We talk a lot about having good soil quality. What does that mean exactly for the farmer. When it rains excessively for a couple of days, you'll be in your field a day or two before your neighbors. Roots will penetrate deeper with less energy required, which means more energy goes to grain development. Deeper roots mean more access to moisture and better standablity.

The following are some pictures showing the difference between a quality soil and a poor soil.

click on the pictures for a close up

 This is a picture of my garden and a neighboring field. This has been a garden for two years. The field is a corn soybean rotation. It was field cultivated this spring, then planted to seed corn.

 This is a shovel in the end rows. I stepped on the shovel with one foot, placing all my weight (260#) on it. It only penetrated 3-4". This is pretty compacted, with poor water infiltration. Note corn roots generally cannot penetrate more than 300 psi. My estimate is that the shovel had over 350 psi on it.

 This picture shows the hole I dug in the end rows. It became impossible to dig after 14". I had to use the shovel as a pick to chip away the soil.

 This picture shows the tillage line about 4" down. You can see the soil is saturated to that point, after that it is moist, but not wet.

 Just for comparison I stepped on the shovel 150 yards out into the field. It did not go in much farther than on the end rows. Also you can see excessive ponding of water signifying poor structure, poor infiltration, and compaction.

 This picture shows the shovel in the garden. It slid in all the way very easily with about half my weight applied.

 This is the hole dug into the garden. It dug easily to a depth of 21". Note no saturation of soil.
In the field the shovel only penetrated 4", in the garden the shovel easily penetrated 12". If the shovel cannot penetrate the ground roots will not be able to either. The volume of soil available for plants in the garden is 3x the amount in the field. Why not find a way to farm more of the ground you have, by farming it deeper.

 This picture shows that the tillage line is approximately the same as in the field. Having proper structure allows the water to percolate through the soil

 This picture shows the poor soil structure. There are no aggregates visible and water is standing. Excessive ponding leads to denitrifcation.

 This picture shows that even after 2.5" of rain there is still structure. The soil aggregates do not breakdown. This allows the soil poor space to fill with water or air not fine soil particles.
      
 This is a side by side photo of the three areas. This right photo shows the end rows, lots of ponding and compaction. The middle photo shows some improvement in the field. The left photo is the garden, which has little compaction, and great infiltration.

We hope this helps give you and idea of what to look for when assessing you soil. Improving soil structure will allow your fertilizers to work more efficiently with less volatilization, detrification, and erosion. High quality soils reduce compaction allowing expensive genetics to work better. Lastly having a high quality, deep soil allows more soil volume for crop production, in other words it's like getting free ground to farm!

SuperCal 98G pelletized lime and SuperCal SO4 pelletized gypsum are the first steps in developing quality soil.

Calcium Products, lower input costs, higher yields, better soil