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Welcome to the Soil Fertility Lab's website. Our work focuses on determining timely and efficient use of fertilizers, developing farmer-friendly soil health tests, and understanding how long-term management strategies can build organic matter and soil productivity. We engage and work collaboratively with farmers, crop consultants, and educators on a wide variety of soil fertility and management issues.

News

  1. Welcome to Our New Graduate Students: Theresa and Louceline!

    Jun 15, 2020

    Welcome to our two new graduate students for fall of 2020!

    Theresa will be persuing her Master's degree and Louceline will be working towards her Ph.D. A little bit about each student and was their research will be can be found below.

     

  2. Wade

    Congrats Jordon Wade on publishing expansive soil health study!

    Jun 12, 2020

    Former Culman lab PhD student and postdoc, Dr. Jordon Wade just published an important study to help validate some important assumptions we hold about the value of soil health in agriculture. Jordon aggregated research corn N rate trials across the Midwest to ask the question "do improvements in soil health translate into increases in yield?". The answer is a pretty straightforward yes. Increases in soil health can help mitigate the risk of underfertilizing with N.

  3. Congratulations to Leo Deiss for Advancing IR Methodology!

    Jun 8, 2020

    Establishing best practices for diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy (mid-DRIFTS) of soils is a high priority to enable robust soil testing. Our aims were to determine suitable experimental parameters to optimize analytical and predictive applications of high-throughput mid-DRIFTS in soil analysis. Based on a series of three papers that evaluated A) sample preparation, B) instrument setup for spectra acquisition, and C) data processing (chemometrics), we provide recommendations on how to improve mid-DRIFTS efficiency to measure soil properties.

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