Boots, Buckets and Soil Cores: Soil Health Assessment Training Set for August 20

Jul 31, 2026

Healthy soils start with knowing what is happening below the surface. Producers, agronomists and agriculture professionals can sharpen their observation, measurement and management skills this August during a hands-on soil health assessment training.

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln Soil Health Program Team is hosting a hands-on soil health assessment training — From Field Sampling to Soil Health Scores — followed by a cover crop demo tour, from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Thursday, August 20, 2026, at Rogers Memorial Farm. This in-person training is designed for producers with or without an RCPP/RPP contract, agronomists, Certified Crop Advisors, and other agricultural professionals seeking practical soil health assessment skills.

Participants will work through the full soil health assessment process, from sampling design to interpreting soil health scores for management decisions using real field conditions.

During this training, participants will learn how to:

Design efficient soil sampling plans by identifying representative sampling locations (by soil type, management and resource concern).
Conduct on-site soil health assessments and soil sampling following nationwide guidelines (e.g., NRCS CEMA 216 and Technical Note 450).
Record and organize field data and prepare soil samples for lab analysis.
Calculate and interpret soil health indicators and connect field observations.
Apply results to inform conservation planning and management decisions.

Source : unl.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids