Farmers, carbon = climate answers

In fall 2022 after Midwestern farmers had gathered the last crops of the season, a team of University of Wisconsin-College of Agricultural and Life Sciences agronomy researchers hurried into the fields to collect samples of the soil. They had just received a grant for the Soil Organic Carbon network – or SOCnet. It’s a new decade-long study that could change the way farming affects the earth. To kick-start the project the research group needed to take baseline samples post-harvest – but before farmers began managing the soil for the next batch. Only a rapid response would do.

The UW team was led by Gregg Sanford, a senior research scientist in the lab of professor Randy Jackson, who is a grassland ecologist in the UW-Department of Agronomy. With a tractor-mounted Giddings hydraulic soil probe, a gooseneck trailer and a Dodge Ram 5500 truck, they set off from the UW-Arlington Agricultural Research Station near Arlington, Wisconsin. At each farm site they used the Giddings to probe deep into the soil, taking samples that when analyzed would tell them how much organic carbon the soil stores.