How can soil health be measured effectively?

Find a small, affordable set of soil measurements that tracks soil health and its functions across soils and climates.

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1	# How can soil health be measured effectively?
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3	Farmers, governments and companies increasingly want to track soil health, but there is no agreed way to measure it. Dozens of indicators exist, many are costly, and few are clearly tied to the soil functions they are meant to reflect.
4
5	## Question
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7	How can soil health, the continued capacity of soil to function as a living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals and people, be measured effectively? Which physical, chemical and biological indicators respond to management and reflect soil functions, how should their values be interpreted for each soil and climate, and how can they be measured cheaply and at scale?
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9	## Background
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11	The question opens the theme "sustaining healthy agroecosystems" of the 100 essential questions for the future of agriculture, compiled from 419 questions submitted worldwide in 2022. The authors describe healthy soil as the cornerstone of farming systems: good structure and drainage, enough depth for roots, balanced nutrients, few weeds, pests and pathogens, thriving beneficial organisms, no toxins, and resilience to adverse conditions [1].
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13	## What is known
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15	- Soil quality assessments rarely evaluate soils explicitly against specific threats, functions and ecosystem services, and few offer clear schemes for interpreting indicator values, which limits their use by land managers and policy [2].
16	- Soil health now covers the role of soil in water quality, climate and human health as well as crop production, but its measurement is still dominated by chemical indicators despite the recognised importance of soil biodiversity [3].
17	- A North American project assessed more than 30 measurements at 124 long-term research sites and proposed a minimum suite of three: soil organic carbon concentration, aggregate stability and 24-hour carbon mineralisation potential [4].
18	- The European Union's Directive (EU) 2025/2360 on soil monitoring and resilience, published in November 2025, requires member states to monitor soil health with common descriptors covering physical, chemical and biological aspects, aiming for healthy soils by 2050 [5].
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20	## What would count as progress
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22	No single result settles a question like this; contributions like these would move it forward:
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24	- Tests of whether minimum indicator suites developed in one region hold elsewhere, for example in tropical soils, using open data from long-term experiments.
25	- Cheap proxies, such as spectroscopy or molecular methods, calibrated and validated against laboratory indicators across soil types.
26	- Studies that link indicator values to measured functions such as yield stability, water infiltration or nutrient retention, so that thresholds carry meaning.
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28	## References
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30	1. Hu, Y. et al. (2023). [100 essential questions for the future of agriculture](https://doi.org/10.1002/moda.5). Modern Agriculture 1(1), 4–12.
31	2. Bünemann, E. K. et al. (2018). [Soil quality – a critical review](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soilbio.2018.01.030). Soil Biology and Biochemistry 120, 105–125.
32	3. Lehmann, J. et al. (2020). [The concept and future prospects of soil health](https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-020-0080-8). Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 1(10), 544–553.
33	4. Bagnall, D. K. et al. (2023). [A minimum suite of soil health indicators for North American agriculture](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soisec.2023.100084). Soil Security 10, 100084.
34	5. European Union (2025). [Directive (EU) 2025/2360 on soil monitoring and resilience](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2025/2360/oj/eng). Official Journal of the European Union.
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36	## Source
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38	Imported from [100 essential questions for the future of agriculture, question 53](https://doi.org/10.1002/moda.5), curated by Hu et al. Listed as open in the source (2023) and still an active research question as of 2026-10-20. The statement above is written in our own words; see the source for the original wording, history and discussion.