WORCESTER, Mass. — Several contractor groups have been working collaboratively for nine months to create a Massachusetts Healthy Soils Action Plan for the commonwealth’s Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.
This plan, which is based on the input of land managers and practitioners, will guide policymakers and regulators to improve policies and programs to help Massachusetts meet climate change and resiliency goals.
While drafting this plan, Regenerative Design Group founding partner Keith Zaltzberg and Linnean Solutions founder and principal Jim Newman updated attendees of the 2020 Northeast Organic Farming Organization Massachusetts winter conference on the plan’s progress as well as hosted a listening session. The plan will be presented to EEA this fall, when that office will roll it out to a wider audience.
“This project is looking at a pretty high level across the state,” Newman said. “We are looking at a bunch of different types of land uses and agricultural land is only one piece of it.”
According to Zaltzberg, for the last nine months the groups have been in an “analysis and assessment phase” during which they have identified “a number of data gaps.” While they are working to try to fill those gaps, some will be included as recommendations on how to fill in the report. In the meantime, the groups are focusing on input from stakeholders.
“It’s really important that the thinking that goes into the analysis that is going to potentially drive a bunch of different activities is grounded in real people’s experience and activities,” Newman said.
One of the first steps, according to Zaltzberg, has been identifying what is soil health.
“When we initially started, I was concerned that there would be a lot of disagreement about what soil health is,” he said. “What there is a lack of specificity, however, there is general agreement that healthy soil is measured by their ability to support healthy ecosystems and other environmental goods like clean water and whatever activity is trying to be accomplished there.”
From that point, the groups have been looking at ways to measure soil health and to examine the land and what is happening on the land. To determine this, the groups used Lidar Mapping technology, which uses lasers and GPS to create a colored map of the land. From there, they were able to determine what land was being used for in the commonwealth.
“We started with land cover as a more in-depth analysis that no one had worked with before we start this process,” Zaltzberg said. “This is a very rich way of exploring the state. If we just take it based on this state, is different than how we previously thought about the state in terms of land cover.”
For example, he said that the USDA Agricultural Census recorded that Massachusetts is made up of 500,000 acres of farmland. However, according to the Lidar map, agricultural land is only about 200,000 acres. While Lidar misses orchards and sugarbushes as part of the agricultural land category, there is still a 300,000-acre gap between “what is classified as farmland in the Census and what we can see,” he said.
“So, that’s really interesting and we need to look at that more carefully and try to understand what that difference (is) and how that will inform policy, program and practice,” Zaltzberg said. “How we count land matters.”
After creating the Lidar map, the groups then began examining the amount of carbon in the topsoil across the state.
“There are strong trends between the health and performance of a soil and the amount of carbon that exists in that soil,” Zaltzberg said. “If you were to look at where the very high carbon soils are, you’d be interested to learn that they correlate pretty strongly with forests and wetlands.”
He also said they found that the farmland in Connecticut River Valley, Massachusetts is low on carbon composition. This is not surprising as tillage breaks down organic matter in the soil. However, the groups are trying to understand how carbon could be increased in these soils.
“This soil took thousands of years to build and it’s a non-renewable event,” Zaltzberg said. “One of the things that will be increasing impacting soil is these mass wasting events and new challenges from novel pests and diseases.”
When taking these into consideration, Zaltzberg said “there’s a lot of possible interventions that we can have, and we need to put attention on production practices.”
To help with that, the plan will give recommendations to policymakers and program managers on solutions that could improve soil health, according to Zaltzberg.
As mentioned by Newman, this plan focuses on all types of land use in Massachuetts, including development. According to Zaltzberg, currently 13 acres per day of land in the state is being developed.
“We better think about how we want to think about development,” he said. “Otherwise, we will be directed by contractors who only think at a parcel level.”
The plan also considers land type and location.
“If we have farmland on really great soil that is (at) high risk of being developed for low density residential use, what bucket does it fall into,” Zaltzberg asked attendees. “Should it be permanently protected?”
The groups will continue to host listening sessions across Massachusetts to gather input into their plan. According to Zalzberg and Newman, they hope this plan will help direct policy and programs in such a way that is a net positive for soil health.