Integrating pastures into farming systems - Soil health and the benefits to crops

Abstract

‘Soil health’ and ‘carbon sequestration’ are now commonly used terms in Australian agriculture. They are prominent in the title and program of this conference, and this paper deliberately introduces them together. While soil health and how pastures can improve the soils in our farming systems are the focus of this paper, it is the potential carbon sequestration under pastures that underpins many of these improvements. Consequently, this paper proposes a structure to understand and assess soil health in our farming systems, provides some examples of how pastures contribute to better soil health, and presents some recent data that show the potential for pastures to improve soil carbon levels across the grain farming systems of Queensland.