What Drives Soil Health in Florida’s Diverse Cropping Systems?

When evaluating soil health, it is tempting to focus on a single factor such as climate, soil texture, or management. However, our research across Florida’s diverse cropping systems suggests that soil health is shaped by a complex interaction of management, environmental conditions, and inherent soil properties.

One of the clearest findings from our study was the importance of cropping systems in shaping biological indicators of soil health. Variables such as soil organic matter (SOM), water-extractable organic carbon (WEOC), mineralizable carbon (Cmin), and soil protein were strongly influenced by whether soils were managed under grazing, hay production, vegetables, or row crops. In fact, cropping system consistently explained more variation in these indicators than most climate and soil factors.

Not all soil health indicators responded in the same way. Some indicators were more strongly influenced by environmental conditions. For example, drainage class was a major driver of permanganate oxidizable carbon (POX-C) and soil protein, while clay content played an important role in regulating soil organic matter. These findings reinforce the idea that soil health indicators do not respond uniformly across landscapes and that their interpretation should consider local soil and environmental conditions.

Interestingly, the factors controlling biological indicators differed from those influencing soil nutrients. For nutrients such as potassium, calcium, and magnesium, soil texture and climate were often more important than cropping system. This helps explain why nutrient concentrations were not always significantly different among cropping systems despite clear differences in biological soil health indicators.

Perhaps the most important takeaway is that there is no single driver of soil health. Management practices matter, but so do soil properties and environmental conditions. Understanding how these factors interact can improve soil health assessments and support more targeted management recommendations.

Even with climate, soil properties, and cropping systems included in our analysis, much of the variability in soil health indicators remained unexplained. This suggests that additional factors such as cover cropping, tillage intensity, grazing management, and field history likely play important roles and deserve further investigation.

As interest in soil health continues to grow, these findings highlight the importance of evaluating soil health within the context of both management and environment. Soil health is not determined by a single factor but by the interaction of many factors working together across time and space.

Learn More

This article is based on published research led by Dr. Franky Celestin and colleagues.

Reference

Celestin, F., Maltais-Landry, G., Dubeux, Jose C.B., Mylavarapu, R., and Lin, Y. (2025). Cropping system is a key determinant of soil health after accounting for environmental and edaphic variability. Geoderma, 458, 117330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2025.117330