LaSALLE, COLORADO — Amid the farms and cattle ranches here in northern Colorado, Syngenta’s soil health team is using digital technologies and data science to better understand one of the most pressing issues facing farmers: How to build and maintain fertile soils at a time when soil health is at risk throughout global agriculture.

At LaSalle and elsewhere in research centers around the globe, Syngenta scientists know that progress will require new insights and new techniques for monitoring and measuring soil health. For more than 70 years, farmers have sent soil samples in resealable plastic bags to labs for analysis. But while this conventional method of testing provides some useful metrics on the composition of soil, it considers only a small, narrow slice of the broader landscape. And this type of lab analysis can be costly, slow and varying in accuracy.

And that’s a serious limitation as soil health becomes a growing concern. Erosion, compaction, excess salinity and other forms of land degradation are taking their toll on the planet’s soils. All of which is made worse by climate change as driving rains, high winds and other weather extremes wash or blow away not just the topsoil, but essential nutrients.

This explains why agriculture is moving from chemistry-focused nutrient management to biologically integrated soil-health measurements. With the right information, farmers can not only nurture and protect soil, but even restore it. Syngenta is tackling this challenge with data, digital tools and analysis — what Syngenta Chief Soil Scientist Matthew Wallenstein calls “soil intelligence.” 

Wallenstein and his team of researchers are combing through stockpiles of existing data and gathering data from new sources. All this information is being studied to provide a better understanding of the many variables involved in soil health.

“We want to go beyond the general concept of soil health,” explains Wallenstein. “We need to be able to connect how practices change our soil health measurements and then link those changes to specific outcomes.”

That last step — enabling positive outcomes — is crucial because any potential increases in farm productivity and sustainability are strong incentives to farmers looking for ways to improve soil-health management. Conventional soil sampling generally doesn’t involve this kind of outcome-oriented approach.

 “The demand for quality information about soil health is higher than the supply right now,” says Jordon Wade, Soil Health Assessment Group Leader at Syngenta. 

Soil research as a two-way street

The United Nations has estimated that as much as 40% of the earth’s soil is moderately or severely degraded and warns that the problem could get worse. 

Syngenta has hired some of the world’s leading soil scientists to help reverse this trend. “We’re bringing the knowledge in-house,” says Wallenstein, a former professor of Soil and Crop Sciences at Colorado State University. “But you’ve also got to get out in the field, then bring the grower perspective into our research enterprise. It’s a two-way street.”

Syngenta obtains this real-world perspective in several ways. Most importantly, the company works directly with farmers to understand their soil management challenges and help them maximize crop yields with services like  INTERRA® Scan, which provides high-resolution maps of soil nutrients, texture and carbon content. More broadly, Syngenta is partnering with organizations including The Nature Conservancy to recover and restore degraded land in Brazil, China and other areas of the world.

In addition, Syngenta is conducting its own experiments to better understand how to optimize productivity on acreage that has been damaged by years of traditional tillage, harsh conditions or neglect.

Weld County, home of the LaSalle Soil Health Research Center, has been a key agricultural producer in Colorado for more than 100 years. But weather extremes of heat and drought, made worse by water scarcity, have made growing conditions ever more challenging. On a hot summer day in August 2024, when we visited, the U.S. Drought Monitor showed some areas of Weld County to be abnormally dry and others actually to be in the midst of moderate drought. 

The LaSalle research center is a testbed for rehabilitating soil in such situations, with researchers comparing the effects of a range of management strategies on soil health. This includes various tillage regimes and levels of crop rotation complexity, as well as determining whether cover crops are viable in this water-limited environment. A precision variable-rate irrigation system is used at the center to impose differing levels of drought stress. To address that, the team is exploring how Syngenta biological products may help accelerate soil recovery, reduce crop stress, and increase the efficiency of water and nutrients to make sure every drop counts.

The experiments generate valuable data about how the biological, chemical and physical makeup of the soil responds to different agronomics strategies. That helps determine the relative importance of soil-management practices in driving crop yield, stress tolerance, efficient use of water and nutrients, and profitability. To digitize data collection, the LaSalle team is testing whether state-of-the-art sensors can replace traditional lab analyses or provide new kinds of soil intelligence.

It’s just one year into the soil research project at LaSalle. But Andrew Hopp, who manages the experimental plots, has a few preliminary observations. One is that the Syngenta-developed corn trait VIPTERA® has proved effective in guarding against the harmful pest earworm, compared with other hybrids. Another is that rye, when employed as a cover crop in water-limited locations like LaSalle, should be used for only limited duration; otherwise, it can deplete too much moisture from the soil. 

Syngenta is testing various products in LaSalle — including next-generation biologicals and soil enhancers — as part of its comparison of management strategies. Going forward, the team plans to explore how to alleviate challenges such as salinity through practices and products and how the microbiome influences crop performance.

From sampling to statistical analysis

What is the best way to measure progress? Ranae Dietzel, an Agronomy Data Scientist with Syngenta, is looking for the answer.

Dietzel, who has a PhD in crop production and physiology, and sustainable agriculture, from Iowa State University, spent months perusing thousands of academic research papers to find the strongest correlations between soil health and crop yield. Her objective is to narrow down a dozen of the most common soil-health indicators — things like microbial biomass carbon, soil organic matter, soil protein and structural stability — to the few that are  the best predictors of outcomes.

“How can we tell if we’re changing soil enough to change the system, to make the soil more resilient and profitable?” she asks. “It’s like the Holy Grail.”

A fifth-generation farmer, Dietzel recalls her early experiences collecting soil samples by hand. One summer, she took thousands of samples with probes as part of a college research project. “My hands were bleeding,” she says.

Now Dietzel uses the R programming language, which is popular for statistical analysis, to run database queries and build dashboards for use by Syngenta’s soil science team. She has yet to arrive at a definitive metric. “It’s hard to define what is best globally,” she says. “It may not be the same indicator in every region.”

That’s because variations in soil and climate affect the relationship of soil health measurements with yield. The combination of clay, sand, silt and organic matter levels under different temperature and precipitation gradients creates a unique environment — even within a single field. Some environments may provide clear signals between measurements and yield, whereas more complex environments may have too much noise to directly identify the relationship.

The data being analyzed by Syngenta researchers will help farmers and agronomists understand and address those differences — whether on a smallholder farm in Africa or the vast Cerrado region in Brazil. The Cerrado is a savanna spanning two million square kilometers, where cattle ranching degraded the soil, that organizations including Syngenta and The Nature Conservancy are now helping farmers reclaim through regenerative agricultural techniques.