Location: Tropical Crop and Commodity Protection Research
Project Number: 2040-30400-002-005-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Aug 1, 2026
End Date: Aug 31, 2028
Objective:
Soil health is foundational for sustained crop health, yield, productivity, and disease suppression. A robust soil health test and accompanying scoring index is being used to measure soil health across a range of agroecosystems and soils in Hawaii. University of Hawaii scientists have developed an extensive database of soil health measurements that reveals key bacterial and fungal indicators associated with high soil health scores in farmlands in Hawaii. However, the relationship between soil health scores and crop productivity and food nutrient value needs to be defined. The overarching goal of this research is to effectively use the soil health scoring index to guide agronomic practices to build soil health and increase crop productivity and nutrient value. Three objectives are proposed: 1) to relate soil health scores and microbial indicators to plant productivity under different agricultural systems; 2) to identify the relationship between soil health and nutritional value of food crops; and 3) to evaluate the use of the microbial indicators as a rapid and cost-effective soil health test associated with plant productivity and food quality outcomes.
Approach:
The research will use data-driven methods to integrate the substantial and complex soil microbiome and food nutrient data with experimental outcomes. For the first and second objectives, we will implement a long-term field experiment with three treatments (fallow, agroforest system, and root row cropping system) that will be used to quantify plant productivity and food nutritional status in soils with a range of soil health scores and microbial assemblages. Machine learning techniques and statistical methods will be used to relate soil metrics with agricultural outcomes. For the final objective, rapid microbial fingerprinting will be used to diagnose soil health and plant productivity parameters. We will validate this novel approach through longitudinal crop data from the field experiment.