1. Introduction

This workbook was made in response to listening sessions conducted in 2019/2020 that discussed barriers to adopting management that would improve soil health in New Mexico. A paradox emerged: people reported not having enough information about soil health to make management changes, and people reported that they were overwhelmed by the amount of information available and could not sift through all of the information to make good decisions for their own context. This workbook is our attempt to address that paradox - we have focused only on dryland soils so that the information is regionally relevant with less extraneous information/photos/considerations from other parts of the country. Additionally, we have worked with a broad group of agency and non-profit collaborators to make sure that the information is consistent across many of the people who are working in soil health in the region. At the same time, we consider both crop and rangeland systems and what can be beneficial for both.

Our goal is to raise awareness of soil health and support management that will increase the resilience and productivity of working lands. We want to bring whole systems thinking to the spatial (from clay particles to acres) and temporal (from seconds to centuries) scales that interact to form and transform soil ecosystems. And we encourage readers of this workbook to observe how parts of the soil ecosystem respond to management and how others are generally unchanging within the human timescale. We will explore the exciting challenge of working within constraints imposed by soil ecosystems to support resilient and productive working landscapes throughout the Intermountain West. We denote our particular focus on New Mexico and Colorado with this icon, but the information will be relevant for similar soil types and climates.

Because soil is such a dynamic system, holistic understanding of physical, chemical, biological, and management interactions are crucial, and the same concepts arise over and over again in different parts of this workbook. For example, how much organic matter is present affects how water moves through soil; feeds back on by soil microbial activity; and can be affected by management.