VIVA

VALAGRO’S CONTRIBUTION FOR SOIL HEALTH:
Soil health is defined as the continued capacity of soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals, and humans.

Soil performs five essential functions:

• Regulating water – Soil helps control where rain, snowmelt, and irrigation water go. Water flows over the land or into and through the soil.
• Sustaining plant and animal life – The diversity and productivity of living things depend on soil.
• Filtering and buffering potential pollutants – The minerals and microbes in the soil are responsible for filtering, buffering, degrading, immobilizing, and detoxifying organic and inorganic materials, including industrial and municipal by-products and atmospheric deposits.
• Cycling nutrients – Carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and many other nutrients are stored, transformed, and cycled in the soil.
• Providing physical stability and support – Soil structure provides a medium for plant roots. Soils also provide support for human structures and protection for archeological treasures.

Main principles to manage soil for health
• Maximize Presence of Living Roots
• Minimize Disturbance
• Maximize Soil Cover
• Maximize Biodiversity

Soil Health is regulated by the interactions of the physical, chemical and biological properties of soils.

Enriching soil enhances life from the microscopic scale to the global scale. Adopting soil health systems can increase microbial diversity, improve farmer livelihood, increase agricultural productivity, and build climate resilience. As a result, downstream communities receive cleaner water, ecosystem health is restored, rural landscapes are sustained, and climate change is held in check for future generations. Biostimulants can play a pivotal role among those sustainable and good agronomical practices that contribute to enhancing soil health parameters.  But How do Plant Biostimulants influence biologicals and nutrient cycling dynamics in the soil, considering it as a living organism?

Our biostimulant VIVA, the rhizosphere fertility improver, is the protagonist of a new international program, the “Soil Health Project”, whose aim is to answer to this question. The program, which is now focused on two countries and will see further development in other geographies in the future, has been made in partnership with recognized prestigious Universities and CRO.

Stay tuned, we are creating a sustainable future for people and nature.

Source: USDA – Natural Resources Conservation services / Soils
Soil health Institute (USA) G. S. Toor. Y. Y. Yang, S. Das, S. Dorsey, G. Felton (2021): Soil health in agricultural ecosystems: current status and future perspectives – chapter four.