We are always seeking opportunities to co-design agriculture technology tools that can help address bottlenecks within the community. For the past 8 months, we’ve participated in a collaborative effort developing the farmOS: Conservation Planner module to increase the efficiency of the conservation planning process. What is Conservation Planning? Conservation planning helps farmers and ranchers secure […]
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Soil sampling is a crucial part of sustainable land stewardship, helping producers understand what is happening on their land. The most common reason for soil sampling is to make effective nutrient management decisions. Increasing adoption of sustainable, regenerative, or soil health building practices over the past 10-15 years has created demand for a different type […]
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Farm Recordkeeping: How to do it right
If you spend any time scrolling social media for agricultural content, you’ll see lots of posts advertising “Smart Farming” tools that can help you “Make smarter decisions with the help of data…” It all sounds so… magical! Unfortunately, farming is not magic. Farm management is a complex business and farmers are often told that technology […]
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Taking the Next Steps, Can SoilStack Help Producers and Agronomists? Dan TerAvest on February 28, 2025 10,000! That’s how many “smart” soil sampling plans have been generated by SoilStack since it was launched in 2021. We’ve reached that number because SoilStack makes it really easy to apply a template for a design-based soil sample planning to tens […]
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I recently returned from Zambia, where Our Sci is supporting research efforts by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) into the delivery of extension services to smallholder farmers. Specifically, CIMMYT wants to know if using technology to deliver site-specific extension advice changes farmer adoption of good agronomic practices and soil health building activities […]
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We have released new features to make it easier for project managers to view and download stratification outputs and metadata from SoilStack without using the SoilStack API. When we first built SoilStack, with support from ESMC, we focused on ensuring that it was interoperable with MRV platforms. For this reason, the API was the main pathway to […]
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Dan TerAvest recently joined Ashley Hammac and Rita Abi-Ghanem for a webinar dedicated to exploring the vital topic of soil health and the power of soil health data!
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Over the past 18 months we have gathered feedback from many SurveyStack users (special thanks to OpenTEAM for their detailed feedback and continued support). Now we are beginning a major overhaul of the SurveyStack user interface (UI) and privacy settings in response to that feedback. In the first phase, which we hope to release in […]
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Feature Photo by Marie-Soleil Turmel Background When we started Our Sci in 2017, one of the first tools we built was a low-cost, handheld Reflectometer. The Reflectometer was used by the Quick Carbon project at Yale University to map soil organic carbon (SOC) at the landscape scale, by the Bionutrient Institute to predict nutrients in […]
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Feature Photo by Roman Synkevych on Unsplash Why we built it Soil respiration (aka soil mineralizable carbon) is a measurement that consists of rewetting air-dried soil, a short-term incubation (1-3 days), and then measuring the CO2 emitted by soil microorganisms during the incubation period. Soil respiration is considered a strong indicator of soil health, affecting […]
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