A few weeks ago at the National No-Tillage Conference in St. Louis, I sat down with Wayne Honeycutt, founding president and CEO of the Soil Health Institute, as well as Shannon Moeller and Odiney Alvarez-Campos, two soil health educators with the Soil Health Institute. The three of them told me about the origin story of the institute more than ten years ago as well as some of their most exciting plans for the rest of 2026. Let’s take a look at a clip from our conversation about their new drought resilience calculator.

Bryan Von Holten: “One of the things that comes to mind that we’re working on right now is the drought resilience calculator that is an exploratory tool that the Soil Health Institute developed and now that that’s getting ready to be launched, we are developing materials to share that information with farmers and conservation specialists so that it can start to be used. A lot of it, we think about how we can make the information accessible even with the language that we use — short, concise, to the point, in fact sheets — and also meetings where we can share the information. We sometimes also do our technical advisor provider meeting which is almost like an education meeting for the Farmers for Soil Health program. We did one in Kansas City last year and we will do that again. We can share information with the technical advisors from this program and then they can go on and share it with the farmers that are enrolled in the program and so forth. I know there has been a lot of work done with SLAKES which is the app we are using to measure aggregate stability and we just had some farmers ask for us to show them how to download it and there’s already fact sheets that are easy to follow on how to do that so a lot of the education programs we have focus on resources that make this information available for them.”

Well that’s only scratching the surface of all the interesting things we talked about during that 15 minute conversation, so if you want to watch the full video and learn more about upcoming webinars and other soil health resources and tools from the Soil Health Institute, you can find that video at cover crop strategies dot com. That’s all for this week’s Cover Crop Connection, until next time, I’m Mackane Vogel.

To view his full presentation, plus several other videos from various cover crop experts, sign up for FREE at covercropstrategies.com.