Tools and Techniques to Measure Soil Health

Soil health is a serious concern in today’s scenario in respect to achieve higher crop yield and quality food for better human health. The soil health determines agricultural sustainability; therefore, there is urgent need a practices to improve soil quality for economic sustainability and environment. To acknowledge the fact that soil is an important resource from agriculture to human health, the year 2015 was named as “year of soil” by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Nowadays, there are a number of tools and techniques available that broadly based on multitier soil health indicators such as physical, chemical, and biological. A complete suite of soil health assessment methods named as soil health card, Haney soil health test, Solvita soil health tests, and a comprehensive assessment of the soil health have been developed for the assessment of soil quality. Besides this, a continuous education, research, and outreach efforts are also required in decentralized manner to implement it among farmers for their adoption. In this chapter we have summarized the recent advances occurred in past years for the measurement of the soil health.