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The presentations and meeting notes of the most recent Plenary meeting 4 in Almeria, Spain, that was held on April 2nd - April 5th 2019, have been made available on the post-meeting page HERE (please login first before being able to access the page).

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Salinization219th June 2019 - A team from the SoilCare project have published a new open access paper in Agronomy: A Review of soil-improving cropping systems (SICS) for soil salinization.  The review compares the effectiveness of different SICS that aim to cope with soil salinization across 11 countries, in order to reveal those that are the most promising. The analysis shows that besides case-specific optimization of irrigation and drainage management, combinations of soil amendments, conditioners, and residue management can contribute to significant reductions of soil salinity while significantly increasing crop yields. These results highlight that conservation agriculture can also achieve the higher yields required for upscaling and sustaining crop production.

Cuevas, J., Daliakopoulos, I.N., del Moral, F., Hueso, J.J. and Tsanis, I.K., 2019. A Review of Soil-Improving Cropping Systems for Soil Salinization. Agronomy, 9(6), p.295.

For more information about this paper please contact Julian Cuevas This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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At the recent SoilCare annual meeting, Jane Mills and Jasmine Black of the project dissemination team were interviewed by Prof. Mark Reed (WP3 leader) for his Fast Track Impact podcast. They talked about different paths of dissemination – including social media, videos and the potential for artist collaborations. Pan-European projects create a great opportunity for different cultures to work together and Jasmine reflected on the variety of ways in which each country best disseminates the story and results of the SICS trials to farmers, in order to spread the information as widely as possible. Jane talked through her paper on the successes of social media and how some countries prefer to use Facebook over Twitter. To delve into this topic further, they wrote a 2-part blog series with Nick Lewis of CCRI here.

A key point from this was on the need to develop a story throughout the project in order to reach a wide audience once the final results are released. Jasmine discussed doing this through encouraging researchers to share preliminary results, which are clearly stated as such and don’t necessarily need to include hard figures or statements. She is currently working with SoilCare researchers to do just this (see blogs from Spanish and Belgium SICS). Jasmine also considered in a second blog the impact of the project after it has finished and how the results might be better used by amalgamating them with similar projects (e.g. SmartSOIL, RECARE) and using key networks identified in other projects (such as SURE-Farm) to most effectively distribute them to farmers in varying cultures.

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Newsletter4 FrontCoverThe fourth SoilCare newsletter has now been published and can be downloaded HERE. This issue covers a range of topics, including:

  1. New Report: Review of Soil Advice
  2. News from the field: Progress in the Spanish SICS trials in organic olive orchards and stone fruit plantations
  3. News from the field: Progress on the woodchip trials in Belgium
  4. SICS Focus: Organic matter decline
  5. New SoilCare Film
  6. New SoilCare booklet for farmers
  7. New SoilCare publications
  8. Past and Future events/presentations
  1. Two New SoilCare Publications: Soil information sharing and knowledge building
  2. Official SoilCare movie released
  3. Third plenary meeting in Almeria successfully ended
  4. New SoilCare Publication: Hidden Miners: The role of cover crops and Soil microorganism in phosphorus cycling
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