Benchmarking program focuses on evaluating soils

STOCKTON, Ill. — Rick Bieber considers a shovel as one of his most important tools.

“I am a retired farmer out of the Dakotas and we have done the soil care principles for close to 40 years on our farm,” said Bieber, soil adviser for the Fields of Sinsinawa.

“If you don’t have a shovel and you don’t look at your soil to see what is going on, how do you know what to do?” he questioned during a presentation at a Nutrient Stewardship Field Day held at Greg Thoren’s farm and hosted by Illinois Farm Bureau.

The Fields of Sinsinawa is a farmer-led learning center located near Sinsinawa in the southwestern corner of Wisconsin’s Driftless Region, one mile north of the Illinois border, and in 2005 a Carbon Benchmarking Program was started.

“We have farmers scattered throughout Wisconsin and now this year in Jo Daviess County,” Bieber said. “We would like to have thousands of farms to have the consistency we need for the data.”

A farm location, he said, should not determine if the soils are unhealthy or produce poor yields.

“We see soils all over the world that function very well and farmers that are profitable,” he said. “And we see some of the best soils be unprofitable and we want to know why.”

For the program, soil samples are pulled from the same fields consistently for a minimum of five years.

“We also ask about the previous management of the soil for the last five years so we can look back, to be able to look forward,” Bieber said.

Soil samples are sent to Regen Ag Lab in Nebraska to do several different tests. One of these tests is a phospholipid fatty acid, or PLFA, test.

“It tells us what life is in the soil by measuring the microbial communities,” Bieber said. “We want to know the balance between the bacteria, fungi, protozoa and nematodes because all these come into play as different minerals in the soil become more regularly available.”

The Total Digestion Analysis indicates the amount of minerals in the soil such as carbon and nitrogen.

In 2025, for the benchmarking program, there was a low of 23,000 pounds of carbon in the soil to a high of 103,000 pounds, Bieber said.

“For nitrogen there was a low of 2,400 pounds to a high of 10,000 pounds,” he said.

“With the Haney test we can see the carbon to nitrogen ratio,” the soil adviser said.

“As we lay the soil tests together, we can start to go back and forth because life is about balances,” he said. “That is what the Carbon Benchmarking Program is trying to do — show the balances and ratios back and forth to each other.”

The reason farmers have problems with erosion in their fields, Bieber said, is because they are doing things that cause dysfunctionality.

“When a raindrop falls on bare soil, it looks like a water bomb going off,” he said. “Every time you see a piece of soil come up and go out, the water is washing the clay particles away from the sand or silt.”

This sends the carbon molecule into the atmosphere.

“The soil biology lives on the carbon molecule, so you’ve had all the food for the biology escape into the atmosphere,” the soil adviser said. “Now we have crusting because there is no food at the surface for the biology to keep the soil loose and then we have runoff.”

Everybody will have water runoff at times, Bieber said.

“But the water should be running clear, because that’s how God gave it to you,” he said.

“The first thing we want to have is our fungal to bacteria ratio balanced and then you will see the protozoa numbers skyrocket because now they have the food they need,” Bieber said.

“The nematode numbers will also go up,” he said. “Once those numbers stabilize, now the fungi numbers start self-organizing.”

The farm at Sinsinawa Mound is 100% organic and adaptive grazing techniques are utilized for the cattle herd.

“We believe you should never be able to look at the ankle of an animal — you should always have more grass than ankle high,” Bieber said.

“The animals will tell you when they are out of nutrition by how they rest and how they eat,” he said. “Once you see it, you will never unsee it.”

Going into third year of the Carbon Benchmarking Program, Bieber said, the program is not big enough.

“We doubled our numbers from 2025 to 2026 and we would like to double them again,” he said. “As far as we know, we have not found any other place that is doing all these soil tests in relationship to each other.”