A Soil Owner's Manual: How to Restore and Maintain Soil Health

A Soil Owner’s Manual: Restoring and Maintaining Soil Health, is about restoring the capacity of your soil to perform all the functions it was intended to perform. This book is not another fanciful guide on how to continuously manipulate and amend your soil to try and keep it productive. This book will change the way you think about and manage your soil. It may even change your life. If you are interested in solving the problem of dysfunctional soil and successfully addressing the symptoms of soil erosion, water runoff, nutrient deficiencies, compaction, soil crusting, weeds, insect pests, plant diseases, and water pollution, or simply wish to grow healthy vegetables in your family garden, then this book is for you. Soil health pioneer Jon Stika, describes in simple terms how you can bring your soil back to its full productive potential by understanding and applying the principles that built your soil in the first place. Understanding how the soil functions is critical to reducing the reliance on expensive inputs to maintain yields. Working with, instead of against, the processes that naturally govern the soil can increase profitability and restore the soil to health. Restoring soil health can proactively solve natural resource issues before regulations are imposed that will merely address the symptoms. This book will lead you through the basic biology and guiding principles that will allow you to assess and restore your soil. It is part of a movement currently underway in agriculture that is working to restore what has been lost. A Soil Owner’s Manual: Restoring and Maintaining Soil Health will give you the opportunity to be part of this movement. Restoring soil health is restoring hope in the future of agriculture, from large farm fields and pastures, down to your own vegetable or flower garden.

About The Author:

Jon is a native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He earned an Associate Degree in Chemistry from Milwaukee Trade and Technical while in High School, a Bachelor’s Degree in Soil Science from the University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point and a Post-Graduate Certification in Geographic Information Science from the University of North Dakota.

Jon has worked on dairy farms in southeastern Wisconsin, as a Field Scout for the University of Wisconsin – Extension as part of their Integrated Pest Management program for irrigated potato and bean production in central Wisconsin, as a Soil Scientist mapping soils in east central Illinois and east central North Dakota. He is now retired from the Natural Resources Conservation Service where he began his career in 1984 as a Soil Conservationist in Sheridan and Burleigh counties in North Dakota, then as a District Conservationist in Griggs/Steele and Dunn counties in North Dakota, in 1990 advanced to an Area Agronomist and from 2007 served as Area Resource Soil Scientist in western North Dakota.

Jon was on the team that developed the “Soil Quality: Assessment and Applications for Field Staff” course for the Natural Resources Conservation Service National Employee Development Center in 1998 and served as an instructor for the course until 2015. Jon has taught soil health workshops from Maine to Alaska and North Carolina to California. Jon is also a past advisor and webmaster for the Manitoba-North Dakota Zero Tillage Farmer’s Association (currently the Northern Prairies Ag Innovation Alliance) and the Southwest North Dakota Soil Health Demonstration Project. Jon is currently a research technician at the North Dakota State University Dickinson Research Extension Center, an adjunct faculty member teaching soil science at Dickinson State University, a technical advisor to Understanding Ag LLC, and head brewer at Phat Fish Brewing Company LLC in Dickinson, ND. Jon is married to Eve, who designed the cover art for a Soil Owner's Manual.