Zoom into Soil: Grassland Soil Health

In this webinar, Dr Paul Newell-Price and John Langley-Randall from ADAS discuss grassland soil health.

Paul is Head of Soils & Nutrients at ADAS. He is a Soil Scientist, Chartered Scientist and Fellow of the British Society of Soil Science with over thirty years of research and advisory experience working on the interactions between land management practices and ecosystem service delivery in the UK and overseas. Paul joined ADAS in 2005 and was Scientific Coordinator of the Horizon 2020 SUPER-G project on Sustainable Permanent Grassland Systems and Policies (2018-2024). In this webinar, Paul discusses the challenges and various options for managing grasslands for soil health, and how this interacts with the delivery of multiple ecosystem services, including results from Defra and EU-funded projects from the past 15 years.

John is a soil scientist at ADAS having joined the soils and nutrients team in 2022. Since joining ADAS John has been working on a range of projects including Super-G, a European project evaluating sustainable permanent grasslands to optimise productivity while supporting ecosystem services, as well as reviewing the potential of biochar in UK agriculture, and evaluating on-farm implementation of the Sustainable Farming Incentive schemes. Prior to joining ADAS, John completed his PhD at Bangor University which assessed the impact of slurry acidification on soil and crop health through UK field trials. In this webinar, John outlines the results of a Natural England funded project which compared the impact of mob and conventional grazing on soil chemical, biological and physical indicators as well as outlining a multi-year Defra funded mob grazing project currently undertaken by ADAS.