Although soil health (SH) is crucial for crop productivity and sustainability, SH's current assessment frameworks find it challenging to balance global standardization with regional ecological realities. Indicators vary widely across different soils and climates, often leading to one-size-fits-all thresholds that put producers in naturally low-capacity soils at a disadvantage.

Recently, Saurav Das et al. (2025) have been developing a new method to measure and interpret soil health. Most current methods apply the same thresholds everywhere, but this often doesn’t make sense. For example, sandy soils in dry areas naturally have lower potential, while rich, humid soils may show early signs of degradation but hide them.

To address this, they created a two-part framework:

Tier 1: Everyone measures the same five core indicators — organic matter, pH, nitrate (NO₃-N), bulk density, and a biological ratio (fungi to bacteria).

Tier 2: Instead of fixed cutoffs, results are interpreted based on local soil and climate conditions using the Cropland Reference Ecological Unit (CREU) framework.

And optional PLFA profiling: used here to assess microbial biomass and community balance, with the fungal: bacterial ratio kept as an optional Tier 1 indicator.

This approach ensures data are standardized nationwide, but the interpretation of results reflects each region’s unique potential.

Just so you know, we have included a selection of a minimal suite of SH indicators published by the Soil Health Institute (SHI) as recommended measurements for scaling SH assessment.