Soil health is driven by soil organic matter, which is driven by plant biomass inputs, which are driven by photosynthesis. The controlling factors of soil health are light, temperature, and water, and the important inputs are nutrients, with nitrogen often playing a key role. It is important to focus your management on these dominant drivers. Don’t get distracted by smaller-effect factors.
This is agrophysics1: identifying and managing the key factors that govern crop and soil performance. A new study shows how it can clear away all the distractions.
Research papers often refer to soil organic carbon (SOC) instead of soil organic matter (SOM). SOC is just the carbon in SOM, which is about half of the mass, so SOM=2xSOC. Besides carbon, SOM contains all the other elements that make up organic compounds: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, etc.