The European Soil Mission highlights the need for practical approaches that enable farmers to assess and improve soil health directly in the field. While many soil health assessments rely on laboratory analyses, there remains a need for accessible and cost-effective methods that can support management decisions under real farming conditions. The Horizon Europe GroundWork project (started in October 2025) addresses this gap by developing and testing a new adaptive management framework, the Ecosystem-Mediated Management Approach (EMMA), with a strong emphasis on in situ soil health measurement.
EMMA is currently under development within GroundWork and will be co-created and refined throughout the project. It is designed as an iterative decision-support framework that helps farmers continuously improve grazing systems through cycles of ecosystem assessment, objective setting, management intervention, monitoring, and adaptation. Rather than focusing only on short-term production outcomes, EMMA links management decisions to key ecosystem processes, including water cycling, mineral cycling, energy flow, and community dynamics, which underpin soil and pasture functioning.
The framework will be implemented and tested across five European Living Labs covering diverse pedoclimatic and farming contexts. The primary focus is on understanding how grazing management influences soil health, while also capturing related effects on vegetation, biodiversity, and livestock health and welfare. EMMA is supported by a monitoring framework that is developed as part of the project and is intended to provide practical, field-based indicators that farmers can use directly.
Soil health assessment within this framework focuses on physical, chemical, and biological indicators that can be measured or observed in situ using simple and low-cost methods. These practical indicators will be validated during the project by results from laboratory measurement of related scientific indicators.
A key objective of GroundWork is to iteratively develop and validate EMMA and its monitoring framework through close collaboration between farmers, researchers, and advisors. The usefulness, feasibility, and reliability of the proposed indicators will be evaluated in real farming conditions across the Living Labs, ensuring continuous refinement based on both scientific evidence and user experience.
This work will contribute to a practical and scalable approach for in situ soil health measurement that is embedded within adaptive grazing management and supports the transition towards more resilient and soil-aware livestock systems in Europe.