Soil Comparison courtesy of permaculture.org

Now that's a pretty presumptive title given how little I know about soil! How about this: Understanding Your Soil - From a Distance - for Beginners. Yeah, that's more like it.

There are many fantastic resources for learning about soil and I won’t pretend to be any sort of expert, but I will offer up some insight as to how we’ve gone about evaluating different properties and their soils. 

As I mentioned in an earlier post on determining a farm location, we aren’t lucky enough to have land in the family or smart enough to just go pick a place and get started. Both of those options would be much easier and sometimes I envy the people that have gone down those tracks. We also don't live near the areas where we're considering buying land, so we rely on the internet for most of our research. So how can we evaluate whether a particular property will support a grass-based dairy without getting on the ground and taking a soil test?

Firstly, let's answer why soil is so important to to what we're doing.