Soil Health Card

A Soil Health Card tells a cultivator what his own plot actually holds — nitrogen, phosphorus, potash and pH — instead of what the average plot in the district holds. On muga and eri land that matters more than on most crops: som and soalu are perennial trees that stay on the same soil for decades, so a deficiency left uncorrected compounds year after year rather than being reset at the next sowing. The institute tests soil for seri-farmers in six North Eastern states from its own laboratory at Lahdoigarh.

States covered

Seri-farmers of the North Eastern states.

State	Sericulture served
Arunachal Pradesh	Muga and eri
Assam	Muga and eri
Manipur	Oak tasar, muga and eri
Meghalaya	Muga and eri
Mizoram	Eri
Nagaland	Eri

The card counts are missing. The previous website listed these six states under the heading “State-wise distribution of Soil Health Cards” but carried no numbers against them, so this page cannot say how many cards were issued in each. A distribution without figures is only a list of states. If the Soil Science section can supply cards issued per state per year, this table becomes the useful thing the heading promises.

The laboratory

Testing is done in the institute's Soil Science & Agro-Chemistry Laboratory at Lahdoigarh.

Equipment	What it is used for
Kel Plus nitrogen analyser assembly	Total and available nitrogen by Kjeldahl digestion and distillation
Water bath	Controlled-temperature digestion and extraction
Hot air oven	Drying samples to constant weight before analysis
Rotary shaker	Extracting available nutrients from soil suspensions
Centrifuge	Separating extract from soil residue
pH meter	Soil reaction — acidity, the governing constraint on most North East soils
Water distillation unit	Reagent-grade water for the analyses above
Electronic balance	Sample and reagent weighing

Analyses performed: total nitrogen, available nitrogen, phosphorus and potash.

Documents

Soil testing facilities available in the Soil Science & Agro-Chemistry Laboratory Equipment list and the analyses offered — not yet published on this site

Soil and plantation management for muga host plants is covered under Research — Muga Plantation Management and Eri Leaf Production. The laboratory itself is listed with the institute's other facilities on Infrastructure.