UC San Diego Launches Soil Health Center to Advance Climate Solutions, Food Security

Experts across the University of California San Diego have come together to launch a new center for soil health research, education and outreach in Southern California, creating a powerful opportunity to advance climate solutions.

Established in fall 2025, the UC San Diego Soil Health Center at Scripps Institution of Oceanography is a cross-disciplinary effort in which scientists are digging — sometimes literally — into research focused on building and maintaining soil health. The collaborative effort aims to mitigate climate change, strengthen food security and improve societal resilience to a warming planet. 

The center taps the expertise of microbiologists, plant and soil biologists, ecologists, biochemists, growers and community historians to collaboratively shape the future of soil health and drive innovations in sustainable technology.

“The Soil Health Center is a new initiative at UC San Diego where we're bringing together microbiologists, chemists, physicists, people with expertise in hydrology, public health, economics and public policy, who are working on soil health across disciplines,” said Sarah Allard, executive director of the Soil Health Center. “Our goal is to bring together these different areas of expertise to advance knowledge in soil health and develop solutions that can be deployed to ultimately help with food security and resilience against climate change.” 

Soils are the living infrastructure of the planet — quiet ecosystems beneath our feet that feed us, filter our water, anchor our landscapes, sequester carbon and host the microbial communities that make life possible. Yet these foundational systems are under growing pressure from industrial agriculture and a changing climate. More than a century of industrial farming practices and synthetic fertilizer use has depleted carbon in the soil and degraded overall soil health, leaving agricultural systems increasingly vulnerable to drought, rising temperatures, extreme flooding and other climate impacts.

With so much at stake, Allard and other center leaders are thrilled that soils are finally receiving much-needed attention from the research community. 

“There's great opportunity in regenerating our soils so that they can recover some of those ecosystem functions, for food security, the production of clean and safe water, for climate resilience,” said Allard.

The Soil Health Center builds on Scripps Oceanography’s Healthy Soils Project, a research effort launched in early 2024 with support from the Jonathan and Kathleen Altman Foundation. Led by microbial ecologist Jack Gilbert, the Healthy Soils Project is pioneering a new era of sustainable agriculture by developing safe, natural fertilizers derived from fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms. 

Over the past two years, the project has explored ways to improve soil health and advance regenerative practices — enhancing crop yields, increasing drought resilience and capturing more carbon in the soil. By developing microbial solutions, the researchers aim to help farmers reduce their reliance on environmentally harmful fertilizers, without sacrificing productivity or profitability.

“The Healthy Soils Project has provided the foundational research that now underpins the new Soil Health Center,” said Gilbert, a UC San Diego professor at Scripps Oceanography and the School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics, and faculty director of the Soil Health Center. “Our work is essential for moving away from chemical fertilizers and building a more sustainable, climate-resilient food system.”

As one of the center’s flagship projects, the team is developing probiotics, or biostimulants, to improve soil health. This work involves conducting field and greenhouse trials to fine-tune predictions, quantify plant health metrics and measure how much carbon is being stored underground.

“We're bringing together bacteria and fungi that have the power to improve plant growth while also increasing carbon storage below ground,” said Gilbert.

As part of this work, UC San Diego researchers are partnering with several farms across San Diego County to test and refine soil health innovations in the field. This effort includes Coastal Roots Farm, a certified organic, regenerative farm in Encinitas focused on hunger relief and education. The non-profit uses minimum tillage practices, carefully limiting soil disturbance to protect soil structure and support healthy soil biology.

“To be partnering with UC San Diego is just so essential because what they're finding in the lab needs to be applied in the field, and what we're finding in the field needs to be observed in the lab, so we’re really dedicated to bringing that together so we can all have mutual uplift for one another,” said Adam McCurdy, director of farm production and distribution at Coastal Roots Farm. 

McCurdy added that findings from the Soil Health Center will be critical for many aspects of the farm’s operation, which is centered on “nourishing community” through education and providing healthy, regeneratively grown produce through its pay-what-you-can farm stand and donations reaching hungry San Diegans.

“It's going to help us to build not only our community of education but it's also going to help us to increase the efficacy of our growing and our soil health,” said McCurdy. “Our two teams coming together — to have the lab in the field, and field the research underway — is just going to be completely symbiotic.”

The UC San Diego team is currently collaborating with Coastal Roots Farm to test a probiotic for growing lettuce, pumpkins and other crops — first in a greenhouse, followed by experiments in the field. Once harvested, the researchers will analyze the soil and crops in the lab.

The center’s work is further strengthened through collaborations with other local farms, including Paradise Tribal Farm, which supports food security for San Diego Tribal community members, as well as with the Salk Institute’s Harnessing Plants Initiative and the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. The team is also conducting in-depth interviews with farmers and ranchers to understand their perspectives on new technologies that can support healthy food production and promote long-term carbon retention.

With the launch of the new center, the team is set to cultivate soil solutions that benefit people and the planet.

“The center is poised to have an enormous impact on advancing food security,” said Allard. “We are developing new technologies that can be deployed not just locally, but nationally and internationally, and at the same time we're working with larger organizations to be part of the policy conversation for how to bring these new technologies into the world.”

In addition to Allard and Gilbert, the Soil Health Center team includes UC San Diego Professor Karsten Zengler, who serves as faculty director, along with 13 affiliated faculty members from UC San Diego’s Scripps Oceanography, School of Medicine, School of Biological Sciences, Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science, School of Global Policy and Strategy, and Jacobs School of Engineering. The team also includes several students, postdoctoral scholars and staff researchers.