Jeff Hill says that with enough experience you can tell a good soil by feeling it in your hands. It will be soft, spongy and crumbly like a cookie. They are also stable under pressure.
These crumbs of soil are called aggregates. The influence of a proper soil aggregation is crucial to the health of a soil. Enhancements of soil aggregation have a similar effect to the improvements of the organic matter of your soil.
Just like you would do with other soil health indicators, you can estimate the condition of the aggregates in your soil when the soil is a little bit wet. Take a few handfuls of soil from the top six to ten inches.
Gently break the soil with your fingers and see what kinds of pieces you get at the end. Good soil would break into brownie-like round crumbs. Take these same aggregates and apply some pressure to them with your fingers. Do they break easily? Wet them a little bit with water and try again.
A healthy soil would break not into large blocks, but into small round pieces. The best aggregates can hold pressure and retain their shape under it.
When a lot of pressure is applied, they would break apart easily. Learn how a well-aggregated soil looks and feels like and you’ll be able to quickly identify soil conditions any time you want to do so. If your soil is building in a healthy way, you would have more and more of this brownie-like crumb structure with every year, shares Jeff Hill.
Jeff Hill 