 The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Rural Development recently hosted a workshop that focused on visual soil health assessment with the objective of equipping participants with practical skills and techniques for assessing soil health, thereby enabling them to make informed decisions on farming practices. The one-day event held at the National Diagnostic Facility featured interactive sessions and demonstrations on how to assess soil health using visual indicators, enabling officers to identify and diagnose soil health issues such as soil erosion, nutrition deficiencies, and other soil degradation problems. In highlighting the significance of soil health in achieving sustainable agricultural practices, chief engineer Quacy Goddard underscored the benefits of visual soil assessment as a powerful tool for farmers to make informed decisions about their soil management practices. It is so important to to improve our soils because in one centimeter in a thousand years we don't have that lifetime but in one hurricane else we can lose many many many thousands of centimeters of soil. We only have 238 square miles and a portion of that is agricultural land and all these lands and forestry lands as well and all these lands are degrading and getting smaller in the amount of lands we have to support our people, our visitors to have foods for natural disasters, storage and all that. So in in terms of food security, this is the major underlying factor is the health of our soils. So then we hope with this intervention we can continuously be building capacity and understanding that we all play from a level kind of playing field in the goal of achieving food security but more specifically looking at the improvement of our soil health. According to Mr. Goddard the Agriculture Ministry has similar training sessions scheduled in its 2023 work plan in support of their overall efforts to promote sustainable agriculture and ensure food security in St. Lucia. Then we start with our offices on our team so then when we go out to farmers and we empower farmers to be able to carry out some assessments for themselves they would not have to rely on on the officers because to come into the field at every time to do these things because what happened is that in most of our agricultural regions we have just a limited amount of officers. So we may have four officers in the region we may have 2,000 farmers so we need to empower the farmers themselves and we start with with us and our extension officers and our staff so that we can go out build that capacity so that they are empowered to even teach other farmers and that would decentralize pressure on our human resource but also it will improve our you know our goals it will improve the impact we're trying to have on food production and eventually we hope you can see it in the supermarket. With the increase in threats of climate change and other environmental challenges the agriculture leaders see improvements in soil health management practices as crucial in ensuring long-term resilience and sustainability of the agriculture sector. From the communications unit of the Ministry of Agriculture I am Anisia Antoine reporting.