Home Buyers Will Pay for Soil, Won't Pay For Dirt

In 2003, the Snohomish County Public Works Department published a remarkable manual with a simple title: Building Soil (pdf). Promoting sediment-free stormwater, it encouraged builders to embrace the wisdom of retaining native soil and vegetation, and to question the value of turning soil into dirt for no good reason. From a building perspective, soil is a valuable construction material manufactured from a low cost/ low value soil resource feedstock. The thinking goes like this: Manipulating soil tidies up a site and adds value. Stormwater regulations interfere with the ability to add value, thus the disconnect.

Enter the Washington Organic Recycling Council which has a new site, www. buildingsoil.org, with a new and refreshingly non-regulatory spin for convincing builders to buy into the principles in the Building Soil manual. The pitch goes like this: Avoiding disturbance around the building footprint, in a sense, doing nothing, confers a marketable value on that soil resource.

New home buyers say they are happy to pay more for a healthy, easy to care for landscape – and that starts with the soil.

A timely message in a buyers' market.

New Soil Science Licensing Website

Renewed soil science licensing efforts are underway in Washington State. Supporting them is a new website. Titled Soil Science Licensing, the site is available to become a clearinghouse for all soil science licensing efforts. It links to the best available information, including the list of soil science licensing boards maintained by the Soil WikiProject.

For now, the Soil Science Licensing site effort is strictly focussed on Washington state's efforts. The latest revision (pdf) (December 7, 2006) has been posted and I have one concern with the new wording:

The practice of soil science does not include design work, such as would be carried out by either engineers, as defined in RCW 18.43.020 or architects, as defined in RCW 18.08.320.

We need something along these lines, but the term "design work" is not specifically defined in the cited sections, but is referred to somewhat broadly. Is this going to be a problem? Perhaps someone with experience in one of the licensed states can comment.