On-Demand Webinar

Designed and priced for the Individual
(at home or in the office)

The USDA textural classification was developed primarily for assessing suitability for agricultural production. Consequently, it's more concerned with the finer grained sand-silt-clay percentages. As such, its textural classes categorize recognizable differences in these grain-size components.

Texture class is related to weathering and parent material. Soil horizons may be differentiated based on texture of their respective parent materials. Texture class can be determined fairly well in the field by feeling the sand particles and estimating silt and clay content by flexibility and stickiness.



Although USDA soil textures are universal, sometimes it helps to be familiar with local soil composition. These are, but not limited to, the presence of carbonate minerals, clay mineralogy, and parent material. If field and laboratory determinations are inconsistent, one or more of these conditions is suspected.

Moisture content is independent of soil classifications / soil texture. It's important to learn how to optimize the soil moisture of a hand-held sample in order to produce ribboning affects and feel the plasticity of the fine-grained component. This is why we bring a spray bottle to the field with us, no matter the field classification system.

Sometimes soil conditions, components, and incorrectly executed procedures can cause inconsistencies between field texture estimates and standard laboratory data.

So, now is the time to learn the proper textural procedures and practice your skills with calibrated soil samples.

Advantages of the USDA Textural Class System are:

• It's widely used in agronomic soil science.
• The different textural classes differ noticeably from one another, so with calibration and practice, it's relatively easy to accurately distinguish these different textural classes in the field.

The limitation of the USDA Textural Class System is:

• It was not designed to have wide utility in classifying gravelly soils. Although terms for gravel-size fragments are added to the textural terms if gravel makes up over 20% of the soil mixture, using a prescribed step-wide procedure for adding those modifiers.

WHAT YOU GET

Training Module 1: Online Instructional Session

• Pre-Training Event Assessment
• 1.5 hours of instruction with Prelude from Staff at US Department of Agriculture
• Handouts
• Post-Training Assessment
• CEU Certificate from Midwest GeoSciences Group