Poonam Karki

Poonam is a Soil Health Research Specialist at Lincoln University, where she works on cover crop-based weed management and organic transition systems for small- and mid-scale farms across Missouri and the Midwest. Her work focuses on microbial ecology, carbon and nitrogen cycling, and practical conservation management helping growers build soil health without tillage or synthetic inputs. In the lab, she works with a full suite of soil health indicators including POXC, mineralizable nitrogen, and PLFA-based microbial community analysis, applying R and SAS to translate data into farm-level guidance. She has presented at ASA-CSSA-SSSA (1st place, 2023) and the MarbleSeed Organic Farming Conference, and regularly engages with underserved farming communities in the region.