GREENFIELD — With a $99,900 grant, Regenerative Design Group, a Greenfield-based ecological design firm, will develop best practices to help implement the state’s Healthy Soils Action Plan.

The state Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs awarded the grant in October. Regenerative Design Group’s allocation is part of a total of more than $1 million given to organizations and groups to promote and protect soil health in Massachusetts.

Through its work, Regenerative Design Group will create a guide for implementing the 2023 Healthy Soils Action Plan’s recommendations in relation to design and construction, which will see the group bring together a wide-ranging coalition to create guidelines for design and construction professionals that will help them improve soil health and carbon sequestration.

“We’re diving specifically into site development practices and comparing that with the research and the science that has tracked different types of disturbance,” said Rachel Lindsay, a senior designer with Regenerative Design Group, adding that the organization’s hope is to “fill in the gaps” of state soil regulations while shifting the mindset of developers.

Specifically, Lindsay said, Regenerative Design Group will be looking through the lens of soil organic carbon — the carbon component of organic compounds in soil — as experts say it is one of the keys to many environmental benefits. In the Healthy Soils Action Plan, it states that for every 1% increase in soil organic matter, soil can hold as much as 20,000 more gallons of water per acre.

“This increased water-holding capacity means that groundwater recharge can be bolstered, system runoff can be reduced, and the export of sediment and pollutants to waterways can be prevented,” the report states. “This also exemplifies how best management practices for growing [soil organic carbon] stocks often do double duty for protecting water quality, improving resilience to both drought and heavy rain events, protecting critical ecosystem services and vice versa.”

Lindsay said the other key part in Regenerative Design Group’s work is identifying how current standard practices for things like excavation or soil stockpiling can be shifted to maximize the amount of soil organic carbon. Additionally, they will be looking at the current “siloed regulations” and see how practices in one industry — agriculture, for example — could be applied to another, like design and construction.

These regulations can be powerful. Lindsay provided an example that if one-quarter of lawns in Massachusetts were managed in a way that maximized soil health — such as mowing less, using organic fertilizers and other practices — and one-quarter of lawns were planted trees, then the “anticipated sequestration rate would go from 50,000 tons a year to 200,000 tons a year.”

“We’re figuring out where we can influence and change the standard practices, so that in addition to meeting the criteria that the regulations are intended to meet,” Lindsay explained, “we can also incorporate soil organic carbon with the end objective of being able to get as close as we can to a maximum carbon sequestration carrying capacity across the state.”

Alongside creating this guide, Regenerative Design Group will work with companies Linnean Solutions, BSC Group, Sasaki, A.D. Makepeace Co. and Read Custom Soils to bring professionals from numerous industries together to gather input.

“We’re going to be bringing together contractors, landscape architects, designers and policy professionals for different roundtable conversations,” Lindsay said. “Then we’ll be coming back around in the spring with some very specific recommendations.”

More information about Regenerative Design Group’s guide can be found at masshealthysoils.org/guide.

Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com.