In this communication, I reply to the recent article by Jeffery and Verheijen (2020) ‘A new soil health policy paradigm: Pay for practice not performance!’. While expressing support for their call for a more pronounced role of soil protection in agri-environmental policy, I critically discuss the two main elements of their specific proposal: its emphasis of the concept of soil health and the recommendation to use action-based payments as the main policy instrument. I argue for using soil functions as a more established concept (and thus more adequate for policy purposes), which is also informationally richer than soil health. Furthermore, I provide a more differentiated discussion of the relative advantages and disadvantages of result-based and action-based payments, while addressing the specific criticisms towards the former that Jeffery and Verheijen voice. Also, I suggest an alternative approach (a hybrid model-based scheme) that addresses the limitations of both Jeffery and Verheijen’s own proposal and the valid criticisms they direct at result-based payments.

在本文中，我回复了Jeffery和Verheijen（2020）的最新文章“一种新的土壤健康政策范式：为实践而不是为绩效付出代价！”。在表示支持他们呼吁在农业环境政策中更加突出土壤保护作用的同时，我认真地讨论了其具体建议的两个主要内容：强调土壤健康的概念以及使用基于行动的报酬作为建议的建议。主要的政策工具。我主张将土壤功能作为一个更成熟的概念使用（因此更适合用于政策目的），它在信息上也比土壤健康丰富。此外，我对基于结果的付款和基于操作的付款的相对优势和劣势进行了更为差异化的讨论，同时针对Jeffery和Verheijen提出的针对前者的具体批评。另外，我建议一种替代方法（基于混合模型的方案），该方法可以解决Jeffery和Verheijen自己的提议的局限性，以及它们针对基于结果的付款的有效批评。