Soil is a much complicated substance, because animals, plants and microbes live together, organic and inorganic exist together. So soil contains a large amount of information. The traditional method in laboratory is a time-consuming effort. But the technology of near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) has been widely used in many areas, owing to its rapidness, high efficiency, no pollution and low cost, NIRS has become the most important method to detect the composition of soil. This paper mainly introduce some traditional methods in laboratory, the basic processes of soil detection by NIRS, some algorithms for data preprocessing and modeling. Besides, the present paper illustrates the latest research progress and the development of portable near infrared instruments of the soil. According to this paper, the authors also hope to promote the application conditions of NIRS in the grassland ecology research in China, and accelerate the modernization of research measures in this area.