Soil Health: Winter 2022
Since most of my readers have an interest in soil health and a lot of you are growing food, we thought we would include a topic about it in our newsletter. As we can read in the beginning of the bible, God used dirt to build a man. We are dirt, so we should be very interested in the dirt beneath our feet and try to understand it as much as we can. But most of all, we need to be concerned about how it gets treated. Our livelihood depends very much on it. If we kill our soil we will kill ourselves.
"A nation that destroys its soil... destroys itself." - President Franklin D Roosevelt.
Our body functions very much like the soil. It needs a balance of minerals like copper, sulfur, zinc and so on just like the soil. The microbes and bacteria in our bodies are also, interestingly enough, a lot of the same ones found in soil and they function and work to break down nutrients and so on very much alike. Everything we do to create healthy soil also works for our body. The only difference is our body needs food to stay alive and the soil needs carbon which is soil food.
You see, God created this perfect cycle when he created this earth. He made plants to capture sunlight. The plants turn this sunlight into liquid carbon and feed it to the microbes. The microbes also eat dead plants, or carbon, as we call it. The microbes return the favor by providing minerals and trace elements to the plant. The microbes know the better they feed the plant, the better they will get fed. The plant also knows that it needs the microbes to stay alive, so it does its best to feed them. The plant and the microbes both need a balanced diet, same as people and animals do. So the microbes are eating off of the plant and they can tell by the quality of the food what the plant needs. If the plant for example is deficient in zinc the microbes will detect it and work to find zinc. The plants and the microbes exchange nutrients through the root tips of the plant. Microbes have a very short life span, so they are constantly dying, leaving all these nutrients for the plant as well. The roots will also team up with mychorrizal fungi and they can reach out a long way to find what they need.
However, if the microbes can't find the nutrition the plant needs, they will encourage plants to grow that are high in that nutrient. So dandelions, for example, are high in calcium and they will grow wherever calcium is deficient. That's how you can tell what your soil needs: by what weeds grow. It also shows the weeds are there for a reason, nature always balances itself if we let it.
So let's capture this picture: the plant feeds the microbes and the microbes feed the plant; if something is out of balance a plant will grow to correct it, then the microbes will consume that plant after it dies and will take the nutrition out of the dead material and feed it to the plant that is currently growing. This is only a very short, simple way of explaining it. For a very detailed explanation read the book Mycorrhizal Planet by Michael Phillips. Most scientists will admit that we haven't even begun to understand what all is happening beneath our feet.
Animals also play a very important role in soil health. In nature, the animals eat the best part of the plant and waste the rest. This is exactly what the microbes need in order to grow even more plants, which is exactly what the animals need to survive. Animals also greatly help the microbes provide a balance to the plants.
They will, for example, go to the woods and eat leaves or whatever is needed to balance the minerals that the grass is deficient in, then they will return to the grass and leave some of it there every time they lift their tail.
That is why access to free choice minerals are important for your animals. When the animals that eat plants die, we now have animals that eat meat come along and eat that animal. They will then scatter those nutrients across the landscape and the microbes will use them to feed more plants to feed more animals. So we have this perfect cycle of life and death. If left alone this will with time create very healthy soils. Taking the animals from the landscape and growing monoculture crops makes it difficult for the microbes and plants to function the way they were created to. If we are growing plants or raising animals we need to keep in mind how they are created to function and mimic that as closely as we can.
Nature never plows its soil. Nature also never puts harmful chemicals out to kill things. By plowing the soil we ruin a lot of the communication between the plant and the microbes, the mycorrhizal fungi is also ruined. That is why it becomes difficult to grow healthy plants without a lot of amendments. Chemicals work the same way. Roundup kills plants by tying up its mineral intake. Remember we said the plant feeds the microbes and the microbes give the plant the minerals it needs. The chemical cuts the ability of the plant to take that nutrient from the microbes and it dies. So now what happens to the microbe? It no longer has the plant to feed it and a lot of them will die. Some will always survive and they will grow weeds that don't die when you put Roundup on them. That is why we now have so many Roundup resistant weeds. Nature will always win. So how do we grow food without being destructive? This is where grazing is trump. If managed correctly we can have a beautiful system in sync with nature and we could grow most of our food this way.
Grains and vegetables are tough, but they can and are currently being grown by some farmers without plowing or chemicals. Nature loves diversity. Cover crops should be grown as much as possible, this helps break the cycle after a vegetable or grain crop.
If possible, taking it to the next step and grazing animals on the cover crops is very beneficial. Just make sure to manage it and trample a lot of it. A lot of vegetable growers are using mulch to control weeds and feed the crop. This works beautifully and is what nature wants, only be careful to not put a bunch of manure or some other ingredient on as this will throw your soil out of balance. Using high carbon products like wood chips or straw is good. Adding a little compost or manure will balance your carbon to nitrogen ratio. Remember nature likes green growing plants, brown dead decaying plants and animal by-products, all in balance. The closer we mimic that in our gardens and fields, the easier and more fun growing food will become. This has been kind of a broad shotgun approach. Maybe in future articles we can narrow down on more specific approaches of how we and other farmers are managing to grow the food we want while working with nature. In the meantime if you have any questions feel free to contact us. We might not be able to answer your question but could perhaps direct you to a farmer, or to a book that might help.