Increasing and maintaining soil organic content.

by Malcolm Beck

Nature, if left to her choice, never allows bare, exposed soil. She prefers a continuous cover of diverse plants that are good for food, forage and thousands of other uses. If we overgraze or somehow destroy the good plants she then grows a less desirable plant. If we destroy or overgraze it she puts in it’s place a lesser plant until there is nothing growing except hard to control bitter, poisonous and thorny plants.

Nature is determined to protect her soil. Soil is the foundation of the whole environment. That is why she designed weeds, cactus, mesquites and junipers. These so called pests plants are pioneer plants. Give them enough time, and it may take centuries, they will restore the soil to perfection. However, if we abuse the soil to a condition that the weedy plants can't grow the land is lost to desert forever.

Holistic Resource Management is a practice and method studied and taught by Allan Savory. It teaches to research every plan, product and action to see what the ripple effect will be. How will it effect the environment, our children, neighbors and the future? The ranchers that follow HRM teachings seem to have a good handle on animal grazing and ranching that meets Natures approval. Conventional agriculture definitely does not apply HRM practices.

The poor farming practices of modern agriculture can destroy the soil and turn farmlands to desert quicker than overgrazing. Conventional agriculture is falling way behind the HRM ranchers in soil and water conservation. The Land Gant Universities should be guiding the farmers. But, I find little evidence of that happening. However, there is a super web site to help existing no-till and wannabe no-till farmers. The No- till Farmers Website address is www.no-tillfarmer.com .It is committed to providing no-tillers with latest in No-till ideas, inventions, techniques and industry news. It also has a question and answer section and chat room.

Agriculture need not be destructive to the soil. Time is running out. There are better ways to grow food and fiber. We don't expect conventional agriculture to quickly change to organic or no-till, but it has to happen. With guidance from HRM for ranchers, USDA and the above web site for farmers, it could happen soon.

Lets take a look at agriculture nation wide. There are 455 million acres in cropland and 578 million acres in grassland pasture. Of that a very tiny proportion is farmed organic. There are quiet a few farms already in low till or some type of conservation tillage. But, most of our agricultural land is still being plowed, wasting water and carbon while polluting the air.

The farmers I know and associate with all work long hours. Some work 60 to 70 hours a week. Even when they are not on a tractor their brain is working. They are always planning and thinking about some farm related problem, be it labor, weather, money, price, equipment or whatever. They can't go home and leave the job and problems back at the office. At the end of the year, after profits are tallied, most don't make a parity wage.

The only reason most farmers haven't left the farm for a 40 hr. a week job is that the government subsidies and or crop insurance pay enough to allow them to stay on the farm. Farmers like to be their own boss and do what they love. Almost all the farmers I have visited tell me “without subsidies and crop insurance they couldn't survive”. Some of these farms are large. One family I visited farms 28 sections (square miles), they have 34 center pivot sprinkler systems. Most of the systems are the large ½ mile type; one complete circle covers a full mile. Each system has several wells feeding it. The farmer agreed they were pumping the Ogallala aquifer dry to grow corn that has a poor market and it brings less dollars per bushel than it cost to grow it.

The big center pivot, circle irrigation systems leave a plot of land at each corner un-irrigated. The government allows the farmers to put this acreage in CRP (crop reserve program). They are also allowed to put a certain amount of other tillable acreage in CRP. Once acreage is put into the program it has to stay there for ten years. This would be fine if they allowed the farmers to concentrate on building the health and organic content of the soil. But the farmers can only do what the government program permits.

The farmer with the 34 center pivot systems had a whole square mile in CRP. He was told to plant Old World Blue Stem, a climax plant that is not a very good soil builder, and he was required to keep it sprayed with a broad leaf herbicide to keep out weeds. Weeds would even be a better cover crop, they are good soil builders. This farmer showed me a section he had just taken out of CRP. The corn growing on it was poorer quality than the section next to it that had been in continuous cultivation. We need to change from CRP (crop reserve program) to SBP (Soil Building Program) which would use legumes in rotation with different grass/grain crops.

Farmers and ranchers should get the subsidies for building soil health. Not for destroying it. Is this ignorance or stupidity? Getting paid each year for the percent of soil organic content increased would be a much better farm program. It would raise the quality of the crop, the farmer could get a better price, production cost would go down, water would be saved, the air would be less polluted, and soil would still be there and in good health for our children and future generations.

The big farms owned by corporations are usually in worse shape than the family farms. Their workers probably only work 40 hours a week and all they care about is the paycheck. The employer is only concerned with profits. I seriously doubt that any of these operations are efficient and environmental.

If these corporate farms where shown a farming system that saved dollars, was environmentally friendly and could get paid to build soil instead of destroying soil they would have no reason to not change.

Changes must be made. If congress understood Nature, government subsidized soil-building programs such as conservation tillage and organic farming could come into existence with the stroke of the pen. I don't think all of our lawmakers are stupid. We need to vote the right people into office and support them with letters, phone calls and E-mail. Some say government should stay out of agriculture altogether. I will not argue either way. Nature doesn't care as long as it’s done right.

Dedicated farmers would rather make money riding their tractors and working in the fields instead of accepting a hand out from the government. Conservation tillage could give them the margin.

According to the U.S. National Corn Handbook estimations comparing farms each growing 1,000 acres of corn in equal environments, and assuming diesel was $1.24 gallon, and figuring all the tractor work each would need to be done from start to finish. No-till would save $6,185 or approximately 5,000 gallons over conventional tillage.

The savings look small at 5 gallons per acre but, the real savings with no-till are environmental, with the air, water, soil and our future the savings are tremendous.

Carbon dioxide and other green house gases from crankcase exhaust and engine exhaust would be greatly reduced with no-till. Moisture and carbon loss from the soil would also be greatly reduced with no-till.

With no-till all the plant material, crops and weeds, are kept on top of the soil as mulch. This keeps the soil a more even temperature of 80 to 90 degrees during hot days instead 120 degrees like I have measured bare soil on a hot sunny day. The mulch also stops sand blasting or blowing crops out on dry windy days. This damages small plants allowing disease to set in, and many times means re-planting.

The mulch is the perfect environment for earthworms and many other soil critters. Billions of microbes live in the moist, temperature controlled environment. They all churn up, aerate and build soil structure and fertility.

Heavy rains are held in place by the mulch until it can soak into the churned up rich soil instead of causing run-off, erosion and floods that send the soil to the salty seas where we have lost it forever.

We must never forget, that, even though 74 percent of the earth is covered with water it is all salty except for 3 percent. Of that small 3 percent between 80 and 90 percent is pumped onto the land for irrigation. No-till could greatly reduce this high percent of water used to grow crops.

The annual rainfall average has gone up slightly, for the last 125 years. But, population growth, urban sprawl, higher standard of living and the demand for water by conventional farming is causing water supply to run short. Neighbors and communities are already squabbling over water. The most imminent problem we have today is water shortages. We need to concentrate on water conservation.

Conservation tillage, low and no till farming has been proven to be the most efficient and very best method for catching and storing fresh water. This is the most natural practice a farmer could do. Think about it. Nature never turns the soil over. When we stop plowing and exposing the soil the savings become tremendous. Production goes up, eventually less fertilizer is needed and insects and disease becomes less and less.

Plowing, or any soil tillage, causes the soil to lose moisture and exposes it to the damaging sunrays. This destroys billions of exposed microbes and fine root hairs. These small life forms then quickly oxidize to form CO2 that escapes to an already overloaded atmosphere.

Conservation tillage is the best water saving practice mankind has. Even the organic farmers that still plow could gain soil organic content faster and save the air from CO2 pollution if they practiced no-till.

Strip-till, ridge-till and mulch-till are all methods of conservation tillage. No-till disturbs the soil the least. It is the best method to keep the carbon in the soil and increases the soil organic content the fastest without hauling in organic matter from an outside source. Applying compost, manure and other organic waste to farmland is an excellent method to build soil organic matter. Nature demands that all organics be recycled. But if conventional methods with too much tilling, plowing, disking, cultivating is continued the soil carbon gained is eventually lost to create more air pollution. We need to think no-till and get rid of the plow mentality.

In some soil conditions aeration may periodically be necessary with conservation tillage but it is not done by turning the soil upside down. A chisel or subsoiler is used when soil is fairly dry. If you cut the mulch in front of the chisel with a coulter (a giant, sharp pizza cutter) you disturb the mulch very little. The chisel shatters the soil loose at the necessary depth without over exposing the soil.

Competing weeds always have and always will be a problem to some degree in agriculture. With no-till, the cultivator for weed control isn't used. In our refined society hand labor to hoe the weeds is impossible. However, there are enough people locked in prisons that may enjoy using a hoe but I don't see that happening.

In no-till farming, the one drawback is the need for herbicides in the early phases and then periodically years later. With conventional till you are always plowing seeds in deep and bringing others up from under ground. This keeps a continuous supply of weed seeds to sprout. Timely cultivating can do a fair job of controlling the sprouting weed seeds but if the weeds get to big because rain delayed cultivating your control choices are, let them grow, hand hoe or herbicide.

All but the organic farmers choose herbicide. No-till keeps all weed seeds on top of the soil where you can eventually get rid of most of them or if you wish you can let them grow for added mulch material. Decaying weeds builds soil fertility. It is a known fact the weeds become less and less of a problem as the health of the soil increases.

Glyphosate is the herbicide most widely used. If not used correctly, without a mist inhibitor or in wrong weather conditions or at the wrong time of day it can drift to locations causing crop damage. It is toxic if inhaled or by skin contact. However, all of this can be prevented when handled properly. But, as Organic and Sustainable enthusiasts can we approve of using an herbicide?

When the question was asked of a well-known mycorrhizae specialists.“ Which is more damaging to the mycorrhizae, deep tilling or herbicide? He explained that tillage kills the host plant and tears the mycorrhizae fungi all to pieces. It destroys it before it gets a chance to make spores (seed). With herbicides (glyphosate) the host plant is killed. As soon as the plant stops sending energy to the root, that is a signal for the mycorrhizae to quickly make seed so it can re-grow on the next live plant root.

The question of what happens to glyphosate in the soil was asked of the above biologist and a biologist that specializes in the soil food web. They both agreed. “In a biologically healthy soil there is a bacteria that feeds on it, in fact loves it, and quickly degrades it“. In a dead soil it is like taking it from one container and putting it into another container that leaks. Conservation tillage builds biologically healthy soil.

I have been an organic gardener and farmer since 1957. I have given hundreds of talks and presentations on doing things naturally. Even written books on organics condemning chemicals. Something deep inside keeps telling me I can't ok a product designed by man to destroy. The plow and herbicides are both destroyers. I wonder which one Nature would approve of? I doubt if she would approve either.

Man created the mounting problems of our soil, water and air and the degrading conditions of our environment and our future. Man fouled up Mother Earth. Man is stuck with making the decision.