Re: [compost_tea] How Healthy and Self-Sufficient Can a Garden Get?

From: <soilfoodweb_at_aol.com>
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2004 11:52:59 -0500

We work with farms that are pretty much sustainable farms in various places around the world. How sustainble they actually are depends on….. your definition of sustainable.

No one exists as islands unto themselves on this planet. If nothing else, air pollution affects everyone. You can’t avoid it. Sorry, not even the Amazon or Antartica are free from air pollution anymore.

The gases your plants use to fix sunlight energy and carbon dioxide into energy-storage carbon compounds inside the plant comes from off-site. You are stuck with the mineral nutrients that your soil has. Geology determined the original parent material, and succession has determined the organic matter built up in your soil. You may need to fix a lack of nutrients if you got stuck with poor soil. If conventional ag has gone on in your soil previously, soil nutrients were mined out, sold as plant produce, or lost to erosion and leaching and volitilization. So, when trying to resuscitate that land, the nutrients have to be put back into that soil.

The fast way to fix this nutrient problem is to buy the nutrients that are lacking (you have to do a soil chemistry test to figure this out). For example, if calcium is needed, you buy calcium in some form (as lime, for example) but then that’s not sustainable, is it? You bought something from off-farm to put back into the soil.

To hold added to the soil calcium, you have to get the fungal biomass going again. Where do beneficial fungi come from? They don’t just “arrive”. Especially with the fungicides that are being poured on the land in today’s ag world. Where would beneficial fungi come from in your neighborhood? Think about it for a minute. Where is that inoculum coming from? Anything treated with a pesticide has lost a significant portion of the fungal community. Anything treated with normal-for-today levels of inorganic fertilizer has lost the beneficial fungi. No wonder you get stuck having to use fungicides.

Don’t let your mineral nutrients leach again – you have to get the fungi back. You must find a source of good fungi and get them, and bacteria, protozoa and beneficial nematodes and microarthropods going in your soil again.

You can use a slower (more sustainable?) way, by buying compost from off-site, and using plant organic material and the biology that comes with the compost to put back the lost nutrients. And the biology.

But is that sustainable? The compost is from off-site. But you have to put back into the soil the nutrients and biology that are no longer there.

Is it “fair” to expect someone to suffer poor plant production until they can resuscitate soil that someone else destroyed, because we want to have rules about what is or is not sustainable? Or is it “allowed” to let people do some non-sustainable resuscitation until the soil is back in decent form?

You could try to let plants grow their roots down deep into the soil, and lift the nutrients from deeper in the soil. But how long does it take to pull up the minerals needed? But the roots won’t grow down if the soil is severely compacted from conventional ag practices.

If the soil is compacted at 6, or 12, or 18 inches (and sometimes there are separate compaction layers at EACH of those depths), roots will not grow through those layers to get to soil where the nutrients have leached. Sometimes the nutrients are completely gone from the soil, because they reached groundwater, and have been moved downstream. When you see algal or cyanobacterial blooms in surface water, that’s a result of the nutrients being leached from the land, into the water, and those nutrients are gone from the land. You have to grow roots past the water table in order to pull nutrients from deeper layers. How long will that take? If the soil is compacted, you can’t get the roots to those deeper nutrients.

So, we have to let growers have a time to fix these problems before demanding totally sustainable practices. The grower has to stay alive as well, for something to be sustainable.

Most people mean by sustainable a situation where as-much-as-possible, the materials to grow plants and keep the people on that land alive come from the land, and specifically from the land owned by the farmer. Most people mean by sustainable that toxic chemicals are used to the least degree possible. That means pesticides and herbicides are not used, except as last-ditch methods to save a crop. Use of toxic materials to routinely control disease and pests is not considered sustainable.

So how do you control diseases and pests in a sustainable system? The existing biology. You have to make the habitat in your soil support the beneficial organisms, which combat, inhibit, out-compete, prevent the bad guys from having or finding a habitat in which they can grow, relative to the plants you want to grow.

If you are trying to grow cranberry, you are going to make the habitat support a certain set of organisms in the soil that would never work for corn, or tomato, or..... whatever garden vegetable you want. Cranberry is adapted to water-logged, at times anaerobic conditions in the soil. Set the stage for highly productive cranberry by making the soil exactly what cranberry needs. Get rid of serious weed problems by recognizing what the weed needs to germinate and grow, and make sure those conditions are NOT met.

Being sustainable means recognizing these factors.

But when nature sends a whammy, as in a drought, a flood, torrential downpours, you have to respond to get the soil life back to what your plants need. A truly healthy soil can tolerate a great deal of abuse before being forced off-target. But nature can send conditions that move that soil away from the healthy condition for your plants. Recognizing what needs to be done to move the soil back to the healthy condition is what we are working on now.

So, can this be done? Yes.

We did a survey at SFI of our clients. Anyone working with us is going to be trying to get back to a healthy soil condition, which is, by definition, moving to sustainable. Pesticides are not things that can be included in building healthy soil.

We asked some of our clients why they weren’t sending in soil samples to be assessed. Of the approximately 60 clients we contacted, about 25% said, “We don’t need to send soil samples in, because we have achieved the no-pesticide and no-fertilizer result that SFI talks about. We’ve achieved healthy soil”.

We, of course, suggested that they might want to check their soil on occasion, maybe once a year, just as a health check-up. You go to the doctor for routine health check-ups, your soil probably needs it too.

But, the question was put in a previous e-mail to the list, can you achieve sustainable? Well, we can achieve healthy soil. It’s a goal that can be achieved. We can document that we have achieved it. The determinant of whether you reached your goal is no more pesticide or inorganic fertilizer use. We can predict that condition by monitoring the biology in your soil.

Healthy soil is MAINTAINED through making compost from your own plant material, from the human manure produced on-site (most people are eating foods from not-on-farm, so there is an import of nutrients there. Enough to replace export of nutrients in off-farm plant sales? Hum….. The out- and in-flows have to be balanced.)

To be sustainable, you have to understand nutrient cycles.

If you buy a farm where the soils lost nutrients through leaching, and the soil is compacted, you have to re-build soil structure, put the nutrients back into the soil, along with, and at the same time as, the biology to hold the nutrients for you once you add them.

You can be sustainable, as long as you pay attention to the export of nutrients from your farm, and balance the out-go with in inputs from off-farm. If you are going to be a part of modern society, you will remove nutrients and sell them off-farm. That means I have to bring nutrients from off-farm and put them back into my soil, hold them with the biology, and be sustainable. I can fix nitrogen on-land, no problem. But I can’t fix calcium, or boron, or manganese from the atmosphere. I have to get compost from off-site to balance those out-flows.

This is perhaps a broader picture of sustainable than being barely sustainable. I don’t think life is sustainable without a few human comforts. Darn, but I’m not living without a refrigerator, a hot water heater and a computer. I have imported metal, coolant, electricity, and the internet. I have to export enough stored energy in the form of plant material to balance those inputs. I have to bring back enough mineral nutrients to balance the minerals sold off my land in the form of plant material so I could have the money to buy my comforts. I need to get the exported nutrients back, so I have to sell more plant stored energy…… which means more nutrients I need to bring back in.

Be aware of the ebb and flow of your nutrient cycles, or you can’t be sustainable.

Fukuoka was right, for the system he described. It is just that his particular examples do not work everywhere around the world. He didn't mean them to be, but people take his example as "THE WAY". The concept presented was entirely possible, his examples were good. He recognized the need for human comforts, outside bare meeting of food-needs. But you need a paradigm, a mental framework and understanding, to allow you to transfer what was done there to what needs doing on your land.

Hopefully, as we keep incorporating more aspects into our understanding of the biology and chemistry fo the soil, we fully realize that paradigm, and enable rapid recovery of not-healthy soil back to a sustainable condition, relative to the plants you want to grow.

Elaine Ingham
President, Soil Foodweb Inc.
SFI Corvallis, OR
SFI Port Jefferson, NY
SFI Lismore, NSW, Australia
SFI Hilversum, The Netherlands
SFI Cambridge, New Zealand
www.soilfoodweb.com

 

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Received on Sat Jan 03 2004 - 12:20:14 EST

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