It’s all good! I’m curious to see a breakdown of where the information could be improved.
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More than improvement is how you can make it apply to you. There are folks with heavy clay soils where this approach would lead to a anaerobic mess prone to root diseases. Not that there is anything wrong with his approach, just that it is ideal for his farm.
Soil is an ecosystem; promoting a healthy living breathing community leads to healthy plants. The soil itself doesn’t exist in a vacuum whether one foot deep or four; your water table, drainage, and precipitation will dictate the best course of action. Then there is the fact that if it is not covered and protected via mulch or cover crop it will deteriorate and dry out. This bit is also affected by your environment and what you are trying to grow.
Bottom line is that there isn’t a single formula that works everywhere.
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I confess that getting something written up over the weekend was a pipe dream. Such is the nature of these things.
Going back to the article Caesar linked, I’ll reiterate that while I commend Paul Kaiser for his aspirations and goals, I have more criticism than praise for his methods.
The long and short of it is, Kaiser is well-intentioned and offers a counterbalance to a lot of the harmful practices in agriculture at large, but he over-corrected, he misattributes a lot of his success to his methods, got lucky on numerous counts, and locked himself into an highly constrained paradigm where, when he needs to feed his plants, can’t, and is stuck over-feeding his soil instead.
Many agricultural practices are essentially extractive. The farmer comes in, harnesses the productivity of the soil with specially bred plants and animals, and continues to do so until either the premium fertility of the soil is exhausted and the farmer has to switch to less productive uses of the land, or the soil is completely exhausted, wherein the farmer will abandon the land for a time or permanently. Cash crops giving way to pasture is probably the most common form of the first, while things like rotating land in and out of being fallow and slash and burn are examples of the second. And in no way is this strictly modern. Pre-moderns all around the world had to contend with the first, and often practiced milder forms of the second (ie letting land go fallow). And slash and burn and similar highly exploitative, short term land use patterns, were the norm in Native American agriculture, among others (I realize that saying anything to contradict the blatantly racist noble savage narrative will p**s people off, but, well, the truth doesn’t care about your Romantic sensibilities: Native Americans did not live at “one with nature” anymore than the colonists did. They grew imported, non-native plants–corn, beans, squash, and such are from central America, the partially domesticated North American crops they grew originally were abandoned a few thousand years ago when the better central American plants were brought in–practiced slash and burn and drove almost all of North America’s megafauna to extinction).
In contrast to that, there are agricultural practices which restore, at least in part, what they extract. Modern conventional farming is a weak version of this, as it deliberately restores the nutrients that are lost each year, as well as some soil properties (usually just pH balance, though sometimes organic matter gets some attention as well, e.g. in no-till systems). The stronger form is usually encountered in gardening, where not only is the soil restored, but considerable effort goes into increasing the fertility and productivity of the soil beyond what it was before. I say usually this is gardening, but I should also admit that irrigation, something done on a wide scale by farmers, amounts to a similar effect; water is, after all, as critical a component of a healthy soil as organic matter. One could say something similar about external drainage, ditches and the like, even though the clearest example of improving soils in this way, draining wetlands, is seen as harmful (in the big picture, it is, but local to the soil, it is an improvement in productivity and fertility, albeit at the cost of very important ecosystem services and biodiversity).
Most commonly found among gardeners, however, is the practice of dramatically altering their soil properties. While a farmer is highly constrained by the low net value of his produce and so cannot economically make major amendments to their soil, a gardener is dealing with a very different equilibrium, and often enough, the net balance of cost is not even a motivating factor. So, gardeners happily and wantonly obliterate the starting conditions of their soil. There is some justification, since the soil they start with is usually in some state of exhaustion. But this naturalistic justification only gets you so far. The “natural soil” in almost all regions of the world is a terrible soil. The list of natural soils that contain 5-10% organic matter, a balance of nutrients, and no micronutrient deficiencies, have good hydrological characteristics, a pH of 6.3-7, are deep and without hardpan, are friable and easily worked, and have soil particle sizes in the goldilocks zone, is short. Very short. Simple probability states that a preponderance of gardeners, by creating a healthy, productive, fertile soil, are creating something artificial and totally alien to their local environment. So, the “natural” justification only has but a little mileage. More convincing is the idea that a gardener is trying to achieve a maximal soil fertility and productivity.
That is what gardeners are in the business of doing: creating the best possible soil.
Creating the absolute superlative soil is no doubt at the back of Kaiser’s mind. But, clearly, he failed.
What Kaiser achieved was an extreme soil, not the best soil. An adage among the sustainability-minded of us in agriculture is, “don’t feed the plants, build the soil.” Paul Kaiser built, over-built, and then build some more. His soil is the Burj Khalifa of soils. And, as it turns out, living in the Burj is great for status and getting attention, but is not actually particularly close to ideal. This shows. An editorial comment for the article mentions that the site gets far more traffic in that article than any other. 60 tons of compost an acre per year is not a recipe for great soil, it is a recipe for going viral.
The reason for the popularity of Kaiser’s method, popularity in the sense of celebrity status, is, among other more comely reasons, it seems to confirm the biases and presuppositions of the target audience. Those priors are hard to pin down exactly, but are something along the lines of: what is natural is good, and organic matter is the key to naturally productive, fertile, healthy soil.
I say seems, because Kaiser’s example is one which, on closer examination, and without the horse-blinder view that comes with accepting the priors I mentioned before, shows just how excessive one has to be in order to maintain high productivity and still follow “the rules.”
60 tons of compost per acre per year is too much.
Paul Kaiser ought not to need that much. Kaiser is doing something wrong if he needs that much. And, by his own admission, he needs that much.
The first reason is straightforward: compost is not a fertilizer. Compost is a soil amendment that increases soil organic matter. Even manure-based composts contain fairly low amounts of plant nutrients, and much of that is locked up in the organic matter or by the accompanying microbes. Amounts vary, but analyzed as fertilizer, compost is somewhere between 0.5-0.5-0.5, and 1-1-1. That is not much, but, again, compost is not fertilizer. Ironically, though, even assuming the lower value of 0.5, Kaiser is applying 600 pounds of N to his fields every year. Even an aggressive fertilization regime for a hungry plant like corn maxes out at around 250 pounds. Kaiser is applying far more fertilizer than the conventional farmers he is trying to distance himself from.
Why would he need to apply absurd rates of NPK to his land? The stated explanation is that he grows more plants and more crops in a year. Fair, to a point. While he might be growing more crops per year, it is unlikely his plants are drawing all that much more nutrients than the corn field counterexample. Kaiser’s crops, annual vegetables mostly, are quite short season. In the time it takes Kaiser to raise two crops of lettuce and spinach, a corn field will be only just starting to produce ears, let alone be ready for harvest. But the corn plant has been growing that entire time, and was only at the low nutrient demanding seedling stage once, unlike Kaiser’s vegetables. Sure, the corn field will require little nutrients in the fall or winter, but for half the growing year, a corn field will need as much or more nutrients than Kaiser’s vegetables. And yet, Kaiser is applying more, considerably more, than twice the nutrients that corn needs.
Why does Kaiser use more fertilizer than Big Ag?
Because Kaiser’s system is extremely wasteful. The degradation of compost, which happens anytime the ground is not frozen and not desiccated, locks up nitrogen, as we all know. But, once that organic matter is degraded and lost, not all of the nitrogen returns to the soil. Soil microbes can make nitrogen available, some soil microbes can even fix atmospheric nitrogen, but some microbes can cause nitrogen to be lost to the atmosphere. Soil nitrogen is in a complex balance of ammonia, nitrates, nitrites, nitrous oxide, and nitrogen gas. Three out of five of those are gasses that can simply diffuse out of the soil. The last one, nitrogen gas, is almost always an end product, being very rarely converted back to the other forms, and under certain conditions soil nitrogen can be converted to nitrogen gas at a very high rate.
It is highly probable that Kaiser is loosing hundreds of pounds of nitrogen per year to the wind.
Similarly, many tons of otherwise fixed carbon are being lost as CO2 on his farm.
Outside of very wet or very cold conditions, it is extraordinarily difficult to maintain soil organic matter levels above 10-15% in a healthy soil. Once you approach that threshold, microbial activity will begin to outstrip the natural replenishment of organic matter. Again, you can artificially increase it by adding compost and the like, but doing so raises the organic matter content above what the soil can naturally sustain, and, so long as there is enough air and warmth, the soil will destroy that extra organic matter, turning it back to CO2, locking up a lot of N in the process, and evidently at the end of the day loosing a fair bit of that N. Kaiser says he applies more compost because he grows more crops. Unless Kaiser is shipping 60 tons per acre of tomatoes, I imagine the bulk of that compost is actually just blowing away in the wind as CO2.
Kaiser’s goal is sustainability, as is mine. A soil amendment that has to be reapplied every year is not very sustainable. A soil amendment that has to be reapplied at a rate of scores of tons per acre per year is deeply unsustainable. I am not a fan.
Now, Kaiser does face a conundrum. Were he to settle for just 1-5 tons of compost, that would mean merely 10-50 lbs of NPK per acre. That is not enough. Applying that little fertilizer would mean that his vegetable farm would be an extractive enterprise, and, as mentioned above, eventually the premium of soil fertility would run out. His method of coping is the apply copious amounts of compost. Perhaps there are other tricks?
Perhaps, and we should treat this suggestion with the greatest of distrust and suspicion, instead of fertilizing with a soil builder, Kaiser should fertilize with a fertilizer.
Returning to the priors: “don’t feed the plants, build the soil” is a perfectly acceptable maxim within the contexts of an ornamental garden, a botanical park, or a low-use home garden. A highly productive market garden or vegetable farm is different. The quantity of high-nutrient plant matter being removed from the land means, in no uncertain terms, that you have to feed the plants, else exhaust your soil.
This of course begs the question: why would Kaiser want to maintain outlandishly high soil organic matter?
First, one questions whether he needed to do much to improve his soil to begin with. His farm is in Sonoma county:
In 2012, Sonoma County ranked as the 22nd county in the United States in. By 1920, Sonoma County was ranked as the eighth most agriculturally productive U.S. county and a leading producer of hops, grapes, prunes, apples, as well as dairy and poultry products, largely due to the extent of available, fertile agricultural land in addition to the abundance of high-quality water for irrigation.
From Wikipedia.
Seems strange that someone living in a gardening paradise would feel the need to take such drastic steps to improve his soil.
So, it might be that the desire to drown an otherwise good soil with compost might have something to do with things other than practical things. Perhaps ideas, not things, are what’s calling the shots.
As I’ve mentioned before, because of the particular historical path of gardening and Romantic agrarianism in the English speaking world, chernozem ended up being placed on a pedestal and worshiped as the best possible soil and gardeners all over go to unreasonable lengths to replicate chernozem in their backyards, usually oblivious to the facts that (1) chernozem isn’t the only “most fertile soil in the world” and (2) chernozem can only exist in dry summer, low humidity, long winter climates. Tellingly, while Kaiser lives in a dry summer, low humidity climate, he lives in a short, mild winter one. Even so, with two of the three conditions, his soil microbes are chewing through metric tons of compost every year. Imagine how many hundreds of tons of compost would be needed for a similar garden in the humid subtropics, let alone the equatorial tropics…
Now, because his soil is continuously burning through vast quantities of compost, there is going to be a fairly elevated amount of free nutrients, far more than the soil would contain naturally. But, Kaiser is growing unnatural plants (vegetables have been bred to do weird, weird things), and at high density, with several cohorts each year. Those unnatural plants have been bred specifically to take advantage of, and to an extent require, unnaturally high levels of free nutrients in the soil. The conventional way of maintaining that unnaturally high level is to apply those nutrients directly as fertilizer. But many see fertilizer as an unnatural way of creating unnatural soil nutrient levels, hence the need for a more “natural” way to create those unnatural conditions.
An ideological commitment to not using fertilizer forces Kaiser to choose between having a productive farm and having reasonable compost usage. Kaiser chose the first, and lucked out that he even could by happening to live in a dry summer, low humidity climate.
He got lucky in a number of ways it seems.
In addition to having a climate that does not severely punish him for his compost addiction (wetter, hotter climates would not only force his hand, but could lead to other issues, such as waterlogging–highly organic soils in rainy weather can absorb too much water and deprive plant roots of oxygen, and just don’t drain very well in general), Kaiser was lucky to have bought a sub-optimally situated farm that was, as the article described, “low, cold, and wet” when, again as the article says, a major drought set in but “he withstood the drought better.” I’m sure the extra organic matter in his soil also helped. But a garden does not live by compost alone. His microclimate is itself a comparative advantage in times of drought.
There was also mention made in the article of Organic-adjacent practices, in particular vis-a-vis pest control. I say Organic-adjacent because his farm is not Organic Certified. Once again, I praise him. Organic certifications are a scam.
But, going beyond that more polemical point, there was something in the article that I found annoying. A pervasive thing. A persuasive thing too. All the intellectually seductive appeal of a platitude wrapped up in the authoritativeness of folksy moralizing:
“If you take care of Mother Nature first,” he now says, “the food production is easy.”
None-freaking-sense. As I’ve already taken pains to point out, your artificial compost battered soil, with man-made plants covering it, nurtured by comparatively abundant pipe-water in a land scarce of sky-water, and all animal life larger than a pigeon driven off or slaughtered to extinction by you or others, nestled in the center of millions of acres of vineyards, in one of the most agriculturally dense regions of the world, where the natural ecosystem has been in utter ruins for at least 9,000 years since the Clovis culture first showed up there and murdered off all the megafauna, is not, and will never be, “Mother Nature.” Even if it were, the imaginary fertility goddess that the neo-pagans have invented will in no way cast incantations of protection on your domesticated plants. Heck, she neglects her own, let alone yours. Wild fruits and berries and vegetables are full of pests. And not just cosmetic. My favorite example is black locust. In Europe, black locust is a fast-growing, tall tree used extensively for both honey production and timber. It is excellent in both roles, having highly regarded honey and exceptionally hard, strong, and dense wood, despite being a very fast growing tree. Its wood is even highly resistant to rot, making it one of the very, very few temperate zone species that yields a timber as useful as tropical hardwoods. It fixes nitrogen to boot! And… is native to North America, not Europe. In North America, it is rarely used for honey, and its timber is seldom used for anything beyond garden stakes and fence posts. Not, my dear reader, because Americans are dumb and Europeans not. No, the reason is simple: Mother Nature is a fickle b*%^h. Black locust, when grown in its natural distribution, seldom lives more than a decade into adulthood, being killed by a pathogenic fungus spread by native borers. Nature said, “here’s the best temperate hardwood species you could possibly imagine. Also, I’ve stricken it with a plague and it is utterly unusable. Have fun!” No introduced pests or anything. This is nature’s balance: black locust, in its native range, is so ravished by native pests that it rarely, if ever, reaches its mature size. In all likelihood, it would have gone extinct within a few hundred thousands of years. Just like all the other species Mother Nature’s “balance” has driven to extinction.
Natural pest control is a purely stochastic process. Will planting windbreaks and host plants and leaving tall grass un-mowed and not spraying broad spectrum insecticides on everything all the time shift the distribution of probabilities of pest outbreaks? Sure. Will you have reliable pest control? Not if you live outside of a Mediterranean or semi-arid agricultural paradise. Low-humidity climates have such light pest pressure that these various natural or organic approaches work well enough to get by with. But, here lies the irony, low-humidity climates are so easy to garden in because there is so little nature there. There are orders of magnitude more microbes, insects, fungi, weed seeds, everything, per unit of garden soil in the east than in the west. Growing plants in the west, especially in areas where you have to use irrigation water, is essentially growing plants in a petri dish. Growing plants in the east, especially the southeast, and especially especially in lowland subtropical and tropical regions, is growing plants “with Mother Nature’s help.” And it is hard, because what she calls “help” I call diseases and weeds and pests and invading tree roots and errant deer and bears and nematodes.
Providing cover and food sources and habitat for predators and pollinators and the like is a good thing, objectively good, and it may even help with select pest problems. That is all.
So, Kaiser is quite lucky to have (largely absent) Mother Nature’s (lack of) “help” in his climate.
And, finally, Kaiser has been very fortunate not to loose his farm to in a lawsuit.
Municipal waste is bad mojo. Yes, it is being composted, but given that he does not have a resting period between applying it and growing plants in it–and I suspect he applies it to already growing plants–all it would take is a single bad batch of compost, or one scoop of raw waste into the wrong pile at the landfill, for Kaiser’s plant to get doused with a hefty dose of E. coli, clostridium, norovirus, campylobacter, or salmonella, and since he markets fresh vegetables, a single contamination even would almost certainly result in a large portion of his customer base getting sick. And, given that he lives in a region of the world with dangerously high levels of yuppies, he’d be sued faster than a triggered Karen can ask for the manager.
Uncooked vegetables and berries, either fresh or frozen, are one of the leading causes of foodborne illness. And organic farms that use manure or compost aged for less than a year are at least 20 times more likely to cause an outbreak. These are established facts.
Municipal waste is dangerous.
Now, again, I still share Kaiser’s goals. I do not want to see the millions of tons of waste we generate in America merely dumped into our rivers or otherwise thrown out. But a market garden is not the place to use that waste, let alone prodigious quantities of it. It is only a matter of time before he makes someone seriously ill.
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Now, all of this is not to say that people shouldn’t apply compost to their farms, or even use municipal waste, or even that Kaiser shouldn’t use compost.
What I am arguing is that Kaiser is using compost as a silver bullet. But, not being silver or a bullet, compost fares poorly in that role. Compost can help build the soil, and provides some nutrients to boot, but in no way obviates the need to use fertilizer in anything but the most closed-loop of gardens, and even with a highly circular garden, such as an ornamental garden or park, nitrogen loss will likely exceed nitrogen fixation. Additionally, I would argue that, while Kaiser was able to realize some benefits from that excess compost, such as better drought mitigation and very friendly soil workability, I am of the opinion it is not only possible to achieve those things in other ways, it would be ideal to.
As a thought exercise: Even a fraction of the amount of compost he applies, had it been charcoal, would have made a dramatic difference. With a density of about 12 lb/ft^3, it would take about 20 tons of charcoal per acre to achieve a soil of 5% charcoal by volume to a depth of two feet. Apply it once, rest the soil for a year and amend as needed to correct the pH. Done, permanently (or nearly so) well-draining, high CEC, pH buffered, lighter and more workable, soil with a very high field capacity. Then just apply normal amounts of compost to keep up microbial life, fertilize as needed (because fertilizer is needed in a commercial setting), and enjoy your amazing soil.
Similar things could be said about applying permatill, or other high porosity mineral amendments. You want the physical advantages of organic matter, but in a non-degradable mineral form. Because otherwise, you’re stuck adding deeply impractical and at times risky amounts of organic matter to your soil, forever, because of some ideology. That’s unsustainable.
And it’s sustainability I care about as much as productivity.
Ideology? You can keep it.
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By the time someone read all these posts and studied what was recommended to be studied, they could have shovelled enough of whatever was needed to produce a garden on wherever they stood. I heard this when I was young, it’s attributed to T.D. Roosevelt- my Great Grandfather’s personal hero since he followed him up San Juan Hill;
“Do what you can with what you have where you are.”
That being said, I left the land of bleached white Podzols and boulders and moved to a non- stony heavy clay-silt loam over 25 years ago and haven’t regretted it. I’ve never seen a good farm built in one generation, but a lot of them lost in the fourth. Whichever one of those you are in, humility is a better friend than expert advice.
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The impossible ideal soil is probably a fool’s errand. Improving what you have is a worthy year after year endeavor.
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Anyone else listen to the podcast “In search of soil”? Some fascinating episodes.
Soil is alive and when you have trichoderma growing inside your tomato’s roots upregulating the plant’s own genetics for more drought and disease resistance including fusarium wilt and powdery mildew that’s pretty cool.
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Thank you for the excellent breakdown! It really helps in putting things into perspective. There’s a lot of info in there that was new to me.
I’ve never understood the “problems” people have with fertilizers, though. It’s not like pesticides (which are objectively poison, if perhaps only to the pests), it’s just nutrients, mineral salts.
I remember seeing a video where the person trialed rock dust in the garden, and found that the conventional methods yielded better than the rock dust (and some of the veggies in the dust batch had inferior flavor).
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Back to the main topic, how about Inga Alley Cropping? It’s definitely used in relatively humid, tropical conditions, and is based on the leafy and woody organic matter of nitrogen fixing trees. The system doesn’t produce potassium, though one application of potash is allegedly enough for several years worth of harvests.
http://www.ingafoundation.org/alley-cropping/
A related technique applicable to temperate climates is the Biomass Belt, composed of comfrey beds with clover in between and temperate nitrogen fixing trees off to the side.
The nitrogen fixers are pruned & mowed and added to the comfrey, which in turn is harvested and applied where needed, to the vegetable beds.
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“I’ve never understood the “problems” people have with fertilizers, though. It’s not like pesticides (which are objectively poison, if perhaps only to the pests), it’s just nutrients, mineral salts.”
As an example of some of the things about bagged fertilizers I was advised to consider;
- What is the other 40% of that bag of 0-0-60 made of?
- KCl (for example) is a very different thing than the K that’s already in your soil, and there is no ‘Chlorine Cycle’ in the natural world- Cl is almost always locked up tight as soon as it appears.
- Plants don’t ‘eat’ potassium, it only plays a part in a complex process leading to an optimized photosynthetic outcome.
I can lay enough Urea (N) down on the best of crops to kill it overnight, even though it’s needed, just like I could pour a whole can of some insecticides out on the ground and have it do nothing. In the absence of sufficient knowledge, wisdom means staying within the boundaries of what is known specifically to help and not harm. Anything beyond that is called ‘experimentation’.
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It’s an interesting practice, for sure. N-fixing plants I think are fairly well exploited, even big ag uses soybean to fix N for the following corn crop.
The benefit of these kinds of deep rooted plants depends highly on the subsoil chemistry. In some soil types, podzols are a pretty good example, soluble minerals tend to redeposit in the subsoil. And since the topsoil is quite poor, using deep rooted plants to bring some of those minerals up can be very beneficial. In other soils, the top soil might not be all they much lower in nutrients than the deep subsoil. Or, the opposite might be the case, where the topsoil, thanks to a duff layer or higher organic matter, retains some nutrients, while the subsoil is just a deep, excessively drained sand. In those cases, you won’t derive as much benefit. Though, just working the subsoil with root activity can be helpful.
Oxygen.
There’s almost no free K in your soil. Good thing too, because pure K is a powerful explosive. There is some K ions when the soil is wet, but as the soil dries those ions will come out of solution and reform as salts or chelates.
That’s a fair point. However, human beings have to strike a balance between chaos and order. Staying at home in the known and venturing out into the world, the unknown, are both equal parts of existence. Alone, both are sterile in their own way.
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I think I’ll continue to avoid your sort of ‘knowledge’, thanks. Can’t say I’ve lost anything over the past 40+ years by doing so, but will avoid smoking near wet soil so as to avoid setting off those explosive ions just in case.
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great thread, much to consider.
ill throw one more plug in for the viewpoint that soil is not merely an inert parent material but a living thing whose potential is realized through the ecology of what is actually growing in it. the notion of the soil a medium of growth and repository of nutrients and water (whether natural or supplied through acts of intervention) is true enough in its own limited way, but is lnarrow minded in the sense that it disregards the generative and degenerative processes that continually act on that system. Its true enough in a practical sense, given modern agricultural tools and imperatives, but conceptually its not that much better than the old idea of soil as sort of a feedstock that was literally consumed by plants. That idea worked well enough too, and was fairly descriptive of what people observed, but we think it laughably provincial.
In a real sense, isnt the soil a confluence of factors- the parent material on one hand, but also the ecology that through its self becoming makes dirt into soil? Isnt that ecological succession 101? While the corn belt may have amazing chernozem, millenia of grassland rendered this a rich Mollisol. Of course, theres climate too, and the peculiar didactic between weather and plant ecology. Climate favors certain types of ecology, and that ecology in turn produces weather at scale. Desertification is common enough, yeah? Even if we can successfully grow things by treating soil as an inert medium, its pretty apparent that done at scale and over time, this tends to lead to marked decreases in productivity. A good case study of this is the example of the Loess Plateau in China. Even the most productive soils can be exhausted and eroded through poor cultural practices. Regrowing China's Loess Plateau (John D. Liu) — AllCreation.org
I can sort of see the faultiness behind fetishization of organic matter as an end in itself, but I also think its apparent that reduction of organic matter is one of the prime mechanism of, or at least indicators of, soil degradation. My soil, for example, has organic matter as high as maybe 10 percent (offhand, anyway) but when I talked to an acquaintance who makes his living as a farm consultant about the soil in my orchard (Fullam silt loam, at a modest to moderate slope) his comment was that I could expect that number to drop to 3% once I plowed or otherwise cultivated it, that being both typical and acceptable. The slope isnt great for that sort of thing regardless, but I for one see through my observations that the cumulative growth and maturation of the landscape can be powerfully transformative.
It seems obvious that fallow is largely about getting this number back up again, the approach really being based at its core on sort of a boom and bust approach. What you see if you allow succession to unfold is the exact opposite outcome- building of ecology in a generative way, the accumulation of organic matter being a natural outcome, at least in this region. I don’t know that having high organic matter in and of itself is that helpful, but I think the relative accumulation or loss of OM is telling of a soil’s trajectory. OM on its own seems a crude metric though, there are lots of types of type of organic matter, are there not? And it wouldnt necessarily follow that adding organic matter would immediately lead to a commensurate improvement in soil or plant health. Whats important seems to be the process as much as some observable outcome of that process. The problem too hinges upon the limitations of our own cultural practices. Sandy and light silty loam soils are as much valued for their conduciveness to cultivation and ability to warm quickly (and thus meet market schedules effectively) as for their other inherent traits. Meanwhile, a marsh or thicket may exhibit incredible NPP, yet that output is likely useless to us. The rampant growth and blossoming of true productivity that its the natural outcome of succession is difficult to control. Its easier to choke down the productivity of the landscape, to simplify it, even if this is self limiting or deleterious over time.
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Funny how prevalent and engrained the idea of niche based on preference is, and people will go to great lengths to recreate these perceived preferences when, barring competition of any kind, all but the most specialized of plants would happily grow on a reasonably fertile loam at about field capacity. I figured out a long time ago that niches are largely about tolerance to one stress or another. I’ve long thought there is, or should be, a principle of ecology that sums the whole thing up, but have yet to track down such an easily conveyed term.
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I mean, this is high school level chemistry, but to each their own. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.
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There’s a lot to unpack here. I definately think the concerns you raise are solid. I think that while starting at a similar level and type of analysis, I end up coming to a different set of conclusions.
Lemme see if I can get a coherent reply typed up sometime soon…
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My dude, you didn’t even know that potash has oxygen in it…
In the interest of not being excessively rude and not derailing this topic, I will limit myself to replying to what you just mentioned: 40+ years of not knowing very, very, very basic facts is far more dangerous than whatever novelties I might be presenting. And to think that your willful ignorance of this matter counts for anything is the height of naiveté. Try going back to school and report back in about 12 years when you’ve earned your GDE.
Hmm, it didn’t feel so good to read that, did it? Perhaps stick to civil discussion and don’t throw rocks in your glass house.
Since discovering my sacks of fertilizer are now 40% lighter, I should have the energy to point out how many mistakes in judgement, outright generalizations into meaninglessness, and (etc., etc.) you’ve spread all over this page, but I have more important things to do than clean up after you, and my diplomas are hung on the wall where they belong.
Go outside to ‘your orchard’, and if you haven’t any work to do in it, just sit there until your head clears. Fullam is nice soil- dig up three handfuls and count the shale chips, pick out the prettiest clear quartz particle there is and offer it to the first spider that sits on your arm like it wants to talk.
Stop wasting time.
Scott, I don’t want to argue or sit here trading insults. But if all you can do is barge in and tell me to stfu, you’re not giving me much to work with.
Have you seen my other posts? Chill-needy fruit in tropical Puerto Rico, intergeneric hybridization, etc… Experimentation is my thing! There’s far too much new stuff that hasn’t been trialed (like poorly-known fruit) to be stuck in a mire of outdated knowledge. “It works”? Great! What else is out there that we can make work?
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This is a good thread. So please if you will, reel it in before we start getting flags and it gets shut down.
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Mea culpa… : (