Soil

I’m on a curious undertaking to build soil, feed my family, restore my land, learn how to farm on a small scale in a big way. Converting the dirt to biologically active soil is the path I’m on but there really isn’t any instruction manual. Most authors and speakers scoff at the recipe everyone wants. What is the recipe? What is the recipe for my soil, farm, family, and life. Your biography is the recipe. A prescription learned from literature and lectures, basic science, bench research, experimentation, clinical/field trials, and finally experience. Oh the parallels with medicine and any type of discovery are right there.

So let’s go at my first real attempt:

Steps

  1. Soil/Compost test and Bed planning

  2. Amend Soil

  3. Diverse crop planning, roots in the ground, and continued soil stewardship

Step 1

There are many ways to make a bed. My wife will tell you that the way I do it is wrong. She makes a bed tighter than the Holiday Inn! In all seriousness there are many ways to convert grass/weeds to a cultivated bed. The goal here is set the groundwork for soil formation and reverse the agricultural trend of losing 6 pounds of topsoil for every pound of food produced.

Methods of Seed Bed Creation

  • Roundup/Herbicide followed my mechanical tillage- this practice is detrimental to the soil, environment, and our health.

  • Conventional no-till- This often involves using herbicides which some proponents (like Gabe Brown) state is less detrimental than tillage. This is not something I’m willing to explore as the risk with conventional herbicides is simply unacceptable for me.

  • Heavy mechanical tillage/rototilling- This was very popular when I first started gardening. It creates a very nice bed but the inversion of soil layers disrupts soil organic matter and life.

  • Double digging- Biointensive farming (like John Jeavons) calls for a labor intensive removal of the top 12” of topsoil, broadforking the next 12” and then replacing that topsoil layer. The effects of this on soil microbiology are very similar to mechanical tillage.

  • Organic no-till-

    • Advocates often recommend an initial tillage in order to create raised beds using a rotary plow

    • flail mowing, mechanical crimping, broadforking, tarping (solarization and occultation), Back to Eden, deep mulch, newspaper/cardboard and compost, etc

    • Raised beds with garden boxes, wood, rocks- filled with soil/compost

Basically, there are many ways to create beds and you need to figure out what is right for your situation

SurgEnduro 1-Till- here is what I did (for better or worse)

  • Soil Test. Mow the grass and amend the soil per the soil test

  • Initially tillage with a rotary plow

    • Many no-till farms perform an initially tillage (check out Daniel Mays No-Till Book). My logic here was that (a) I have a million hay bailing twine strings in this part of my pasture that I had to remove (b) my soil was rock hard (c) I get a lot of rain fall and wanted raised beds without having to rent a backhoe (d) I don’t feel that an initial tillage is any more detrimental for soil biology than prolonged sillage tarping (e) One last soil transgression is forgiven with persistent, regenerative management

  • Cut raised beds with rotary plow: 30” Wide, 70’ Long, 18” Beds. [Note: If I had to do this all over again I would go to the 5’ system with wider beds]

    • OK, this is harder than you think to get perfectly straight beds. The key, in my humble opinion is to perform the initial tillage perpendicular to the orientation of the beds. This gives you the greatest chance of avoiding a previous wheel track and getting off on your straight shot for cutting the beds

  • Covered with a black silage tarp to kill weeds (occultation). I did this for 2 weeks on my latest bed and 1 year on my first bed.

    • I’ve played around with the tarps and really don’t like to leave them on for 1 year in zone 7. It kills everything. No earthworms, no weeds, no life. + My wife hates the tarps.

    • I’ve transitioned to landscape fabric when needed. But I really try to keep the soil covered with living roots as much as possible and have been very pleased with the results.

  • Applied soil amendments and 2-4” of compost

  • Direct seeded or planted transplants

  • Hand weeded with hand weeding, Neversink tools and stirrup hoes. I try to limit soil disruption while still controlling weed pressures

Step 2

Based on my Kinsey agricultural organic recommendations here is what each of my 24 beds need (70’ long, 30” wide). All weights/numbers are pounds:

  1. Protein Meal- 1.6

  2. Miller compost- 20

  3. Sulfur 90-92%- 0.5

  4. Soft Rock Phosphate- 2

  5. Calcium Carbonate- 3

  6. Pelleted Calcium Lime- 1 (for the curcubit and green beds)

  7. Dolomite (magnesium)- 8

  8. Potassium Sulfate- 1.5

  9. Chilean nitrate- 0.1

That’s about 12- 50 pound bags to create my custom starting blend and 420 pounds of starting compost which fortunately contains enough copper, boron, and manganese.

A brief word on Compost. I would definitely have your compost professionally tested by Kinsey Ag. Compost is not compost unless it is 10-20:1 C:N. Additionally most compost (like mine) is actually high in K and often Na. This will unfortunately tie up B and Mn.

I also looked at balancing one of my cattle pastures (grass farming!). That would require 4410lbs of material (not including compost).

That is quite a recipe! But that’s not even the real recipe! The deeper I go into this world everything begins to make less sense while become more clear. I’m trying to amend the soil, to grow plants that harness the sun through photosynthesis, while feeding all the microorganisms in the soil that then feed the plants, which feed the animals, which then feed the plants some more, while feeding other animals, and in the process we get some food that we can’t completely consume and then we feed the soil some more through compost.

How on earth do you design a close looped system like this? External inputs are vitally important to getting started (seeds, minerals, knowledge, compost, irrigation equipment, etc) and crop/animal planning is probably even more important. My ultimate goal is to plant more of what Jeavons calls “Carbon-calorie crops” in order to boast my soil/compost production.

Step 3

Basic steps in my cropping plan:

  1. Plant Diversity- perennials, annuals, grass, crop rotation

  2. Animals- diversity, manure, and rotational grazing

  3. Integrated Soil/Plant/Animal/Life system designed to produce the most food possible while still building the soil.

“Long before man could make a plow or a test tube, nature was creating life, including man, and providing an environment in which all life could live. She used the resources of air, water, sunshine, and soil plant food minerals to make life. If she had created only life, these resources would soon have been tied up in all living things. So she created death. This way resources could be recycled and used again and again. There is a basic law which says, All life forms must return at death what they took from the resources of the earth during their lifetime.” - Eugene Poirot”