Fertility Management Question

[dominiquer60]

Tim, I contacted our one Soil Scientist at UConn to find out what a general environmentally critical P point is for our soil type. He gave me the # of 200 ppm for P, anything over that and we should avoid manure, the field across from the barn will not need manure for the next 100 years 🙁

[Tim Harrigan]

200 ppm is equivalent to 400 lb/acre. In Michigan we use 300 lb/ac as the cut-off point based on environmental concerns for any P application. Above 75 ppm (150 lb/ac) application should be only to meet crop removal. From an agronomic POV you can expect no crop response above the 50-60 lb/acre soil test level. Your field wins the prize for the highest soil test P I have ever heard about. 😎

[ethalernull]

hey ed,

we primarily use oats or rye (often with red clover) as an overseeded covercrop. we broadcast rye or oats by hand from late aug-october, using only rye after mid-september. if possible we do a last pass with the cultivator to cover seed. we don’t mow any of the cover crops as they are seeded late enough not to compete with crops. all depends on what the field will be next year and the timing of the crop growth and cultivating. if the field is going to be planted early the following year i will use only oats, for mid-season planting there’s enough time for us to work in the rye, and rye + red clover to set up the field for a fallow season.

-evan

[Anthony]

A little story to illustrate our ‘Fertility Management’ (for the more practical bits, see here: http://flofarm.org/dap/forums/topic/work-horse-manure/#post-82502)

Imagine the earth, the soil, is your mother. Good ol’ Mother Earth. I admittedly could have a closer, more intimate relationship with my mother. She has and does provide me with so much, and I can hardly call her to converse, to really form a close, personal bond to really get to know what is happening in her life, right now. She’s probably just how she was last month, when I talked to my brother and asked him how she was. He had talked to a good friend who still lives in the town where our mother lives recently, who had run into her at the supermarket and said hi. He gave me the low down on Mom. Needless to say, what I know about the condition of my mother right now, how her life is, is based on a few levels of separation from someone who does not really know her, at all, from a couple months ago. This is the soil test. Good, fine, but limited use. A little abstract, a little out of touch, removed from actual reality. From a different time as well, not in the now.

If I were to ship some heavy duty, high dose vitamin D pills to my Mom, since I heard from my brother from his friend that she was spending a lot of time indoors this winter and not getting a lot of sunlight, was feeling a bit down, therefore she is probably low on vitamin D according to modern science, it would be akin to adding a certain amount of something, such as a mineral fertilizer (whether it be lime or rock phosphate or some blend), especially in the amounts suggested typically.

Instead, I decided to give her a call. I wanted to know why she was inside so much, and maybe see if I could help. We talked for a little bit, and got laughing together. She remembered how much she enjoys walking with a particular friend, but can’t stand the cold. I decided to leave it at that for now. It was just good to hear from her and try to understand what was going on.

I called back a few weeks later. We had both worked over the situation a bit over the weeks. Walking with her friend came up again, and she seemed a bit more open to bundling up. She had seen her last week and sort of skipped out on a walking date, but talking again got up her courage to bundle up and get out there for her health.

I called back a few weeks later and found out that she was walking three times a week with her friend, talking laughing, having fun, and was feeling much better in general.

The phone conversation, working over the situation at hand, is the compost. The animals have carefully listened, via the plants they have consumed, to what the earth, the soil, is expressing. In their co-evolutionary wisdom, their connection with plants, particularly the plants on this farm, the wisdom many of us know and can’t come close to having ourselves, these animals take what they have eaten and add just what is needed in the miraculous processes that occur in their digestion. The product of the digestion, the manure, is then worked over again in the compost over time until it is stable and can be put into action,worked back into the farm’s soil.

Not to disrespect any doctors around here, but often I look at the soil as a doctor would a patient. I can know their history, I can know their past cases, I can take blood tests and bacterial tests, put electronic sensors here and there, and feel physically here or there. I also check out their emotional state, find out how they are day to day, in their work, in their play. I need to look at them as a whole human being, not just a blood test. Not just a psychological examination either.

What I prescribe continues to respect them as a whole human being, including their innate capabilities. I help them through their struggles. I do not take their burden from them; I may assuage the pain a bit, but this dis-ease is something for the patient to work through and learn from, to strengthen themselves and evolve forward. There may be physical exercises (tillage and landscape forming), healthy water consumption and retention (good drainage as well as good water holding capacity/ Humus / irrigation if needed),a homeopathic remedy to stimulate them where they might need a little bit of help to work through their illness or a small nutritional supplement, in whole food or other living form(compost/biodynamic preparations, a plant preparation or tea). Maybe some prayer or mediation can be suggested to help them connect with something higher, something subtle or unseen but active and essential, with something to help make them a whole and healthy part of a larger whole, to contribute healthfully to that whole (farm as an individual, integration of animals/forests/wetland/etc, biodynamic preparations, working with cosmic rhythms).

Our scientific, materialistic outlook that brought us the ‘green revolution’ and industrial agriculture is and has quietly snuck into our worldview, even in small, organic agriculture. We can see phosphorus as an inorganic chemical element on our soil test, and add inorganic elements to balance the soil chemically, but our soils want to live! Many of us begin with beaten up and neglected soils, burnt up with poor management and fertilizers over the years. They want to be more than the soluble, chemical soup we find in hydroponics. It is not a direct addition and subtraction process.

What is behind phosphorus? How do living organisms, specifically plants, interact with it? There is much research showing the so called ‘transmutation’ of elements, that is, you might eat something, but by the time it comes out the other side it has changed quite a bit. A soil test is also not a plant. What can we see, for ourselves, in the larger picture of the farm’s life?

Humbly, I cannot spoon feed a soil, not a plant, nor do I have a desire to. To find, to see dynamic, living processes in everything (though the timeframe might be longer or shorter than we as humans are accustomed, and it may not be visible to our 5 senses thought there is a way to come to know it personally), and to learn to work with them creatively, is my current task as a farmer in bringing life and fertility to the farm.

[Stephen Leslie]

Anthony—thanks so much for sharing both your practical experience and your poetic insight into the life of soil.
This has turned out to be such an amazing thread of great depth and scope and with more questions than answers…..

[Author]

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