Compliments, a pair
I want to begin by complimenting Sima for a fine OT last Tuesday starting the conversation on soil composition and describing her approach to making it. A lot of wisdom there coming from years of experience.
Then too, many jumped in with even more good ideas and advice. Thanks to everyone for their input.
I'm going to compliment her essay with some more detail on soils and how to build it and then turn it over to everyone to talk about it or anything you would like to talk about.
So, to begin.
I am not a degreed professional big ag thousand acre+ farmer. I don't own a ten ton combine or any huge piece of heavy equipment with an air conditioned cab and CD player.
I have a little BX 2380 Kubota tractor that doesn't even fit in the fenced garden (75' x 75'). Everything I've learned is by book or seat of the pants experimenting or fellow gardeners over a period of 16 years.
I am an experimental organic gardener.
I work off the premise that the soil is alive with life. From microscopic to earthworms to even gophers and moles, everything is a part of soil health. There are billions of individual bacteria, millions of fungi, hundreds of thousands of protozoa, and hundreds of good nematodes in a teaspoon of soil.
Or there should be.
In a recent article in The Guardian (H/T Joe Shikspack), a special report from the UN found that 40% of the earths land mass was degraded and unable to sustain adequate food production.
What do they mean by degraded? Well, it doesn't mean lets just throw more chemicals at it. You know, Nitrogen, phosphate, and potash, or N,P, and K, the last two de-stabilizing into salts. Which is the main problem. These chemicals kill the biome of living organisms and render the soil barren and lifeless, and over time, leaves the soil salted and irredeemable for hundreds of years.
It is not sustainable.
My current experiments are centered around the Ruth Stout method of til-less cultivation after layering the soil with organic material, manure, pottery shards, bone meal, and biochar.
Biochar is one of the main ingredients of Terra Preta, or Black Earth, found in the Amazon Basin. It is an ancient manufactured soil that is incredibly fertile and was discovered by Father Gaspar de Carvajal in his journey down the Amazon headwaters to the sea in 1542.
A fascinating account can be found in Albert Bates "The Biochar Solution", and referenced again in Charles Mann's "1493" and then again in James Bruges "The Biochar Debate".
While the exact process of making it is still a mystery, analysis indicates a biochar made from trees or wood, and layered with fish remains, broken pottery shards, organic materials, bones, table scraps, and human and animal waste.
It is estimated these plots of artificial soil, some 20 ft. deep, add up in aggregate to the size of France and could have supported a population of 50 million people. Some are thought to have been produced over a period of thousands of years.
Sounds like something we could use today.
The floor is open.
Comments
Good morning...
Those interested in soil might enjoy this small manuscript.
Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years
https://soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/01aglibrary/010119lowdermil...
In 1938 and 1939, Dr. W. C. Lowdermilk, who was an assistant chief of the U. S. Soil Conservation Service at that time, made an 18-month tour of western Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East to study soil erosion and land use in those areas. This tour was sponsored by the soil Conservation Service at the request of a congressional committee. The main objective of the tour was to gain information from those areas -- where some lands had been in cultivation for hundreds and thousands of years -- that might be of value in helping to solve the soil erosion and land use problems of the United States.
Great pictures and commentary in the little bulletin.
My main interest these days is in using ruminant animals to sequester carbon, restore ecosystems, and provide high quality nutritious food. For years I had bought into the idea that grazing degraded land, because typical continuous grazing does. Then I leaned of Allan Savory's Holistic approach of mob grazing with frequent moves to emulate the large grazing herds of the African savanna. His restoration of the savanna, wildlife, and water retention over the last few decades is absolutely amazing.
More here:https://ata.land/allan-savory-holistic-management/
These practices are reflected in Joel Salatin and Greg Judy's farms. Both offer workshops and internships.
I like to imagine the conversion of large swaths of Midwest crop land back to native prairie with large herds managed to rotationally mob graze. No factory farm needed. No big machinery needed. Just diverse grassland and herbivores. Restoring not degrading the ecosystem.
Oh well, one can dream.
Y'all have a good day. Thanks for the OT!
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Thanks for the Lowdermilk link
Will peruse it later, when it starts raining again. I'm out at the farm, planting. Just finished with corn, one of the three sisters (corn, squash, beans). Will check out the other links too.
I've heard of the plains indians practicing a form of mob grazing by burning a few square miles on one side of their village each year which brings fresh, sweet grass each spring. This draws the game animals (Bison, deer, etc.) to one area, sort of a passive corraling. By orbiting the burn they can keep the food supply on the hoof going around their village year after year. No need for extensive storage capacity except for winter.
In Charles Manns first book "1491", he gives credible proof of all of the Americas having the hand of man upon it. An illustration of the Americas in the first pages shows earthworks like terracing, fish weirs, burns, flood irrigation, tree planting, and terra preta farming that covers the entire lanscape of both continents.
Thanks for the post.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Good Morning Earthling1 - first, a wee bit of housekeeping;
please use the Edit function/link on your OT to edit your tags to include the phrase "Open Thread" without quotes and resave it. That makes it much easier to find because it makes it show up in the Open Threads heading in the sidebar. Thanks mucho.
Biochar is one of those things that burst upon the scene, but, as of last I looked, withour any real instructions for replication by the average small farmer or home gardener - a very maddening situation. Perhaps you can help here.
The original reports and information was that the biochar material was "a layer" and/or buried in the soil, so, how far below the surface should it start? Next up is the material itself; commercial charcoal is presumably right out, though small scale ops might need to use "natural charcoal", but should it be chunks (and what size) or granules or powder? Or does none of that really matter all too much.
I remember getting into some "discussions" over on DK on the sucject whith some thick headed twit who could not understand that there were possible means of production other than the standard charcoal production process and who kept insisting that biochar couldn't exist without massively adding to the CO2 emissions. It can, via pyrolysis, but that process is not that readily accessible to the average homeowner. It takes, to my understanding, the equivalent of a modified rocket stove where the flue gases are captured and "recycled" into a fuel source for other uses like cooking or heating or generator fuel or such. Do you know of any large scale production facilities using such tech? Do you know of any cookie cutter instructions for small scale home brew operations using pruning scraps and the like?
I have envisioned using a soil auger to introduce appropriate materials at appropriate depth into my planting beds, raised and otherwise, without the necessity of turning them over, but beyond that all of the details seeem to elude me.
Thanks for the OT
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Thanks
for the housekeeping tip, I think I got it cleaned up.
From what I have gleaned from the above biochar books and a visit to an actual biochar farm on the Washington coast, the char should be about the consistancy of coffee crystals or a little larger.
As far as the biochar depth, it should be applied down at root level, about 18 inches. Also it should be inocculated for a couple of months before use to speed up the habitation process.
Making biochar is another issue. The organic material, which can be just about anything organic,needs to be slow cooked at around 400° without oxygen present. It is not fully understood how the Amazonians did this.
But there are commercial suppliers out there and prices vary widely. I don't know what source of energy they use. The farm I visited had a barrel inside another larger barrel contraption that did work. But seemed ineficient and was cumbersome and time consuming in that you have to tend the fire for about 24 hrs.
And it took wood fuel to bake wood into char. But it was a prolific garden, even in Febuary.
Will see if I can find some photos I took and post them later.
There are small stoves out there that are used in the third world to cook with and produce biochar to replenish rural depleted gardens. They also save thousands of womens lives from smoke inhalation and cancer.
In one of the above books is a compilation of small cookstoves in the back just for this purpose.
Thanks for the post.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Que es eso, to coin a phrase, meaning what's that?
What is it being inoculated with, and how?
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Beneficial microbes
take up residence in the biochar itself. IIRC, a gram of char is so porous it has the surface area of a three bedroom house and hosts numerous organisms that make the soil healthy and alive. Is also retains water very well.
Each little piece of biochar is like a hotel for soil organisms.
It can take months or even a season to properly inoculate and can have a slightly deleterious effect on crop growth initially until then.
I've read some folks use urea, or a bucket of urine to soak the char in for hours and sometimes days, ymmv. Others use commercial microbe packets purchased from hydroponic suppliers and some make an herbal tea with an air pump for use.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Hokay, thanks mucho.
be well and have a good ome
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
I want to look into the commercial fertilizer
ingredients that erode to salt. We must find a better way.
Thanks so much for the OT.
A fun thing going on with me and my husband today: We are at motel for a few days. Most times, we feed the stray cat that hangs around every motel parking lot.
Well, this time, I spied a raccoon in the garbage bin last night. He got in it, ate our pizza leftovers. So, anything we had leftover from our meals today went onto a paper plate. I placed the plate full of leftovers so it would be stable, and made sure the lid on the bin was easy to knock off. The Raccoon licked the platter clean while I and a motel neighbor watched. Very cool! The neighbor and his pals will likely save their leftovers tomorrow.
The raccoon is missing his right front paw. He needs a leg up, as it were.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
So cool!
Thanks for feeding the wounded raccoon. You rock
If you're poor now, my friend, then you'll stay poor.
These days, only the rich get given more. -- Martial book 5:81, c. AD 100 or so
Nothing ever changes -- Sima, c. AD 2020 or so
Thanks for the info!
I had hopes that by the time it all went endemic, that it would be a cold-like sickness. That is good news.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981