Farming in the shade

Every year like clockwork we take soil samples. And we have a soil consultant interpret and make suggestions as to what to add to the soil to make the whole system work better. It's one of those crazy expenses that we refuse to cut back on, no matter how tight things are. It's That Important. Both people and the soil can be lacking in certain minerals, or out of balance in some way. Just as you might take vitamins to  help with a nutritional deficiency, so also we add things to the soil. A few weeks ago, The Farmer spread some gypsum and other minerals on some hayfields. The gypsum is a dusty business, so he chose a day that was pretty quiet. The spreader mounts on the back of the tractor and just slings the product every which way. The product in the spreader looks a bit clumpy because it was purchased a year ago, and sat in the barn for lack of time.

While we wait for the fields to dry out and the soil to warm up enough to plant, we have time to apply nutrients to the soil. This is a tote bag of sulfate of potash. It's a really nifty way to handle small amounts of nutrients for small farmers.  Except for one thing. This tote bag came with a very small hole in the top that had a long neck. To get the potash out of the tote, we carefully lowered a five-gallon bucket through the long neck, filled it up, and lifted it back out. It was a bit of a pain. Someone suggested a pocket knife as part of the solution, but then the tote would not have been returned in the same condition in which it was shipped. The five-gallon buckets were emptied one by one into the spreader. Keep this in mind the next time you buy food from a small farmer. Just because we don't farm thousands of acres doesn't mean things are easier. In many cases, they're harder. Scary-looking spray drift? Nope, just a naturally-occurring minera...

I talked here about N, P and K--the big three nutrients that farmers pay attention to and add into their soils to help produce healthy crops. I compared NPK to vitamins that you might take to round out your diet. Can you imagine not eating any food--only taking a handful of vitamins each day? Even if we were really careful to take a C, a D, an iron pill, a multivitamin, and maybe even B6 and B12--would that be enough? Heavens, no. There are many things we get from food that cannot be compressed into a pill. Yet in some ways, that is what we farmers are doing. We are trying to sustain crop life by just adding the nutrients we know the crops need. But there is so much going on in the soil that we don't understand. So many things that we cannot help but miss when we JUST take soil samples and add the required nutrients (that we know about). So that's part of why we've moved in the direction of biological farming. We're trying to build healthy soil by using compost and oth...

Many farmers apply nitrogen to their corn at this stage. We've had regular, ground-saturating rains, which hasn't allowed the nitrogen applications. When this field (not ours) gets its shot of nitrogen, it will turn a deep, dark green. But if you look closely, there's something else going on to cause some spots to be much more yellow. It's the heavy rains I mentioned up above. This corn has been standing in water off and on, and something about standing in water makes it turn yellow. Maybe it can't absorb the nitrogen that's naturally in the soil. If corn stands in the water long enough, it suffers from root rot, and can die out. Notice the missing corn in the corner of this field. Why do farmers apply nitrogen? Agronomists have isolated three base nutrients that are necessary to sustain crop life: Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P) and Potassium (K). Most bagged fertilizers that you buy for your lawn or garden have NPK numbers on the bag, to show the percentage rate ...