Farming in the shade

It's been a fairly wet May, and some of the fields with heavier soil have been wet. The other day The Farmer decided to add some grass waterways in two soggy spots. In the photo below, you can see the sogginess near the back of the photo. He worked with the bobcat to carve a very shallow ditch leading to another field ditch, which leads to a county drain, which leads to a creek, which leads to a river, which leads to a lake, which leads to Lake Michigan. See why it's important what we do in our fields? Anyway, he added the soil from the ditch-making to the low, soggy spot. Here's the same grass waterway/ditch, but facing the other direction. We will seed this grass waterway/ditch with grass seed. The point of having a low, slow waterway like this is that the water will slowly drain off the field here, and the grass will catch much of the soil that would normally erode into the ditches. Just doing our part to keep the earth and the water separated.

Each year we carefully take soil samples and send them to a lab. Our soil consultant (yes, really!) advises us what our soil lacks, and what is the best thing to add to bring the soil up to optimum level. This year we're concentrating on small amounts of minerals that our soil needs. It's important to know just how big a field is, so that you can put on the right amount of fertilizer or minerals. Here's our son, measuring the field. And here is The Farmer, getting ready to spread. Minerals like copper, boron and manganese are in this mix. Didn't take long, but soils (like people) work best when they have enough vitamins and minerals...

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 ...