|
ecmn | Healthy functioning soil should grow a bountiful crop that is resistant to pests and disease. The soil should be diverse with life, resist compaction, have very good infiltration rate and be resistant to runoff, erosion from water and wind. Does that sound like how we're farming now?
You need to get out of the maximizing our yields and become a student of the soil and the plant that you want to grow. Spending all this money because it gets us bigger yields has gotten us where? We have to import food into America, a nation that is fat and starving. I used to be the biggest proponent of you need to be out there with fungicide/ insecticide on soybeans. You need to be treating your soybean seed. We have to be putting in all the fungicide and insecticide along with all our pop-up fertilizer to get that corn going. How many of us borrowed money to spend thousands of dollars per row unit on our planter to get all these gadgets.
No way no how would I start using 1 and 2 gallon rates, especially in furrow. You throw a ton of carbon in the furrow You're going to have a terrible disaster.
A high quality carbon should be broadcast or strip-tilled at 7 to 10 lb per acre. High quality fulvic, humic should go in the furrow by the ounce. A little goes a long ways. They are part of a program Not a complete program.
You're not going to farm how you're farming and just start pouring out a bunch of carbon products because you are going to create a disaster. You have dead soil. We need to bring it to life.
Our soil is like a drug addict if you just simply take away all his drugs, throw a suit on them, toss them in an office and call him a businessman. He's going to fail. Our soil is the same way if you don't wean it off the drugs and heal it along the way and you just simply take away all the tillage, fertilizer and chemicals at one time and just throw a bunch of bunch carbon at it. You will have a complete disaster
Cover crops are a huge part of it. You want to reduce your fertilizer bill, you start getting very good with cover crops. Its not an overnight fix. You've had hundreds of years of degrading that soil. It's going to take a few years to bring it back to. You want to add humic, fulvic, carbon to the soil. Covers are going to put more on the soil than you're ever going to buy. They're going to bring life back microlife and the big bugs like our worms.
A good stand of buckwheat can move your P level on your soil test more than you're going to want to buy in fertilizer. You start putting buckwheat into your cover crop mix and within a couple years you will be done buying map or dap.
Mustard is a good natural fumigant, ryegrass along with oats and brassicas are massive compaction fighters, life promoters and supporters, and the Italian ryegrass is a huge carbon pumper. Nothing builds soil better than perennial grasses. We have proof of that in Minnesota. Look where the grasses were versus where the trees were.
reducing the tillage it's going to be a big part of. I didn't say zero till I said reducing tillage. Easiest thing to do is start with rotating the disc ripper out .
an actual nutrient management program, using insecticide fungicides as needed versus broad acre.
How much do we know about the weeds, bugs, diseases that we are fighting? What if making sure our soil has oxygen and adding some calcium. Took care of a lot of weeds like thistle? Wouldn't it be a whole lot easier to not have thistle come back because you actually fixed a problem in your soil versus spraying chemicals every year. Waterhemp loves our farming system. By the middle of summer we have way over applied nitrogen and potassium. The ground is lacking oxygen, life, competition. and we have created the perfect environment for that plant. What if some nematodes were the natural predator to soybean cyst nematode ? As we keep applying nemocide products we are killing the bugs that want to help us as much as we're killing the bugs that are hurting us.
By following the guidelines of retail agronomy we are creating and perpetuating our own problems.
If your retail sales agronomist cannot explain what is happening in the soybean plant that is allowing a soybean aphid to thrive, then he is not qualified to tell you that you need to run out there with some insecticide.
Nothing says I have dead non-functioning dirt like grid patterned tile on beautiful flat black soil that is feet deep. Again, if the guy that is telling you about tiling cannot talk about the capillary action of water or infiltration rates of your soil and how that functions they are not qualified to tell you that you need tile. Practical farmers of Iowa, University of Iowa, University of Illinois have many studies showing how many nutrient dollars leave the soil through the tile lines. Tile can be a wonderful tool, but it has been a hammer fixing a light bulb for way too many acres.
| |
|
Follow up? To Humic acid post
