How To Bring Soil Back To Life

For centuries, agricultural practices have eroded the soil that farming depends on, stripping it of the organic matter vital to its productivity. Now conventional agriculture is threatening disaster for the world's growing population. In Growing a Revolution, geologist David R. Montgomery travels the world, meeting farmers at the forefront of an agricultural movement to restore soil health.

From Kansas to Ghana, he sees why adopting the three tenets of conservation agriculture―ditching the plow, planting cover crops, and growing a diversity of crops―is the solution. When farmers restore fertility to the land, this helps feed the world, cool the planet, reduce pollution, and return profitability to family farms. Now conventional agriculture is threatening disaster for the world's growing population. From Kansas to Ghana, he sees why adopting the three tenets of conservation agriculture--ditching the plow, planting cover crops, and growing a diversity of crops--is the solution.

From Kansas to Ghana, he sees why adopting the three tenets of conservation agriculture—ditching the plow, planting cover crops, and growing a diversity of crops—is the solution. Cutting through standard debates about conventional and organic farming, Montgomery explores why practices based on the principles of conservation agriculture help restore soil health and fertility. Farmers he visited found it both possible and profitable to stop plowing up the soil and blanketing fields with chemicals. Montgomery finds that the combination of no-till planting, cover crops, and diverse crop rotations provides the essential recipe to rebuild soil organic matter. Farmers using these unconventional practices cultivate beneficial soil life, smother weeds, and suppress pests while relying on far less, if any, fertilizer and pesticides. The practice of minimising tillage is one of the main management practices that Alfred uses to stop the decline of organic matter in soils and regenerate soil health.

He also takes crop rotation into account, integrating crops that contribute to the soil biomass such as alfalfa . Alfred is constantly looking for ways to improve his practices and recently he discovered the "roller-crimper" method developed by Rodale Institute . "I am always looking for new ways to improve my results, sometimes my colleges think I am crazy" says Alfred.

In this new method, in Autumn a cover crop mixture is sown and then in Spring when the cover crop is flowering, it is rolled and crimped. During rolling, a cash crop, Alfred used soybean, is seeded directly into the mulch. By using this method with the correct timing, annual weeds are suppressed, the soil stays moist, biodiversity is supported, erosion is prevented, and carbon sequestration is promoted. The improved soil structure also results in a higher water infiltration rate. If they make progress, American farms will start to look more like DeSutter's 4,000-acre farm in west central Indiana. Instead of neat rows stripped of extra foliage, his fields look messy, since each is planted with at least two crops.

He rotates his fields among corn, soy, wheat and alfalfa, and between the rows he plants grasses like rye, and legumes like beans and lentils. He's starting to bring cattle onto the land to improve soil health even further with manure, a natural fertilizer. When he started no-till farming and using cover crops in the early 1990s, his soil had about 1.8 percent organic matter.

These farmers adopted practices that cultivate beneficial soil life. They planted cover crops, especially legumes, as well as commercial crops. And they didn't just plant the same thing over and over again. Instead, they planted a greater diversity of crops in more complex rotations. Combining these techniques cultivates a diversity of beneficial microbial and soil life that enhances nutrient cycling, increases soil organic matter and improves soil structure and thereby reduces erosive runoff.

Compost is decomposed organic matter, and it is the best thing you use to improve the health of garden soil. We have lost a lot of precious topsoil through erosion, deforestation, construction and over-farming. However, just as we can always start a healthier lifestyle, we can always start helping the environment.

There are things we can do to help repair and care for our soil. Composting, mulching, planting cover crops, and not tilling are restorative practices that bring balance back to degraded soil. Planting native plants and trees in riparian buffers around waterways also help to prevent erosion and also keeps our water clean. Innovative ranchers likewise showed me methods that left their soil better off. Cows on their farms grazed the way buffalo once did, concentrating in a small area for a short period followed by a long recovery time. This pattern stimulates plants to push sugary substances out of their roots.

And this feeds soil life that in return provides the plants with things like growth-promoting hormones and mineral nutrients. Letting cows graze also builds soil organic matter by dispersing manure across the land, rather than concentrating it in feedlot sewage lagoons. For a wide variety of systems and crops, the mean increase in yields was 79 percent, not quite a doubling of harvests but enough to feed the world of tomorrow if achieved globally.

For projects that had data on pesticide use, yields grew by 42 percent, while pesticide use declined 71 percent. Many of these changes were attributed to practices that improved soil and crop health, and thereby allowed effective pest control with minimal pesticide use. Something else I learned on my gardening journey is that our soils have been so badly depleted in urban and suburban areas that adding organic matter one time is not enough.

Soil health depends on adding organic matter to soil and making sure you have plenty of earthworms too. Rejuvenating depleted soil requires continual additions of compost and mulch. It takes time to build soil health and a balanced community of soil organisms. Beneficial soil organisms are slowly attracted to the decomposing organic matter. The principles of conservation agriculture offer flexible, adaptable guidelines for restoring soil health, feeding the future, and ensuring that farmers can make a living without damaging the environment. To create a healthy, living soil you need to add organic matter.

This can be in the form of animal manures, compost, straw, etc. It needs to be breaking down in order to feed soil microbes, which make the nutrients contained in the organic material available to your plants. Conventional wisdom says that fertile soil is not renewable, that it can't be replaced. Fertility can be improved quickly through cover cropping and returning organic matter to the land. Soil-building is about getting the biology, mineral availability, and organic-matter balance right, rolling with the wheel of life instead of losing ground pushing against it. As we've seen, restoring fertility to the world's cropland is not an either-or choice between modern technology and time-tested traditions.

We can update traditional wisdom and adopt new agronomic science and technology. Solving the problem of land degradation is devilishly simple from a practices standpoint. The difficulty lies in marshaling the political wherewithal to stop subsidizing conventional farming and start promoting practices that build soil fertility. If your soil will be fallow for more than one growing season, you can plant perennial or biennial green manures, such as clover or alfalfa. All cover crops should be tilled-in at least three weeks before the area is to be replanted, so the organic matter will already be partially decomposed at planting time. NEW AND IMPROVING testing techniques are increasingly giving scientists and farmers a better look inside the soil and promoting better management practices.

In recent years, scientists have learned about key soil transactions like exchanges between plant roots and microorganisms that provide nutrients to the plants, and gotten better at assessing organic matter in the soil. The first step to improving soil health is to stop the bleeding. Instead of leaving fields barren in between crops, which leads to erosion, farmers are increasingly planting cover crops such as rye grass, oats and alfalfa. They also are replacing intensive tilling with no-till practices to prevent the breakdown of soil structure. Organic matter is made up of plant and animal residues in various stages of decomposition.

The final stage - and most long lasting is humus, which is the residues of micro-organism activity, and is the most stable and long lasting form of organic matter; lasting thousands of years. All forms of organic material are important additions to soil to feed micro-organisms. It is these creatures in their activity and life cycle which make nutrients in the organic matter available to plants. This sponge like structure holds onto water and nutrients, making them available to plants as required, and helps prevent leaching of nutrients. A world of creatures lives below our feet, and I'm not talking about the upside-down world in Stranger Things. There is an entire ecosystem of tiny organisms that keep soil healthy.

Some, like beneficial bacteria, are too tiny for the human eye to see. There can be millions of tiny single-celled bacteria in one gram of soil. Soil fungi are plant-like cells that are essential for breaking down decomposing woody organic matter in the soil. Fungi form an underground network of thin, white fibers called mycelium that process and release nutrients. Millipedes, rollie pollies, grubs and earthworms are among the larger soil dwellers.

How Do You Bring Soil Back To Life A balanced biodiversity of these organisms is essential to soil health. While some soil organisms feed on decaying organic matter in the soil, others feed on each other, creating food webs below ground that connect to food webs above ground. Many birds, and other small animals, depend on soil-dwelling organisms for food.

There are so many fascinating creatures that live in the soil. They all have important roles to play, but let's take a look at one of the most well known, earthworms. Both the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Bank recommend the three elements of conservation agriculture as the key to sustainable development for small farms in the developing world. The World Bank promotes these same principles as the basis for "climate-smart" agriculture to increase crop yields, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, sequester carbon in soils, and bolster agricultural resilience to climate change. Even agrochemical giant Monsanto now advertises soil health as central to the future of agriculture. Soil restoration is the process of improving the structure, microbial life, nutrient density, and overall carbon levels of soil.

Many human endeavors — conventional farming chief among them — have depleted the Earth to the extent that nutrient levels in almost every kind of food have fallen by between 10 and 100 percent in the past 70 years. Soil quality can improve dramatically, though, when farmers and gardeners maintain constant ground cover, increase microbe populations, encourage biological diversity, reduce the use of agricultural chemicals, and avoid tillage. Potato pathogens provide a good example of how crop rotation keeps garden soil healthy.

Nematodes and fungi that cause scabby skin patches on potatoes increase rapidly in the soil during just one growing season. This year's crop may not be affected, but if next year's crop is planted in the same location; it will be destroyed by the hungry disease organisms that are in the soil from the previous season. The disease spores and organisms will die out naturally if they do not feed on their preferred crop. You can increase the amount of organic matter in your soil by adding compost, aged animal manures, green manures , mulches or peat moss. Because most soil life and plant roots are located in the top 6 inches of soil, concentrate on this upper layer.

To learn more about making your own compost, read All About Composting. Tilling organic matter deeply into the soil may create a cleaner-looking soil surface, but this practice leaves organisms that live near the surface without a food source. The easier, healthier approach is to add compost or plant residues to the soil surface or to incorporate them into only the top few inches of soil. The soil biota will take care of breaking the material down into nutrients your plants can use, and moving the nutrients down into the soil where plant roots can find them. Digging isn't even necessary when setting out new growing areas.

Start by clearing the surface of any debris and any rocks larger than a hen's egg. This will suppress the growth of the weeds beneath by blocking out light, and provide nutrient-rich material for roots to grow into. Suitable organic matter includes compost, or manure from a trusted source where you can guarantee no herbicides have been used. The botanical world managed to carpet the continents long before people existed.

When we tapped into this ancient wisdom, we saw the common ground we shared with the first twiglike land plants. Like Anne and I, they found themselves surrounded by dirt when what they really needed was soil. The efforts of the botanical world to improve their lot in life took millions of years. Fortunately, our efforts began to bear fruit in a geological instant. Thanks to wheelbarrows full of organic matter, by the end of three growing seasons, the life of our soil was back on its proverbial feet and the transformation of our dead dirt into fertile soil was well underway.

Soil, at its base, is 50 percent gas and water, and roughly 45 percent minerals such as sand, silt and clay. The remainder is organic matter—decomposing plants and animals. For being such a small portion of dirt, organic matter plays a huge role. It serves as food for microorganisms that do everything from store water to provide nutrients for plants and control pests. Researchers are learning more and more about the exchange between plants and fungi, bacteria and other organisms in the soil, said Robert Myers, a professor of soil sciences at the University of Missouri.

Overall, with less disturbance of the soil, Overby says, "The microbes all have a chance to kind of rebuild the soil pretty quickly… once you start building up that whole underground bunch of living organisms, they do that for you. And different crops exude different types of secretions from the roots." He credits glomalin, which has been called "soil's super glue", for helping to bind together clusters of soil on his farm. Glomalin is a sticky protein produced by certain fungi in plant roots, which clumps together particles of soil and coats their surface. This clumpier soil can retain water longer and helps to sequester carbon.

Our orchard is in a sandy area and our garden is in a clay area. We've been working compost into the soil, adding mulch and using cover crops and it is amazing how both the sandy and the clay soil have improved. Using less fossil fuel and agrochemicals while maintaining crop yields helps farmers with their bottom line.

Regenerative practices also translate into farms that use less water, generate less pollution, lower carbon emissions – and stash an impressive amount of carbon underground. My research group is now bioprospecting for groups of microbes that are especially efficient at forming new soil and recycling nutrients. We are also researching which crop traits support microbiomes that help enhance soil health. Making soils more healthy will make it possible to grow more food with fewer inputs, which will make farming more profitable and protect our air and water. These mixed-species cover crops help improve soil organic matter, soil life and structure, and even reduce soil compaction.

Things finally started to take a turn for me, and my garden, when I began to work with nature. I began to simply cover my garden beds with homemade compost, chopped leaves from my yard, and mulch. It was so much easier than mixing up my soil into a muddy mess.

I began to trust and marvel in Mother Nature even more than I already did. I also followed her lead by planting more native plants, like black-eyed Susan , American beautyberry and oakleaf hydrangeas . These plants do not require extra water and or fertilizer to thrive where they naturally grow. Another great thing about native plants is that they attract native pollinators and beneficial insects like praying mantis, ladybugs, butterflies and bees. A number of site and soil characteristics were observed in the 135 Acre paddock, representing a typical mid slope, texture-contrast soil at Milgadara. In order to achieve this, they increased their total carbon through the addition of soil organic matter (fig. 3 above).