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  • From: John Cowan <johncowan@bluebottle.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Fwd: Re: [soilandhealth] Re: Cuba....
  • Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:41:57 -0600

If you want to drill into this subject a bit deeper, I think that you have to ask "what OM are we talking about?" There are a hundred materials that fit that name. Do you mean manure or compost? What is the quality? Do you mean wood products? That will have a substantially different mixture of organic chemistry and will produce a different biological response. Do you mean sugar and molasses? Again, there will be yet a different response. And how much is appropriate to apply? Are we going to aggressively till the soil to incorporate?

If you were thinking about cover crops. There are more issues. If you grow a poor quality cover crop, how much will that do for your soil? High quality plants can contain 3-4 times the soluble carbohydrates and other nutrients. How much exudates are going to be pumped into the soil for microbes if the crop is not robust.

The bottom line is that the circumstance DOES matter. What kind of soil are we talking about? What are the skills of the farmer/gardener? What are the production objectives. What are the materials available? What are the time and expense restraints? What time of year? These are important considerations unless you are just fooling around with a postage stamp garden. The 'silver bullet' approach is not a long term answer even if it has some traction in the short term for some situations.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

*John Cowan*/
<mailto:johncowan@bluebottle.com>/


On 8/19/2011 1:58 PM, Toby Hemenway wrote:
On 8/16/2011 4:24 AM, m_astera wrote:
There is a myth, a very popular one, that all one needs is "more organic
matter" to turn any piece of ground into a fertile paradise.

Among others promoting the myth are the Rodale organic crowd,
Biodynamics, Permaculture, Fukuoka's fans, and Ingham's SoilFoodWeb. The
soilfoodweb organization has probably taken it to its furthest extreme,
It's not that it's a myth, because it's often true. It's just not the whole
story. But it tends to be true so often because so many of our soils have
been depleted of their organic matter. Tillage, chemical fertilizers,
addition of urine or other high-nitrogen materials to soils, and many
practices of agriculture deplete soil organic matter. So in many, many cases,
the first and best thing you can do to restore soil health is to add organic
matter. I know there's been a certain backlash to this because it's been
over-simplified, but in many cases the results of adding OM are more dramatic
than anything else you can do. By now, OM has become the limiting element for
proper soil function in most of the world's soils.

If you don't have SOM to hold onto minerals like Ca and Mg, adding them is
just a short term solution, even in the form of rock dusts. Rock dusts are
more persistent than soluble chemical fertilizers, but both are just ways of
delivering minerals to plants (or microbes). Rock dusts need microbes to
break them down and keep them in the soil. No SOM, no microbes, no mineral
retention. Some clays are good at holding minerals, but SOM is far better.

So in most cases, adding OM is the first and most effective step, and
refinements like rock dusts come later.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com


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