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  • From: Richard Wade <wade@coac.es>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] [soilandhealth] Organic matter percentageing
  • Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:51:48 +0100

Hi John,
If you are selling off more nutrients in your animals than the pastures can creat, you have a serious pasture managment problem. Managing pasture means getting the sun to fuel the nutrient cycle and put in the OM by maximazing photosynthsis. That's (the photosyntisis) where it all came from in the first place.
You might begin by googling Holistic Management, Managment Intensive grazing.
Richard

El 28/12/2011 20:00, John D'hondt escribió:
I agree that razing can improve the land but...what this really amounts to
usually is rearing animals on grass and then selling them of the land and by
doing this you export a serious amount of nutrients.
We could see the result of that sort of practice when we first started
farming in Ireland on land that had exported foodcrops for hundreds of years
and had almost no soil left, just subsoil and bare rock. We had no option
but to import organic matter and in the beginning it was obvious that even
then we were loosing the battle for improving our soil by selling lambs and
beef. We finally began to see a difference when we could get our hands on
tons and tons of free fish waste. This mixed with a carbon source made a
difference fast.
On the Midwestern Prairies grazers died or were eaten on the spot by
predators and so left the nutrients captured in their bodies in place. Also
all kinds of birds especially tend to spread out the goodies over large
distances. Not much use to us in Ireland where we are one of the few farms
left with food for wild birds in the middle of green desert. Once again
nutrients are leaving our farm because of this.
john

From a practical standpoint, 50,000 lbs of organic matter is a _lot_ of
material. That is 50 loads on a half ton pick-up truck, or about a load
a week per acre (208' x 208'). That would require the application of
1250 40 pound bales of straw per acre, for example. Since I only bring
chemical free organic matter onto my ecofarm, I have not found sources
for that much mass, and I really don't want to. Of my 63 acres, 20 are
tillable (the rest is hardwood forest), so I would need to bring in one
million pounds of matter to raise SOM by 1%. The most practical way to
increase SOM of any significance in temperate climates is by grazing
animals on grass. That is how and why the Midwestern tall grass prairie
(Eastern corn belt) and the central plains attained SOM levels of 8-10
percent. Louis Bromfield claimed he was generating 1" of topsoil per
year on Malabar Farm in Ohio, USA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEBoAEb7Opw

Steve
Indiana USA


On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 11:12 PM, Toby Hemenway
<toby@patternliteracy.com>wrote:
Although 50,000 lbs sounds like a lot, it's only about 20 cubic yards
per
acre, 40 at most. So it's not that hard to boost SOM using compost (even
though I'm a big fan of mulches).

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com

On Dec 26, 2011, at 3:13 PM, Glenn Gall wrote:

On 9/18/2011 2:03 AM, m_astera wrote:
How much compost or manure would one need to add to raise the Soil
Organic Matter SOM content of an acre of soil 6" deep by 1%?

SOM percentage is calculated by weight, not volume. The convention
used is that 1 acre of soil 6-7" deep weighs 2,000,000 (two million)
pounds. Or a hectare of soil 15cm deep weighs 2,000,000 kg. One
percent of that is 20,000 lbs/acre or 20,000 kg/ha
Compost and manure can be assumed to be around 60% moisture and 40%
dry organic matter. So

20,000 / 0.40 = 50,000

To add 1% organic matter to the top 6" or 15cm of soil would require
about 50,000 lbs/acre or 50,000 kg/ha of organic matter at 60%
moisture content.
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