Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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TALKING SHOP: 4th annual Texas Conference on Organic Production
Texas organic conference hosts tea party
The ‘King of Compost’ and the ‘Queen of Compost Tea’ share their
soil secrets as the conference focuses on two things Texas lacks—water
and soil organic matter

By Skip Connett
http://www.newfarm.org/depts/talking_shop/2005/0305/texas.shtml

More than 200 people attended the conference in South Padre Island,
including John Chandler, right, a former intern at Rodale Institute.

South Padre Island, TEXAS: Organic farming in the Lone Star State has
plenty of room to grow -- from grass-fed beef across its vast ranches to
specialty flower and vegetable markets thriving in the state's
organic-conscious capitol, Austin.

Then again, they face Texas-size shortages of two sustainable production
essentials -- water and organic matter. Which explains why the 4th annual
Texas Conference on Organic Production Systems here in late January was so
heavy on the compost tea, cover crops, and conservation.

“The number one critical problem we face in the Valley and across much of
Texas is lack of organic matter in the soil,” said Larry Zibilske, a soil
biologist at the USDA's Kika de la Garza ARC in Weslaco, TX.

Zibilske was one of two dozen conference speakers who contributed to the
conference theme, "Building Basics...Tried and True to Visionary and New."
Sponsored by the Texas Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, the
conference opened with four presentations from the ARC's scientists that
included the latest research on using covercrops for organic production.
(See Research Report.)

On the tried and true side, more than 200 attendees soaked in the
highlights of 50 years of organic advice from Malcolm Beck, the region's
undisputed king of compost.

A lifelong organic farmer who was a good friend and advisor to Robert
Rodale, Beck is the author of The Secret Life of Compost. Beck is famous
for sharing those secrets with a folksy storytelling style that makes his
latest book, Lessons in Nature, such an engaging chronicle of his trials
and triumphs in organic farming.

"Nature never has bare fields," Beck noted in a presentation documenting a
lifetime of trying new approaches to old problems.

In Texas, where bare fields stretch for miles and no-till agriculture has
been slow to catch on, Beck showed a 1960 photograph of a bridge spanning
the Pecos River. The same shot 40 years later revealed the damage done --
the bridge's great stone pilings buried in 50 feet of silt.

Building up the depleted soil is a constant challenge across much of Texas,
where sandy soil, dry conditions, and sparse vegetation make it hard for
organic farmers to find plentiful sources of mulch. Indeed, Beck built his
multi-million-dollar compost company, Garden-ville, by developing and
distributing soil enhancements and conditioners, such as colloidal
phosphate clay, bat guano, and compost teas.

Finding solidarity -- and more clout in numbers -- Beck has been a driving
force behind the newly created Texas Organic Farming Research Center, a
non-profit corporation whose primary initiative is to enlist farmers and
landowners for research on green manures, cover crops, and compost tea. The
center's board of directors, living in and around Austin mostly, includes
three physicians, a librarian and a lawyer.

Keynote speaker Howard Garrett, a co-author with Beck on several organic
production books, presented a history of organics in Texas. It included his
early efforts at convincing corporations like Radio Shack and Frito Lay, to
landscape their office parks with organic methods he and Beck have
perfected on a commercial scale at Garden-ville.

Like Beck, Garrett has been a thorn in the side of Texas A&M University. On
his popular radio program, the Dirt Doctor, as he is known throughout the
state, he often rails against the "hard-core Aggies who love their
chemicals" and still view organic farming as a lifestyle rather than a
viable business model.



"The number one critical problem we face in the Valley and across much of
Texas is lack of organic matter in the soil.”

--Larry Zibilske, soil biologist
As if to prove them wrong, Garrett showed slide after slide of landscapes
benefiting from organic products, including lava sand, cornmeal and
molasses, and slides showing how organic methods are cost-comparable to
chemical methods.

"Everyone has used molasses, by itself or with tea, but we are now using
dry molasses, as fertilizer, and having dramatic results," he said. Applied
at 800 pounds per acre, dry molasses provides a natural food source for
indigenous microbial populations in the soil. It has another benefit,
particularly in Texas -- fire ants don't like it.

Scientists at the Texas A&M research station in Stevensville, which has an
organic greenhouse, stumbled on the benefits of cornmeal, Garrett said.
They began experimenting with it after seeing how peanut crops grown in
fields planted with corn the previous year had much less disease loss.

One type of indigenous mulch with abundant supply in Texas is cedar
(liveberry juniper actually), which has infested many pastures throughout
the state and sucks up precious moisture. Both Garrett and Beck believe
cedar flakes, unlike pine mulch, can suppress diseases and insects. In
1972, Beck began spreading four inches of cedar mulch on the floor of his
greenhouse. He credits the release of carbon dioxide, coupled with the
cedar aroma, with never having a significant problem with diseases or
insects.

Compost tea gurus share podium

It was compost tea that dominated the "new and visionary" theme of the
conference. Even to the skeptics, the sheer volume of compost tea
experiments presented at the conference, coupled with advances in
processing equipment and laboratory analysis, underscored the interest in
this growth area.

If Beck was the conference's king of compost, Elaine Ingham was its queen.
Her company, Soil Foodweb, Inc., has been putting down roots in Central
Texas, with testing labs operating in Fredericksburg, west of Austin, and
Bastrop to the east. Among the wide range of projects she presented, from
spring wheat in New Zealand to citrus groves in Florida, were the results
of microbiology techniques used by Texas grass-fed beef farmer Betsy Ross.

Ingham's take home message was simple -- if you don't have biology in your
soil, there is no use adding nutrients to it. Many of the 25,000 organisms
estimated to inhabit a single teaspoon of healthy soil have to be put back
into chemically treated soil if it is going to regain its health. The good
news, she said, is that "you feed them a little and they will do the work
for you."

By feeding them with the compost-tea jumpstart, she noted, impressive
results can be seen within a single growing season, rather than the typical
two to three years it takes to restore depleted soil with traditional
methods, such as spreading manure and growing cover crops.

Ingham contends that microbial activity is the most important measure of
soil health, so Soil Foodweb is teaching farmers, like Ross, how to conduct
tests on-farm. The Ross farm also has one of several commercial-size
compost tea extractors that can provide the kind of output needed to
compost big operations.

Water conservation is hot issue

Author Dan Imhoff discusses his book, Farming With the Wild

With a water crisis looming in Texas, several presentations on land
stewardship and water conservation had added import at this conference.
Almost all of Texas agriculture is dependent on irrigation. Rapid growth
around Austin has put heavy pressure on the area's aquifers, while farmers'
rights to access rivers and creeks has become a big issue.
Dressing up those ubiquitous bare fields with cover crops and native
grasses is not enough in the hilly, water-starved areas found in much of
west central Texas. Dick Pierce, an Austin-based master naturalist and
consultant on rural land designs, shared practical elements of sustainable
design that can help farmers utilize the flow of energy on their property.

Pierce began with an elegant, often overlooked statement -- nature happens
at the edges. Rivers, he reminded farmers, run serpentine, not in straight
lines, to slow down the flow and reduce the runoff. Not surprisingly, the
most productive land borders woodlands, along the edges where organic
matter is more abundant. He contrasted the wide-open fields of today with
the checkered, hedgerow patterns of a century ago. The bottom line? Create
more edges.

While creating more water isn't possible, catching it is if farmers take
the time to plan the layout of their property up front. "Texas gets enough
water but it doesn't soak in," he said. Using the yeoman method prescribed
in the book Water For Every Farm, he showed examples of how farmers have
put in roads and homes without considering how waters flows on their
property. Store water as high and as often as you can by digging diversion
ditches on the contours and creating storage ponds (tanks in Texas) that
can be used for irrigation. Only after you have taken care of the water, he
said, should you build a road or choose a building site.

Building natural bridges between wild habitat and farmland was the
challenge that closed the conference. Conventional agriculture surpasses
commercial land development and logging in the loss of natural habitat and
native species, said writer Daniel Imhoff. Reconnecting food systems with
eco-systems will require closer collaboration between sustainable farmers
and environmentalists.

"These two camps have so much in common, yet are not learning enough from
each other," he said.

Imhoff is co-founder of the Wild Farm Alliance, a national group of wild
land proponents and ecological farming advocates. Its goal is to create
regional farmscapes and ecological corridors by restoring marginal
croplands and native habitats based on a watershed approach. His talk
showcased inspiring success stories in eco-agriculture that make up his new
book, Farming With the Wild.

Imhoff would like to see a successful sustainable agriculture broadened to
the more inclusive "natural systems agriculture." Perennial polycultures,
such as native hedgerows, wetlands, and wild gardens, provide the
opportunity for native wild species to thrive side by side with tame ones.
If farmers need proof of principle, they need only consider the bee, which,
as pollinator for one out of three crops, is the great "ambassador of the
wild."

Agriculture ecologist Gary Nabhan and other bee researchers have been
warning for years that the alarming loss of bees is signaling a pollinator
crisis. The USDA estimates that honey bees in this country are declining at
a rate of 1% per year, Imhoff said, primarily the result of habitat loss
and pesticides. But sometimes the reasons are not so obvious. Recent
research by Nabhan has shown how when native bees compete with honey bees,
the honey bees become more aggressive and prolific. That kind of
interdependence, Imhoff concluded, is just one example of how much we don't
know about the hidden balances of true natural systems.