Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Robert, last year I took several experimental beds starting with dry,
light, sandy soil totally bereft of organic matter, earthworms, nitrogen,
and phosphorus, and made good topsoil in one season without compost tea.
Not great of course, but good, and held moisture well. When I say sandy
soil, I mean blow sand. We took aged horse manure mixed thoroughly with
alfalfa, bonemeal, etc. and water, and that mixed thoroughly with soil and
left to percolate a few months. With almost no watering and no rain it
stayed moist a foot down with only the top inch or two drying out. And that
was even without a cover crop developing the miccorrhyzae for better crumb
structure and moisture capacity. 

Of course that was a small scale experiment. But if you can grow five times
as much on humus-rich soil in permanent beds on 1/2 acre and clear a good
profit, then why would anyone stay stuck in huge fields of single file
tractor rows, spending their whole life in debt to the banks to get a 2%
return on capital investment and working for 10 cents an hour? I just don't
see how compost tea or any other one technique alone can turn around the
disastrous paradigm in modern agribusiness. 

paul, tradingpost@riseup.net
---------------
The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not
television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only
those who know the most about it can appreciate how little we know about
it. 
   - Aldo Leopold in  Round River, 1933
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 6/13/2006 at 11:55 PM Robert Norsen wrote:

>Yes Ryan, getting from poor or worn out soil to great soil, like you say,
>takes time -  Dr Elaine in her wonderful lectures talked about how nature
>can build an inch of top soil , microbes, soild food web and all in - did
>she say 50 years?   But with ACT added to rather ordinary soil and with
>suitable planting  a foot of top soil can be built in a 2 to 4 years.  
>That is when the example was shown of ordinary turf root systems 2 to 5 "
>deep but with ACT 36 to 49 " deep within I think 4 months time.     
>   
>  Them little bugs is magic if you give em a break.   Bob 
>
>Ryan Albinger <ryalbinger@earthlink.net> wrote:
>  Does a purchased mycorrihizal innoculant turn poor soil into a sponge
>that
>holds moisture that way glomalin all by itself? Think big picture before
>getting the cart before the horse. If it were that simple, everybody and
>their cousins would be doing it. It is a system and it takes a systems
>approach.
snip