Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>]

One of the best values in soil testing is to find out what NOT to put on your soil. My land has had manure dumped on it for decades, and the soil tests show that I have no need to buy P or K, while N will come from legumes. pH is another matter. An argument for doing pH testing on plant tissue could be raised, vs. soil pH, and I have no qualm with that. There are experiential things that will tell us about our soil which are probably more reliable and accurate (know your place), but since our society has basically outlawed the experiential farming methods, so has the experience necessary to reliable evaluation gone away. In the meantime, soil testing should be considered in the right context, and there are laboratories which perform much more than mineral salt testing. Elaine Ingram's labs http://www.soilfoodweb.com/, for example, where organic matter, mycorhizae, biological activity, etc. are measured and compared. There are others who will perform micronutrient tests which also can be quite useful.
Simply dumping compost on the soil and hoping for the best might pay off in a decade or so, but for someone depending on production levels, starting out on a new place on a scale larger than a sandbox, there are tools that you should use, but only when you know what you are trying to accomplish in the end.
The typical university methods of bioactivity tests are really doing cultures at the pathogen temperatures, so they make recommendations that would encourage everything BUT what you want to grow. We are just beginning to learn about the true varieties of life in the soil, and the term 'soil testing' will change in its application over time. Poke your head into the local extension or university lab once in a while and ask what they are doing. Make some suggestions that they keep an eye out for real advancements that don't come from the fertilizer companies.

Dan C.
Belgium,WI