Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com>]

The problem is not the soil test.  It doesn’t hurt to take a soil test.  The 
problem is the result or the remedy prescribed together with the result.  The 
test result will include a list of chemicals that are present, or not, in 
sufficient quantities together with a recommendation of what mixture of 
fertilizers or amendments to add to your soil.  If the gardener feels so 
insecure about the quality of her soil that she needs to have a soil test 
done in the first place, she is hardly going to resist the recommendation of 
the soil scientist after the test result has come out with “scientific” 
endorsement.  After all, what is a poor gardener and non-scientist to make of 
all that scientific gibberish?  In other words, in practice the soil test 
functions like a gateway back to chemical farming.  Soil tests are the 
analytical tools of chemical farming.  Traditional or natural farmers know 
how to farming without soil tests.

Furthermore, a chemical analysis doesn’t tell us anything about a 
biologically active soil.  The N bound by microbes at one moment may be 
available for feeding our plants in the next moment.  Even if organic matter 
contents is tested or the presence of microbes is quantified, this is nothing 
but a very crude snapshot of a constantly changing infinitely complex soil 
environment that is already history by the time the soil sample reaches the 
lab.

Dieter Brand
Portugal