Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Harvey Ussery <harvey@themodernhomestead.us>]

On 08/24/2010 04:48 AM, Dieter Brand wrote:
> 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. . . 
> 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

All *excellent* points, Dieter. I remember soil tests I had done by the 
state Extension Office years ago. Routinely, they came back "very high" 
for both P and K. "Very high" one would think indicates no need for 
added P and K--but just as routinely, the recommendations were *always* 
for application of 10-10-10.

And there was never any slightest indication of awareness of the soil 
food web, the "aliveness" of the soil as the key to fertility, nor of 
level of organic matter, which was never tested for.

It is possible to find your way to soil consultants who are more 
sophisticated/sensible about what they're doing, and they can be 
helpful, if only as reassurance for the naive/beginner gardener. "No 
fertilizer needed" from the soil consultant I went to after abandoning 
the Extension Office (a student of William Albrecht) was an eye-opener. 
I was so astonished, after the EO recommendations, I called him up, 
asking "I understand about P and K, but why no recommendation to add N?" 
and his dismissive response was: "Oh, with OM at the levels you're 
showing, crops are not going to go begging for nitrogen."

Another way a good soil consultant can help is with the trace 
minerals--boron or selenium, for example--some soils are less well 
supplied with one or another of them, and that might make an amendment 
desirable.

~Harvey


--
Harvey in northern Va
www.themodernhomestead.us

The industrial mind is a mind without compunction; it simply accepts that 
people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, 
will be treated as garbage.  ~Wendell Berry