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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] The only way to tell what your soil really needs???

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: Harvey Ussery <harvey@themodernhomestead.us>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] The only way to tell what your soil really needs???
  • Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:49:20 -0400

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





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