Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Sustainable, no-till, ag practices worked very well for Iroquois 500 years ago
http://www.farmandranchguide.com/news/regional/sustainable-no-till-ag-practices-worked-very-well-for-iroquois/article_4ac0ef9c-7a52-11e0-a7cf-001cc4c002e0.html

FARGO, N.D. – As the adoption of sustainable agriculture practices become 
more commonplace today in American agriculture, some of those methods now 
being adopted are similar to those practiced four centuries ago by the 
Iroquois nation in what is now New York.

That became apparent during a presentation by Jane Mt. Pleasant, an associate 
professor in the Horticulture Department at Cornell University and also 
director of the American Indian Program at the school.

Mt. Pleasant spoke at the recent Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture 
Winter Conference in Fargo, with her speech focusing on indigenous 
agriculture and its links to contemporary agricultural sustainability. She 
used her expertise in Iroquois agriculture to support that contention.

According to Mt. Pleasant, records dating as far back as 1687 for areas in 
the Iroquois nation, which was located in the area which is now New York 
State, indicated some very high yields for crops grown by the Indian group.

These yields, according to Mt. Pleasant, were actually higher than the 
results being experienced by European farmers growing wheat and other small 
grains at the time. In fact, she termed the wheat yields in Europe as 
“miserable” with a kernel of wheat seed often yielding only 10 kernels at 
harvest time. These conditions didn’t start improving until the European 
farmer started to include forage crops in their planting rotation.

Despite that, the farming industry in the U.S. was actually patterned after 
the system developed in Europe, which included using the plow and teams of 
animals to till the soil. Lacking the draft animals and plows, the Iroquois 
actually used a basic no-till system, once the trees in the forest area were 
cleared and the planting mounds established.

Though many hail the moldboard plow as the tool that helped agriculture the 
most, Mt. Pleasant isn’t convinced. In fact, she contends the plow caused 
more problems than it solved.

“If you keep plowing soils continuously there is no attempt to increase soil 
organic matter and they eventually reach a pretty stable level of about two 
percent,” she said. “As a result, very little nitrogen is added to the soil. 
We now know that plowing is the single, largest threat to soil organic matter 
to everyone involved in agriculture.

“Soils with less than two percent organic matter, not only suffer from low 
fertility rates, but also many other problems such as soil structure, its 
ability to hold water and increased erosion factors.”

However, during this time of scarce wheat and other small grain crops in 
Europe, the Iroquois nation, making use of no-till agricultural methods were 
raising good crops of maize (corn) as was documented on several occasions in 
journals kept by various individuals.

In the 1600s, when Britain and France were fighting over the control of what 
is now the northeastern part of the U.S., the English made a pact with the 
Iroquois to supply their troops with food, and the French were constantly 
sending scouting parties south from present day Canada to destroy those food 
supplies.

On one such expedition, which was headed by Denonville, a French businessman 
headquartered in Canada, his patrol reported destroying over 1.5 million 
bushels of corn in his nine-day sweep through Iroguois ag production area, 
according to Mt. Pleasant.

“It was an incredible amount of corn,” she noted, “and Denonville spent a 
good amount of his time destroying as much of it as he could.”

Almost a hundred years later, John Sullivan, a general with George 
Washington, had the assignment of going into Seneca (the Iroquois ag region) 
and destroying their agriculture ability, since they were still supplying the 
British with food. Several soldiers in that campaign wrote in their diaries 
of the agriculture they encountered while conducting their “slash and burn 
campaign.” Those diary entries told of fields of over a mile in length and 
exceeding 200 acres in size, covered with heavy crops of corn, squash and 
pumpkin, with top corn yields in excess of 75 bushels per acre.

“What explains this level of productivity,” she asked, “particularly when the 
wheat farmers of Europe were not experiencing good yields?

“First, the Iroquois were farming fertile soils, but they maintained high 
levels of soil organic matter because they weren’t plowing,” she said. “They 
were also lucky that they were working with maize, which is uniquely suited 
to no-till conditions and they were also fortunate that maize is usually more 
productive than wheat.”

After clearing forested areas, the Iroquois formed mounds of earth about 
three feet across with hand tools and then planted in those mounds. These 
areas were kept weed free by pulling the weeds. When they came back the next 
year, according to Mt. Pleasant, they reshaped those same mounds and planted 
in them again.

This type of farming is starting to take hold in the farming community today 
as we see an increase of cover crops and less tillage, which is resulting in 
healthier soils and improved production. All things our forefathers in 
agriculture learned several centuries ago under different cultures in 
different parts of the world.