- Location
- Essex Coast
Recently came across this photo I took in the winter when I had dug a hole to show a group of visitors.
Sorry nothing to show the scale, but it is about two feet deep. I was amazed to see that I have grown about six inches of top soil in 12 years of no-till, but also you can see dark organic matter forming in clumps further down the profile. This means that the worms and roots are working to build stable organic matter much deeper than I had imagined, and also the air is getting down there, exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide to allow it all to breathe.
This is the only photo I can find of what it used to be like. Twenty or thirty years of deeper and deeper cultivations and there was no top soil left, the clay came right up to the surface.
When no-tillers talk about how they are increasing organic matter, they are often accused of just concentrating it in the very top couple of inches so I thought it would be interesting to test this field at different levels. I took samples from lots of different places across the field and then mixed together soil from the top 4 inches, then from 4 to 8 inches, and then from below 8 inches.
Top 4 inches- 6.5% OM
4 to 8 inches- 4.8% OM
Below 8 ins- 4.4% OM
There can be no other system that is capable of storing what must be huge amounts of carbon down two feet into the ground.
It also makes talking about OM percentages a bit of a farce because there is no mention of the actual bulk of soil it is representative of. We should talk about the weight of carbon throughout the whole soil profile.
Sorry nothing to show the scale, but it is about two feet deep. I was amazed to see that I have grown about six inches of top soil in 12 years of no-till, but also you can see dark organic matter forming in clumps further down the profile. This means that the worms and roots are working to build stable organic matter much deeper than I had imagined, and also the air is getting down there, exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide to allow it all to breathe.
This is the only photo I can find of what it used to be like. Twenty or thirty years of deeper and deeper cultivations and there was no top soil left, the clay came right up to the surface.
When no-tillers talk about how they are increasing organic matter, they are often accused of just concentrating it in the very top couple of inches so I thought it would be interesting to test this field at different levels. I took samples from lots of different places across the field and then mixed together soil from the top 4 inches, then from 4 to 8 inches, and then from below 8 inches.
Top 4 inches- 6.5% OM
4 to 8 inches- 4.8% OM
Below 8 ins- 4.4% OM
There can be no other system that is capable of storing what must be huge amounts of carbon down two feet into the ground.
It also makes talking about OM percentages a bit of a farce because there is no mention of the actual bulk of soil it is representative of. We should talk about the weight of carbon throughout the whole soil profile.