How do you sustainably enirch your soil?

[mark_carbon]

Please redirect me if there is a better sub to post this in.

Hi,
I'm learning about sustainable farming practices and I could do some help in understanding the problems you've faced and how you get the soil into a healthy state.
What approaches have you tried to get good drainage, especially for denser soils like clay?
How have you ensured the right nutritional levels are building up without artificial fertilisers?

 

[teslacoils]

Depends what you mean by sustainable.
Depends what you mean about right nutritional levels.
Depends what you consider artificial fertiliser.
Depends what you mean by healthy.

 

[DrWazzock]

I aspire to:-
Drill only - no cultivations whatsoever.
Keep the under drainage system in tip top condition.
Keep off the land when it's wet.
Test soils for pH, P, K and Mg indices. Apply lime and Mg accordingly and P and K to replace crop offtake thus maintaining P and K indices. If you are exporting P and K from the farm in crops then you need to replace that P and K using manures or mineral fertilisers. There is no way round that as matter does not appear from thin air.

In theory the clays should self structure due to the busting action of deep roots and summer droughts.
In practice they seem to need some help from some subsoiling tines when its dry to avoid ponding over winter.
In practice, not cultivating can lead to weeds that seem resistant to repeated big doses of glyphosate and can lead to layers of trash that cause problems for the drill and for disease carryover into the next crop so sometimes I plough.

That's it really.

There isn't a holy grail, though some blessed with very forgiving land might claim to have found it. All I can say is they have never farmed proper heavy land in a wet time and needed to get a living.

 

[Lowland1]

I think it’s the incorporation of residues although our situation is probably not typical we are growing 3 or 4 vegetable crops per year on the same land with minimal bagged fertilisers and only occasional use of fym generally before potatoes. We cultivate

probably no deeper than 8 inches but use raised beds and tend not to run on tilled land. Our organic matters have gone up by 1 per cent per year over the last two years to around 5 per cent and this compensates for high ph and very high k levels. We are looking for a very big root system that can work for itself. Sorry for tillage pictures in a direct drilling thread.

 

[Flat 10]

How many years has your land been in such as system? Surprised that you are managing to build OM

 

[Lowland1]

How many years has your land been in such as system? Surprised that you are managing to build OM

Some of it has been in production for 20 years although it's only around the last 5 or 6 years that we really have been pushing the land. Our soil analysis is really bad with PH of nearly 9 and high sodium etc but if you actually look at the soil it's quite nice. If you look at the picture of the maize crop we are chopping in there are about 40,000 plants per acre weighing a good kilo each so there is a good 40 tonnes an acre of organic matter back in the soil a field of broccoli has 20- 30 tonnes of crop chopped back in. Beans and Peas don't have as much but hopefully the roots are leaving some nitrogen. Nowadays everyone is talking cover crops and making sure there are plenty of roots in the ground at all time as such we don't have cover crops but there is something in the soil at all time. The Maize we are chopping in the picture has been grown with no fertiliser. We grow about 3000 acre of crops with no more than 150 tonnes of fertiliser per year. What we are trying to do is recycle the carbon.

 

[Bury the Trash]

Some of it has been in production for 20 years although it's only around the last 5 or 6 years that we really have been pushing the land. Our soil analysis is really bad with PH of nearly 9 and high sodium etc but if you actually look at the soil it's quite nice. If you look at the picture of the maize crop we are chopping in there are about 40,000 plants per acre weighing a good kilo each so there is a good 40 tonnes an acre of organic matter back in the soil a field of broccoli has 20- 30 tonnes of crop chopped back in. Beans and Peas don't have as much but hopefully the roots are leaving some nitrogen. Nowadays everyone is talking cover crops and making sure there are plenty of roots in the ground at all time as such we don't have cover crops but there is something in the soil at all time. The Maize we are chopping in the picture has been grown with no fertiliser. We grow about 3000 acre of crops with no more than 150 tonnes of fertiliser per year. What we are trying to do is recycle the carbon.

Aamoi, Is there an All year round growing season there ?

 

[Lowland1]

Aamoi, Is there an All year round growing season there ?

yes we are planting 52 weeks a year.

 

[sjt01]

I think it’s the incorporation of residues although our situation is probably not typical we are growing 3 or 4 vegetable crops per year on the same land with minimal bagged fertilisers and only occasional use of fym generally before potatoes. We cultivate

probably no deeper than 8 inches but use raised beds and tend not to run on tilled land. Our organic matters have gone up by 1 per cent per year over the last two years to around 5 per cent and this compensates for high ph and very high k levels. We are looking for a very big root system that can work for itself. Sorry for tillage pictures in a direct drilling thread.

Do you get termite problems with the surface organic matter? They managed to chomp their way through any maize residue when we tried in Malawi in the early '80s (Paraquat, not glyphosate then!)

 

[Lowland1]

Do you get termite problems with the surface organic matter? They managed to chomp their way through any maize residue when we tried in Malawi in the early '80s (Paraquat, not glyphosate then!)

No termite problems. Our biggest issues are dealing with lots of trash when planting and weeding. And some fields are starting to have mole problems. Dealing with the trash means crop rotation is an issue. Wider row crops like broccoli have to follow babycorn and weeding with tines is hard so we have to use interrow rotavators. Luckily we can use hand labour .

 

[britt]

Drainage is the key.
If the soil drains well you will have lots of worms opening up the soil, letting air in and water through. They will pull pant residue down enriching the soil and the whole system accelerates.
Poor drainage means less or no worms and system goes backwards.
I have a short term rented field where the landowner won't even compensate me for drainage work if I loose the ground within a reasonable timescale, so the work needed isn't done and there are no worms after a couple of wet years and very few after a run of dry/normal years.