Soil organic carbon/Soil organic matter.

[DairyGrazing]

With everything thats going on in the wider industry I've decided to get the ball rolling on increasing our soil organic matter/carbon. Plan is to under sow the maize, cover crop the wheat stubbles over winter and move a lot of the FYM from youngstock to an arable farm 6 miles away. I really wanted them to test the soil organic matter as that is what everyone normally talks about.

1st field is permanent pasture
2nd 2nd wheat in grass maize wheat rotation
3rd is 3rs maize crop in grass maize wheat rotation.

All sandy loam, recieving slurry and fym.

Does anyone know what is a realistic target for soil carbon? I'm more interested in raising soil organic matter to increase water carrying capacity and cover cropping to hold on to nutrients.

 

[Bogweevil]

I reckon 5% is pretty good - often only 2% on sandy soils hereabouts no matter how you manure/cover crop/no till.

You must have some good dirt.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

10cm is a bit unreliable to measure "management" against in some respects. We go to 40cm with a coring tool and then take a 10cm, 10-25cm and 25-40cm fraction off the cores.

What that's shown is that much of the actual "fixing" doesn't happen at the surface level but at greater depth, the first 25-40cm tests were only 2% C and 5 years later they'll be 4.5-5%. Whereas the surface soil C can be more a product of weather and it can yoyo a lot, it should still be increasing as you increase the soil/landscape function but some years you can sell more stuff which is an "outward flow".
We don't take silage off anymore and that alone greatly improved the OM of our soil at all depths, it's logical but it also needs to be within the realms of what we can actually do in our systems.

Not every system can accomodate "well, it hasn't rained for 3 months, so we'll send all the stock away home and sit on what we have left" which we now do.

We have a bunch of students come every 6 months or so to collect samples and although it's really interesting stuff, think about "landscape function" rather than simple metrics. You have to get air and water and root exudates in there for nature to do the magic.

 

[onesiedale]

With everything thats going on in the wider industry I've decided to get the ball rolling on increasing our soil organic matter/carbon. Plan is to under sow the maize, cover crop the wheat stubbles over winter and move a lot of the FYM from youngstock to an arable farm 6 miles away. I really wanted them to test the soil organic matter as that is what everyone normally talks about.

1st field is permanent pasture
2nd 2nd wheat in grass maize wheat rotation
3rd is 3rs maize crop in grass maize wheat rotation.

All sandy loam, recieving slurry and fym.

Does anyone know what is a realistic target for soil carbon? I'm more interested in raising soil organic matter to increase water carrying capacity and cover cropping to hold on to nutrients.

Out of interest did you get any 'conventional' testing done as well? If so, how do they look?

 

[teslacoils]

Outside your field is a grass verge. Find a molehill in verge. Test that for som. That's realistically as good as you can possibly get. So pick a number halfway between your field

 

[DairyGrazing]

Out of interest did you get any 'conventional' testing done as well? If so, how do they look?

HP P K Mg P K Mg mg/l Aviliable
CROWS 8 acres Grassland into Grassland 6.1 2 3 5 20.4 273 267
MAREHILLS SOUTH 7 acres Forage Maize into Forage Maize 5.9 4 2+ 3 66.6 181 101
MIDTOP ROWES 26 acres Forage Maize into Forage Maize 6.6 4 2+ 2 64.8 217 92

Meaningless to me sorry

 

[DairyGrazing]

10cm is a bit unreliable to measure "management" against in some respects. We go to 40cm with a coring tool and then take a 10cm, 10-25cm and 25-40cm fraction off the cores.

What that's shown is that much of the actual "fixing" doesn't happen at the surface level but at greater depth, the first 25-40cm tests were only 2% C and 5 years later they'll be 4.5-5%. Whereas the surface soil C can be more a product of weather and it can yoyo a lot, it should still be increasing as you increase the soil/landscape function but some years you can sell more stuff which is an "outward flow".
We don't take silage off anymore and that alone greatly improved the OM of our soil at all depths, it's logical but it also needs to be within the realms of what we can actually do in our systems.

Not every system can accomodate "well, it hasn't rained for 3 months, so we'll send all the stock away home and sit on what we have left" which we now do.

We have a bunch of students come every 6 months or so to collect samples and although it's really interesting stuff, think about "landscape function" rather than simple metrics. You have to get air and water and root exudates in there for nature to do the magic.

I was think of throwing in some tillage radish and crimson clover into the cover crop mix to get some activity further down the soil profile. I can see us using deeper rooting species in silage and grazing fields for similar reasons.

 

[Barleycorn]

I would suggest composting your FYM, we do the same taking it to outlying fields 5 miles away and once composted it's about a tenth of the original volume.

 

[DairyGrazing]

I would suggest composting your FYM, we do the same taking it to outlying fields 5 miles away and once composted it's about a tenth of the original volume.

I did think about doing that but decided instead to leave the FYM out of the calving yards here which is barely soiled. The stuff that comes out of the young stock yards is that heavy we can often not fill the 18 and 22 ton silage trailers. There is a gov weigh bridge next to the other farm so the lads are quite careful.