BUILDING BETTER SOIL is what, and when, you choose to plant

The soil is a “living” organism, in the sense it is capable of growing something 365 days a year, either above or below ground  (as with cover crops).

Only growing a monocultural (grain) crop, which from planting to harvesting takes up to 125 days in Michigan latitudes, leaves the soil barren of crops for 240 or more days—  eroding, incubating weeds, while starving the soil biology.

Rotating crops with winter covers and spring-harvested forages, is the first step in regenerating the water holding capacity and tilth of your soils.  Yields will increase.

 

BUILDING  BETTER  SOIL   is returning your livestock to the land

Assuming that we have returned all the animal fertility to the soil by spreading a manure stockpile (or a liquid from a lagoon) is only 30% to 40% true.

Nothing stimulates soil life as much as the real-time passage of livestock across the land.    In the days of wagon trains moving west, the immense growth of grass in the prairies (which annually saw the passage of buffalo and year-around all the species lesser in size) was so dense, and so TALL, that you could not see wagons moving.    (They followed paths of Indian hunters to avoid being totally lost).   It is not just manure fibers, but urine and its retained enzymes, it is hair, it is sluffed off cells, anything falling off the buffalos’ (or cattles’) backs fed some element of the soil life.   

The separation of livestock from soil contact  (accelerated since 1968’s sweeping farm bill beginning subsidies for exportable row crops)  has been part of degrading soil structure, tllth and productivity.

 

If you don’t mind building fence, send your momma cows to pasture, where they will get sunlight vitamins, eat fresh grass, attain healthier levels of body condition, improve circulatory health from exercise, and regain muscle tone to calve easier.