Market gardening
Within the soil food web
PART 1: BY HUGH LOVEL
SINCE early childhood, I was aware we are facing an environmental crisis. My parents discussed these things at the dinner table and the trend toward greater weather extremes was noticeable even in the early ‘50s as my family took long summer trips from Louisiana to the Pacific Northwest. Back then the roads were almost all two-lane and rural, so we saw lots of crops, along with flash floods, dust storms, devastating erosion, grasshopper plagues and failed farms. Farming was wearing out and using up the soils it depended on, while weather affected soil loss, and soil loss affected weather.
I didn’t start life as a farmer, nor had I dreamed I would ever farm, though I studied soil microbiology in my biochemistry curriculum at Southeastern Louisiana University. When I started to farm, I assumed farmers knew what to do. Thus, I copied their examples by plowing and discing my fields wall- to-wall. This devastated my soil biology while channeling the field’s energies into growing only one kind of plant. But the evidence I was killing my soil was in my face wherever I looked, even though I took a while to notice. Fortunately, I didn’t have much soil biology to begin with, so I noticed its loss in my first year. What was I to do?
I’d started with a rundown 10-acre parcel whose best field had 1.5 per cent organic matter, a pH of 5.2, rocks by the ton, swampy seepage and horrific gullies. Most of the topsoil was missing due to erosion. On the surface amidst various annual and perennial weeds were huge wads of rotten carpet, plastic Mylar, wire fencing, collapsed sheds and ancient garbage. I knew I had to build soil.
Initially, I cleaned up a boxcar load or two of garbage. Then I plowed and disced, further killing my already nearly dead soil. I had some hard lessons to learn, but fortunately, it dawned on me that I couldn’t afford to grow anything or use any method or technique that didn’t improve the organization and vigor of the farm as a whole. Somehow in the back of my mind, I was always putting together a farm as an entity, a being with personality.
Soil food web
While setting up a small market garden, I heard about something called the soil food web. This I envisioned as a symbiotic community of soil organisms where hundreds of thousands of different kinds of microbes are at work, interacting, balancing and nurturing each other. This synergistic ecosystem of biological activity was enlivening the whole farm as its basis of productivity.
In this system soil fungi with their fine, thread-like mycelia provide mineral access and a distribution network. Bacteria recycle organic materials, activate phosphorous and fix nitrogen. Actinomycetes and mycorrhizal fungi conserve loose nutrients by storing them in large, carbon/nitrogen complexes called humic and fulvic acids.
One-celled soil animals called protozoa, contribute sense/desire awareness as they ingest and digest other soil microbes while excreting a steady stream of freshly digested nutrients around plant roots.
With their root exudates, plants feed complex sugars and carbohydrates to the soil food web in exchange for minerals and amino acids. Soil animals further enhance this system with their intelligent awareness and digestion. Ideally, all ecological niches are filled, ensuring the soil profile brims with life activity. No job goes undone. Everything interacts and resonates together.
Enhancement
It became my daily meditation to ask myself, what could I do to establish, grow and enhance this biological reservoir and well- spring of life that filled every corner of my farm? When I listened with an ear to the soil, I imagined I could faintly hear the soil food web humming, breathing, spinning, weaving, chirping, moaning, sighing, sleeping and, especially in winter, awakening and being renewed. I was growing an ecosystem, a teeming, diverse jungle or metropolis of soil organisms that made a city like Tokyo look like a country village.
Reducing cultivation
As the years wore on, I got cows and rotationally grazed my banks, ditches, fence lines, roadsides and boundaries, establishing a whole-farm soil food web to ensure everything worked together. For my market gardens, I cut meter-wide (39-inch) beds into an established cover of grasses, legumes and forbs. I mowed the traffic strips around and between the beds, using the grass and clover clippings as fresh livestock feed or as mulch. My light truck and tractor straddled the permanent beds, and I never drove or walked where I cultivated, nor did I cultivate where I walked or drove. This gave me controlled traffic without a GPS. As my soil food web filled with life, the smorgasbord of clippings from the paths were a superfood for cows, pigs and chickens, and it got to where the paths grew so fast, they had to be mowed every week.
The benefits of feeding and improving the soil food web that encompassed my beds kept adding up. I learned to feed my boundaries, so my boundaries fed my beds. I found I could spread my compost, lime, rock dust, trace minerals and biodynamic preparations everywhere, feeding my paths, fencerows and boundaries as well as my crops.
I replaced my ripper, chisels and tiller attachments with a meter-wide spader from Italy, which greatly improved and simplified my bed cultivation. The milk my cows gave from their daily green chop ration was sweet and creamy. By building my boron levels, clover became dominant in my paths and boundaries and I began to get all my amino acids from biological nitrogen fixation.
Beds and paths
Now I mow paths and mulch beds with mower clippings. If mulching pumpkins, potatoes, ginger or turmeric, which need thick mulches, I supplement with hay. My former market garden, which now belongs to my neighbors, is shown on the previous page.
Review
Looking back, it took me eight years to realize what should have been obvious at a glance. Plowing, cultivating and leaving fields bare for weeks and months on end doesn’t just kill the earthworms. It stunts, starves and kills the entire soil food web.
On the other hand, strip- tilling beds within an otherwise undisturbed soil food web creates miles of boundaries between cultivated beds and the surrounding food web sod. After all, it is a principle of physics that life arises at boundaries; thus, the soil food web not only is enlivened, it awakens and becomes intelligent as the soil’s animal life truly thrives.
Then the delicate influences of starlight and moonlight engage the atmosphere with the soil for nitrogen fixation and protein chemistry. Then animal digestion shows up along with animal awareness, and the market garden within the soil food web becomes aware and intelligent.
Biodynamic growers call this sense and desire animal nature the astrality. Plants depend on digestive activity in their surroundings to supply them with nitrogen. But animals internalize their digestion of proteins and assembly of amino acids. Thus, they experience the outer
world around them as an inner experience because this is how they get their nitrogen.
Life activity
Life is what engages soil minerals, and our soils are deficient in life. What are we doing about this? Compare well-humified compost with chemical fertilizer. Which one adds life? Easy guess. Close to 98 per cent of every living organism is carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulfur. Nitrogen and sulfur levels may show on a soil test, but the rest of these ‘Five Sisters’ are free to go ignored.
If we had balanced, thriving life activity in our soils we wouldn’t need to worry about nitrogen or sulfur as well. After all, only two per cent of our biomass comes from soil minerals, the rest comes from the atmosphere. We should ask, why are these Five Sisters so important?
Sunshine, precipitation, carbon dioxide and air - which is one-part oxygen and four parts nitrogen along with a trace of sulfur - all come from the atmosphere. This means most of what grows comes from the atmosphere where it is free for the taking. Life activity harvests these five sisters, without which it wouldn’t matter what we put on the soil.
Of course, life activity also harvests what is needed from the soil, but the soil doesn’t replenish things as readily as the atmosphere. Most soils are deficient in available sulfur and boron, as well as being marginal or deficient in available silica and amino acid nitrogen. Many soils are also deficient in one or more of the cations in the lime complex.
Since there’s only enough sulfur in rainfall for maintenance, but not enough to repair deficiencies, gypsum (calcium sulfate) or elemental sulfur may need to be added.
Feed this to the entire soil food web from fencerow and roadside to creek bank and woodlot. In other words, feed the whole farm soil food web. Include with this a few pounds per acre (or kg/ha) of borax or other soluble form of boron to improve plant uptake of nutrients.
Any further deficiencies must also be corrected, which is where we run into nitrogen.
Blood meal, soy meal, copra meal, fish emulsion, or other nitrogen-containing soil foods may be needed at first to build nitrogen-fixing capacity. But once life activity gets nitrogen fixation working properly, nitrogen inputs can and should be phased out to let biological fixation take over.
Beyond that, the recipe for better farm productivity is feed the soil food web so it feeds soil organization. Organization is the basis of life. Life activity is organizational, and it makes the most out of its resources if it is given support where needed. Basically, by feeding the needs of the soil food web, it organizes the rest.
When we feed the soil food web to feed our crops, market gardening within the soil food web gives us quality yields in partnership with nature. Indications are that co-operating with nature produces better yields at lower unit costs while building life into the soil. ☐
Next issue PART 2: Recipes for Building the Soil Food Web.