MIXED FARMING
WHATis mixed farming? Indeed, it is the sort of farming activity that involves a diverse type of farming. This involves different enterprises taking place at the farm the farm may have different crops that may include maize, soya, sunflower, or groundnuts. Mixed farming also includes livestock such as cattle, pigs, chickens, goats and may be fish enterprise. In mixed farming each enterprise does support the other on the farm direct or indirect.
It is obvious that no plant could possibly go on thriving if we tried to grow it in sand alone. No matter how much water may be provided, the plant would sooner or later die for want of the small but necessary quantities of such plant foods as nitrates.
What happens if the farmer continued to grow crops year after year without replenishing the soil with any nitrogenous material? Can the plants continue to crop freely? They cannot. The nitrogen and similar substances that are taken from the soil by growing plants must in one way or another be replaced. Otherwise, the soil will lose condition and the crops will be poorer and poorer as the years go by. There are, however, several ways of maintaining the soils supplies of nitrogen. Let us examine them.
If one stands near to a heap of fresh farm manure no doubt one would notice the smell of ammonia that surrounds it. Ammonia as we know is a compound of nitrogen, and its presence in the dung of animals is one of the reason for putting farmyard manure into the soil.
Farmyard manure is a very good source of nitrogen for plants. One may ask how the nitrogenous substances get into farmyard manure. The thing is no animal is able to digest all the protein contained in its food, and some of the proteins that animals eat pass right through the digestive tract and come out in the dung.
All animal dung is rich in nitrogenous materials, for this reason, the farmyard manure contains a good deal of dung. It does not appear that plant roots are able to absorb this dead protein, it has to be changed back again to nitrates and similar substances before the plant can use it.
The change takes place more readily when the dung is mixed with straw or other litter. Dung comes from animals the farmer is keeping and straw comes from some plants the farmer grows on the farm for example rice, wheat, soya all these can produce straw which is mixed with dung. This mixture creates a conducive environment for millions of bacteria or germs. These bacteria are present in all fertile soils so that buried manure and other dead protein material is constantly producing nitrogenous for the plant.
No farmer ever has enough farmyard manure to keep his land fertile of replacing nitrogen in the soil. This is however, made ideal by applying mixed farming activities such as keeping of livestock from which dung or animal droppings can be used in the making of farm manure mixed with other farm residues from other farm crop enterprises. This then complements the use of chemical fertilizer and reduce the cost of farming to some extent.
The proteins in dead plants and animals are changed into nitrates by the soil bacteria and fresh plants use these nitrates to living proteins again. In due course some of these food proteins are eaten by animals to build their muscles and so on. The cycle of nitrogen from death to life, life to death is called by scientists the NITROGEN CYCLE, because it can go on indefinitely.
This is how important mixed farming is to a farmer. Those practicing such have abundant benefits on the farm. Animals produce dung that is used by the plants to grow vigorously and from the plants animals again benefit because they have access to plenty of grass or plant material for food.
Bacteria in the soil would work on the dung and plant residues to make nitrate which the plant uses. Although plants cannot make use of nitrogen in the air, nature has fortunately provided a very satisfactory way of converting atmospheric nitrogen into materials that plants can feed upon. This is how good mixed farming is to any farmer in the farming circle.