There are many ways to improve soil on a farm. One of the most important steps is to amend your soil, or add nutrients and minerals back into the soil. When farming, the plants are up taking the soils nutrients and minerals to produce our food and crops. As responsible sustainable farmers, we must in turn add nutrients and minerals back into the soil.
There are a few different ways we can do this, one way is to add compost to the tops of our beds, which will directly benefit the soil by reducing compaction, adding nutrients, reducing moisture loss and help to keep the soil covered and cool.
You can also amend and improve soil through covering cropping. Cover crops are plants sown into the field not for profit but instead to hold place in the field and improve the soil during a time the field isn’t in use. Cover cropping is a great way to protect and improve your soil. They adds organic matter to the soil and diversity of plant life, while also covering the soil to keep it from being barren or overgrown with weeds when not in use for production. Cover crops do a great job at protecting soil from hard rainfalls, compaction, and wind. Cover crop roots can also help to break up the soil and mowing cover crops and incorporating them into the soil will help add organic matter and feed the micro-biome in the soil.
Compost tea is a great way to improve plant and soil health. Compost tea is an aerated or non-aerated mix of compost, manure or fish emulsion, with water and other beneficial ingredients, such as oats to feed the microbes or nettles for a boost of nitrogen. This can brew for up to 24 hours and then can be applied to beds, transplants or plants in the field to help improve the soil and plant life.
The last way to amend your soil which may be one of the more straight forward and important ways is by truly adding amendments into your soil. While preparing a bed for your next crop, such as spring brassicas, you will want to add certain direct nutrients and minerals to the soil. Most farmers take soil tests yearly to know what is lacking or what is over abundant in the soil they are growing in. An exceeding or a lacking amount of a certain nutrient or mineral can negatively affect your crop yield and production. This is why testing your soil and amending it to the proper needs is a very important part of farming.
This week on the farm we amending some beds with feather meal pellets, which is a slow release of nitrogen and other nutrients into the soil. Feather meal is not the best product to use, however it is sustainable in the fact that it is using the parts of chickens that would otherwise be waste and probably put in a landfill. Harmony is a great amendment to use in the soil, however it is not as abundant and easily accessible. We also added a small amount of boron as a micronutrient. And we added sunflower ash hull to add potassium sulfate to our soil, this helps to lower our pH because our soils pH is on the high side. A soils pH being off can also negatively affect the plants and their ability to uptake nutrients and minerals from the soil.
I hope this weeks blog has inspired you to take care of your soil in your own gardens and think about the science that takes place behind growing food and crops in your local community!
Soil Amendments. (n.d.). CALS. https://cals.cornell.edu/national-good-agricultural-practices-program/resources/educational-materials/decision-trees/soil-amendments
-Hailey Ostenfeld
The Student Farm at CCCC 