Organic Farmer February / March 2020

When considering healthy soils
and plants, the greatest need in
terms of achieving vibrant plant
health and lasting vigor is to consider
“the trunk of the tree” instead of getting
hung out on a limb and never tackling the
core problem. To determine this certain
basic questions and answers should first
be considered and some of those may not
always come that easily into view.
As a whole, in this entire world someone
has responsibility over all the land.
Someone is put in charge of it and generally
has a say about what can or cannot be
done to that land and too often not with
a mind toward what would be best for
the land or what is produced on it. The
real bottom line is, when you give the soil
what it actually requires, only then can it
provide what is truly needed for optimum
soil and plant health! Anything less and
that much less is what you should expect
in return!
Various short term for profit programs
have allowed so many destructive actions
and so much degradation to the land that
there are now a host of programs that
“make it better” and are touted as basic
solutions to the problems the previous
thinking of past and present generations
have caused.
What works best? Is it when plants
improve soil health or when soil improves
plant health? In other words, can you
best use plants to improve the soil and
its fertility level, or the soil to improve
the plants and their health and nutritive
providing abilities? This is not like asking
the question, “Which one came first, the
chicken or the egg?” This question can be
correctly answered. And in the process
of answering such a question, what is best
for soil biology - the true life of the soil -
would need to be included.
So then what is the trunk of the tree
for deriving the most benefit from
agriculture? Is it making the most
money, or making the greatest yields?
Is it growing the best plants or the most
nutritious foods? It should be the key
to all of those packed into one logical
program with the most economical
approach being what can best be done
to most help the soil and the crops that
grow there.
The best answers to soil fertility, plant
growth and feed or food quality are not
geared to the philosophy of how much
can growers get for the least amount
they can give, whether that is money,
fertility or the amount of effort being
put forth.
However, most of the time the solutions
that get adopted are because it
can be shown that to do so means there
is substantial profit to be made by the
sale of something to the farmer. This is
not meant to even imply that anything
is wrong with increasing income from
the added value of work being done.
But if the bulk of the profit accrues to
those who are devising the program at
the expense of the soil and what grows
there, is it really true profit? And are
those programs being proposed the
actual solutions needed or just another
“band aid” as a stop-gap measure that
helps only temporarily improve the
situation in some way?
Dr. William Albrecht once described an
experiment his team tried for extracting
more nitrogen from the colloidal humus
once they learned to isolate that humus
from the soil. He said they tried every
conceivable acid and many “reasonable”
combinations, but could never find a
formula that would do the job.
But conversely, by extracting exudates
from plant roots and using an inordinately
large amount as compared to the normal
release from plants and crops, it was the
secret key to unlock that N. Yet they were
unable to duplicate that in the lab. So far
as is now known, no one ever has. When
science can’t even do that, it is hard to
believe that even the best team of scientists
would be wise enough to figure out
all that a plant really needs.
That said, a slow steady feed of what is
shown to be needed should generally be
of most benefit to both plants and soils.
However, in work with a company using
that approach on a 20,000 acre almond
operation for feeding nutrients through
the drip, the program still only provides
top results if the soil contains or receives
what nutrients can be measured and supplied
as needed first.
No matter how intelligent mankind may
be considered, taking care of the soil to
feed the total biological needs of the entire
“team” - then striving to provide needs for
the specific crop - works time after time.
But too many want to skip building up
soil fertility and just feed the crop. When
that happens, could growers be robbing
themselves of the greatest benefits in
terms of both soil health and the highest
yields and quality for whatever they are
producing?
Most likely there is no one who really
knows how to provide all of the exact
nutrients each plant will thrive on to do its
best. When anyone proposes to improve
upon what life in the soil can do in that
regard, even the best “guesstimate” will
likely fall far short of properly feeding the
soil- and thus will also rob the plant of its
full potential - to grow the best yields and
highest nutrition from the proper inputs.
So the question then becomes what is the
18 Organic Farmer February/March 2020