Soil Matters
January 2007
Thaddeus Barsotti
Soil, seeds and water are key components to growing any plant. It was no surprise to see my younger brother putting this thought to practice by eating some dirt, swallowing a watermelon seed and washing it down with some water. Pretty clever for a little kid – but the proof we grew up on an organic farm came when he choked down a couple spoonfuls of compost as fertilizer.
My brother is married now and probably would abstain from that act again for various reasons, including the realization that his stomach didn’t have any sunlight and that harvesting watermelon size objects from humans is generally reserved for pregnant women. Never the less, kids who grow up on farms understand the importance of the combination of soil, water, sunlight and seeds.
While sunlight, water and seeds are fairly standardized within a region, soil remains the key component to farms. Entire university degrees revolve around the science of soil, but the crucial point to be understood about soils is that they change drastically within a hundred feet. Soils hold different amounts of water; contain different types of nutrients and microorganisms; foster different root systems or pathogens. The result of the variation in soils drastically affects yields of a given crop and even the ability to grow or not to grow a specific crop.
To a farmer the type of soil drastically changes the value of a given piece of land. I cannot help but realize that farmers may be the only people who take this into consideration when thinking about land. It is obvious that developers and government planning agencies pay little to no attention to soil quality. The short term economic gains created by developing land hides the long term loss of highly productive soil – even a farmer makes more money selling prime soil to developers than by growing food on it.
The real question is what are the long-term effects of permanently taking great soil out of production? It can be argued that we have more food that we know what to do with – which hides the importance of the most highly productive soils in our communities. Perhaps one day the value of producing food will increase so drastically that farmers will be able to make money by buying back subdivisions and returning them to agricultural land.
Email comments to: thaddeus17@gmail.com
Visit www.capay.blogspot.com for more writing
1 comment:
Forty years ago I lived in a small farm town in Illinois. One year, for the first time, several farms yielded over 100 bushels of corn/acre. I remember saying to one, "100-bushel corn! Pretty nice, huh?" His response typified farmers of that day for me: "Yeah, but it's awful hard on the ground." It seemed like farmers always had something to complain about, no matter what good news there was.
That was before I understood anything of what you write here about the varying qualities of soil, and before most had heard anything about the value of rotating crops.
Now my box from Capay is the closest I get to a farmer, but I'm a lot more appreciative than I was in those days. Maybe age has something to do with that.
Post a Comment