How To Create Fertility Without Fertiliser

When I wrote this article I did so assuming that I would be lucky to get even a handful of people to ready it – this is a highly specific topic. 

I was very wrong. Within hours this had been picked up by some farmer groups in Australia and the USA and it has had hundreds of thousands of views.

There’s a lot of noise on the world wide web, so knowing your niche and talking to your people in your unique voice is the best way to get yourself heard.

There is a common misconception in the farming world that’s harming your profits and potentially your future. We’re led to believe – in increasingly clever and technical ways – that we need fertilisers in order to increase the productivity of pasture or meadow. But just as humans aren’t ‘statin deficient’ when they have a heart attack; grasslands aren’t ‘fertiliser deficient’ if their performance is poor.

 

How to create fertility without buying fertiliser.

The study of soils has come on enormously in the last few years. Before 1980s scientists had little idea that soil organisms were important to plant health, through the ‘green revolution’ agriculture has been dominated by chemical solutions. Now, due to recent scientific findings, I’m confident that the next wave of high production agriculture will be led by those who understand the biology of our soils.

 

Minerals come from rocks. Every soil in the world has the potential to grow plants. Some rock is weathered into soluble forms that plants can absorb directly through their roots and then are recycled back through the decay process – this is the ‘soluble pool’ that shows up in a soil analysis test. But how do we access the limitless ‘total pool’ available in the crystalline structures of the rock that can provide the full 42 of essential nutrients plants really need to be healthy and disease resistant?

 

This is where your underground army is required. Every spoonful of healthy soil contains a billion or more microorganisms. In healthy grassland there’s approximately the same weight in earthworm biomass as the weight of the cattle grazing above ground, not to mention the thousands of other tiny critters all shredding, digesting, dissolving and excreting to gradually improve your soils.