21who cares about the environment or is trying to live in harmony with nature. It does, however, present us with a unique opportunity to do something interesting and different in our own particular
bioregion. We are blessed in the Northeast for so
many reasons. For one, we lack the huge expanses of land that make industrial agriculture so well suited
to the Midwest and the plains states. Plus, a very
willing and open-minded population inhabits our towns and cities, and locally produced foodstuffs are now more popular than ever. Indeed, small-scale agriculture has been in decline and needs a boost, and people are hungry for meaning as well as food. Organic grain production provides opportunities for both farmers and gardeners to expand their
repertoires; dairy farmers can very easily add oats,
barley, and wheat to their forage crop rotations, and small plots of any sort of grain can be intensively grown in the home garden.Information about organic grain growing was
pretty sparse when I rst became interested in
growing my own cereals in the early 1970s. Having come to farming as a romantic with a background in the history of agriculture, old farming textbooks
were my rst source of information about soils
and crops, and I was able to purchase many old agronomy texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at used-book stores. Studying farming practices from this particular time period provided me with good sound advice because agri-culture was still being practiced in harmony with A rich heritage of grain culture exists in our region. There are a few basic considerations and requirements when you’re thinking of growing your own grains. Land, machinery, and knowledge are all essential. Couple these ingredients with some good advice, willpower, and beginner’s luck, and you are on your way to being a grain grower.
First, it’s important to consider scale; grain, by its
very nature, is bulky and lower in value than other more specialized crops, which gives rise to mass production and large scales of operation. Today’s average producer of commodity grain crops farms a thousand acres or more to make the same living that his grandparents made on two hundred acres two generations ago. So-called mixed farming, where farm-raised grains were fed to cattle, hogs, and chickens, has been replaced by the cash grain system, and the rural fabric of much of our country has unraveled as small-scale animal agriculture has given way to gigantic concentrated animal feeding
operations (CAFOs). In this industrial system,
grain is harvested by massive combines and trucked away to nearby grain elevators owned by multina-
tional corporations; crop diversity is an unwanted
burden to an industrial agricultural system that is
fueled primarily by corn and soybeans. Ninety-ve
percent of all soybeans and 85 percent of all corn
crops are genetically modied, and seed sovereignty
is increasingly in question as fewer and fewer large corporations come to dominate the trade. This sad state of affairs certainly poses challenges to anyone
CHAPTER TWO
Soil Fertility Considerations
The Organic Grain Grower
22culture. According to von Liebig, plants need nitro-gen in the form of ammonia to grow and synthesize protein, but where the nitrogen comes from is of no consequence according to the von Liebig view. This discovery has led to amazing gains in crop yields over the past 150 years. In the mid-nineteenth century, bat guano imported from South America
was the rst articial “manure” applied to crops at the time, and nitrate of soda (Chilean nitrate) was
the next big discovery, a salt-like substance mined in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile where the
rain never falls; it contains 16 percent nitrogen.
The history and development of high-yield-production agriculture is directly coupled with the introduction of stronger and stronger sources of mineral nitrogen—Chilean nitrate was followed by ammonium nitrate, also used in the munitions
industry. Modern fertilizer production reached its
zenith with the invention of the Haber-Bosch pro-cess in which urea could be made with natural gas
and anhydrous ammonia for direct soil injection. This process—rst used during World War II to harden the ground for airstrips in the jungles of the South Pacic—paved the way for higher crop yields in the 1960s. (Now a standard source of nitrogen
for corn, it has also succeeded in hardening the
soils of farm elds throughout the Corn Belt of the American Midwest.) In addition, nitrate and salt
fertilizer use has increased steadily since the end of
World War II, and excess ammonium nitrate from
the munitions industry was channeled into fertil-izer production, which paved the way for the Green
Revolution that followed in the 1950s and 1960s.
American agriculture has become totally reliant on the fertilizer bag, but the unforeseen consequence of this over-reliance on salt-based fertilizers has been pollution and environmental degradation. Nitrates have seeped into the water table, making drinking water unsafe throughout much of farm country.
Perhaps the largest and best-known example of this
pollution problem is the ever-growing dead zone
in the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi River nature; chemical fertilizers (or manures as they called them) were relatively few, and toxic inputs were not yet developed. By the rst decade of the
twentieth century, mankind had probably reached the pinnacle of knowledge in crop science that was holistic and friendly to the natural environment.
MacMillan and Orange Judd Company, both of New York, were the two primary publishers of agri
-cultural texts at the time, and Liberty Hyde Bailey, dean of agriculture at Cornell, was the editor of the
Rural Science
series,
Cyclopedia of Agriculture
(four vol
-
umes), and
Cyclopedia of Horticulture
(six volumes), all published by MacMillan. My favorite volume
from the time is
The Cereals in America
published in 1904 by Thomas F. Hunt, a professor of agronomy at Cornell. The book contained everything I needed
to know as a novice intent on growing my rst
crops of grain, and I would recommend this book and all others like it to anyone searching for good
solid information on any agronomic subject. Oc
-casionally, you might stumble across one of these volumes in a used-book store, and the libraries of most land grant colleges and universities still have many of these old agronomy books on their shelves—simply go to the 630 section in the
Dewey decimal system and you will nd all of these
old books in one place. Certainly, farming in the early twentieth century has a lot to offer us now, one-hundred-plus years later.
A Brief History of Chemical Fertilizers
In its quest for high levels of production, modern agriculture has forgotten and ignored many of the tenets of basic farming knowledge contained in the agronomy textbooks of yesteryear, as quantity is much more important than quality in these modern times. Ever since German chemist Justus von Liebig discovered chemical nitrogen and its importance as a plant food, soluble minerals have supplanted humus and organic matter as the basis of fertility in agri-
Soil Fertility Considerations
23
The Importance of Soil Fertility
Any exploration of soil fertility will take us into three interdependent and equally important realms—the chemical, the physical, and the biological. The chemical realm is an indication of what kinds of minerals are present in a particular soil and in what sort of concentration. This aspect of the whole picture is probably the easiest to understand and measure with a standard garden or farm soil test, where levels of calcium, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium, and nitrates are indicated in parts per
million or pounds per acre. With this information
and accompanying recommendations, decisions can be made about how much and what types of soil
amendments to apply to a specic plot or eld.
The physical realm refers to a soil’s actual physical
structure. What kind of texture does it have? Is it clay, silt, sand, or gravel? Is it poorly or excessively drained? Compaction could be a problem because
of low organic matter and poor aggregation. A soil’s physical qualities are directly related to its humus content and the cultural practices of its human stewards. Good diverse crop rotations and frequent applications of compost and manure will preserve and enhance the physical structure of a farm’s soil. The biological realm of soil fertility is all about microbiology and the billions of little organisms that inhabit our soils. Fungi, bacteria, actinomycetes, nematodes, and algae all work in
conjunction with the soil’s humus and mineral
fractions to feed themselves and the resident plant
population. Mycorrhizal fungi colonize plant roots
to symbiotically consume plant sugars while they break down soil minerals and make them available to the root zone of the host plant. Soil microbiol-
ogy is the least understood aspect of soil science;
these little beasties make it all happen, and we only
vaguely understand their function. What we do
know is that microbial populations are more diverse and effective in an environment high in humus and
empties the efuent of America’s productive heart
-
land into the sea. We have learned that the increased
productivity of modern agriculture has come with a price tag.The forgotten element in this quest for higher crop yields and so-called increased productivity has been carbon. Justus von Liebig was a chemist,
not a soil microbiologist; little did he realize that
soil-applied mineral nitrates require the oxidizing action of soil bacteria and presence of carbon to make them available to plant roots. For every one part of nitrate, twenty parts of carbon are needed to make this process happen, and soil carbon is literally burned up and released to the atmosphere as carbon
dioxide during the nitrication process. Sadly, the
application of soluble nitrate fertilizers has reduced organic matter levels in American soils from a high of 5 to 7 percent one hundred years ago to a cur-rent average of less than 1 percent nationwide. But humus and organic matter ensure resiliency in our soils, and for every 1 percent increase in organic matter level a soil will retain an additional 160,000 pounds of water per acre. High-humus soils are like the lungs of the earth, allowing soils to retain moisture in times of drought and wick away excess moisture during rainy wet spells. Good aggregation or soil structure goes hand in hand with high levels of humus. A soil with good aggregation proper-ties will very easily crumble into many small little pieces in your hands. This good “crumb structure” ensures that there will be plenty of pore spaces for air and water storage, and a healthy high-humus soil will have the ability to hold on to more min-eral nutrients and be able to resist the forces of wind and water erosion. The carbon cycle is the foundation of organic agriculture, and it is entirely possible to achieve the same yields as the chemical
guys in an organic system. We get there by working
with
nature to foster a soil that is alive and teeming with microbial life. To grow nutrient-dense, high-quality crops, we must have an abundant supply of carbon—nature’s building block.