14
Farming
www.guardianonline.co.nz
Are you ready to step up? A
re, you happy with the fertiliser program you have been using last season, did it reach your expectations? Often farmers get complacent with the same old fertiliser program, which is now very expensive, that doesn’t seem to give them the resilience or meet the regulations and environmental goals that’s required of today. Doing the same thing year after year and expecting a difference result, as described by Albert Einstein, is the definition of insanity. Are you ready to step up, change gears, unlock your soils potential, and take it to another level? Over the last several decades new information and science has been developed around biological agriculture, with new thinking around management decisions and farming practises emphasizing nutrient uptake from soils through natural soil biological cycles. This ecologicalbased agriculture approach uses microbes and carbon compounds to produce crops naturally rather than relying entirely on highly soluble “salty “nutrient inputs for plant requirements. These new discoveries show how plants and microbes interact to provide the plant with more nutrients. The big deficiency in most soils is oxygen and biology, caused by management practises producing hard compacted soils, and the heavy reliance on highly soluble synthetic fertilisers and nitrogen. In the next decade the lack of fertiliser efficiency and the percentage of nutrients applied that have not been taken up by the plant will become evident. Producers will be horrified at the money spent for little return. In The USA about 54% of all nitrogen fertiliser applied to corn crops is wasted. In New Zealand its thought that only 25% of Urea applied, is taken up by the plant. In traditional farming systems, where nutrients
Jeremy Casey observing Top Soils soil testing.
are removed from the soil by either crops or animals and not replaced, it was suggested producers were mining the soil. If animals are grazing multispecies grasses and legume pastures, they are recycling a lot of those nutrients back into the soil. But the removal of nutrients from high yielding hay, silage or grain crops from the field, is slightly different. The theory here would suggest those nutrients would need to be replaced with fertiliser applications to hold the fertility statis of the soil. However, with a well-balanced mineral and biological active soil using regenerative practises
(e.g. organic, no-till, manure, compost, cover-crops, humates, fish and seaweed, natural slow-release fertilisers with humates), that’s not necessary the case. The soil is able to produce some of the nutrients required, substituting with fertiliser applications. To provide top performance a soil should be composed of 45% minerals 5% humus and 50% pore space. Ideally, the pore space is 50% air and 50% water to provide the correct environment for the biology whom support the needs of growing plants in that soil. The Albrecht system of soil fertility uses soil chemistry (Ca
PHOTOS: SUPPLIED
Multi-pasture species intercepting sunlight, putting carbon into the soil.
and Mg) to affect soil physics (structure) which determines
the environment for the soil biology.