In the recent podcast with Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser, the owners of Singing Frogs farm, they told a tale of success that begins and in many ways ends with their soil.
By creating abundant, rich, and biologically diverse soil, their plants are packed with more nutrients and are far more able to fend off insect, viral and bacteriological pests all on their own.
The takeaway? If there is a first rule of Soil Club, it would be: Don’t Till.
While a freshly-tilled field may evoke warm, fuzzy visions of the traditional farming landscapes we see in paintings, it's actually a highly destructive and self-defeating thing to do. Tilling damages the structure of soil, in which untold billions and trillions of microorganisms live in a graduated ‘canopy’ of life spanning from the surface to far below. Tilling also leads to the release of one of the worst greenhouse gasses, nitrous-oxide — an important contributing factor that makes conventional agricultural practices responsible for a full one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Instead, when you see a tilled field you can think of it as damaged land. It's a wound from which the soil will need time to recover.
On their farm, Paul and Elizabeth do not till, nor do they ever leave raw soil exposed. And when they harvest, they cut the plants off at the base, leave the roots, put more compost on top and plant again.
Using this method, they can water far less (very important in CA right now which is where they live and farm), while more than doubling the number of crop cycles per year. And they rarely have to fend off weeds or pests. That's pretty darn impressive.
Stuck On A Broken Treadmill
A few years back, when Adam and I were in the DC area on the Money Map shoot, we visited a standard industrial agriculture operation. A pair of kindly elderly brothers were in charge, who farmed their 11,000 acres mainly growing corn.
by time2help