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Southeast WI | Damn Terry, now I suppose I should expand and think a little. You saw our operation a few years ago so you know what time of year this is here so I'm a little wore out!
Soil Health or soil health principles are buzzwords that may be over used a little I suppose. I guess I get a little more bothered by "regenerative agriculture" but that's my pet peeve.
When I mentioned soil health principles it means, to me, a bunch of things. First it means minimal soil disturbance - and here outside of vine crops that get full tillage that means long term notill or judicious use of strip till when needed to get the crop in. It means minimizing traffic and any activity that can compact my soils. We don't chase the combine with the grain cart because we don't have to being a 2 man show most of the time. It doesn't bother me to combine a few extra days because when that's done all that's left is broadcast fertilizer for the year. Over the past 15 years it means keep a cover crop (cereal rye) on the most challenged soils and of late it means trying to cover all soils yearly. It also means following soil tests and land grant fertilizer recs to never short a crop. Sidedress N is mandatory to get N in the plants and not in our groundwater. There are more things but those are big ones here.
While we will never make our severely eroded gravel hilltops perform well in super dry years, I don't see dramatic breaks between "good" and "bad" soil types anymore. I see crops that don't dry up and die as quickly. We have wet soils that don't get rutted up anymore. The soils that are all goo are gone.
These are things we do and see. Mind you almost all our ground is rented. I believe we need to leave the land better for the future generation. Hopefully they don't want to destroy the ground like previous generations did. In their defense we didn't have better methods to preserve soil and build it back. Today we have the tools that are very much underutilized because of a brain block of "that don't work here". Terry and I live worlds apart in soil geology but we farm very similarly. Except he has more growing season to grow bigger and more diverse covers. | |
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"Soil Health" principles
