OBSERVATIONS 2009 - Whats in Store for 2010?
New England Agriculture, Country and the World

Weather, input shortfalls, and rising costs of farming, lead to a not so abundant harvest.
Helpful crop treatments for getting through the pinch of ‘short’ years.
The “certified organic” food system becomes unwieldy with fees, politics, agencies and regulation. Does the label guarantee quality nutrition? “Are we growing real food or paperwork”?
Sap testing, Brix, pH is something different than Calcium…and more.

In 2009, The effect of relentless rains and below average temperature ranges till later in August, which turned to very dry conditions and then back to early unseasonal cold, left a lot of crops short of finishing. Very early or late delayed plantings did better on either side of the ‘monsoon like’ conditions. Fungal diseases above and below the ground ran the show for many farms. Untold hours and materiel expenses were applied to crops suffering from historic levels of late blight pressure, soil hypoxia, seed rot, and fertilizer loss. The few early hay crops were either snatched in or rained on to spoil till very late first cuts came well into August. Clean local, non-moldy dry hay was rare.
Fertility levels also took a hit from leaching losses, over budget costs and simple lack of soil warmth and oxygen to allow soil biology to “deliver the goods”. With soil tests ‘guiding’ fertilizing practices but not always reflecting results being a common theme even on good years, this was a season that growers needed to pay a lot more attention to ‘real-in-the-field’ indicators about soil function. Early weed indicators, disease identification, sap testing and close observation about plant responses to conditions may have helped some situations but much was out of our hands till rainfall relented.
The use of biologically stabilized amendments and foliar nutrition sprays that would still be accessible to crops short on soil oxygen and accompanying aerobes, made a difference to farmers, both conventional and organic if they knew about them. They were not cheap however, but neither is the cost of applying unstable soluble fertilizers, especially nitrogen multiple times in an attempt to compensate for leaching. Most of the soluble fertilizers quickly dissolved with a larger than usual percentage being washed away. Adding humates, simple sugars and microbial helpers can convert simple soluble fertilizers to more stable and bio-available plant foods.
Without going into much detail, Nitrogen, which is a primary soil electrolyte, wears many faces and the Ammonia form of it is the least stable, which is why you can smell it on the wind when there is loss to the air. It is also the reproductive form of N, meaning it enhances the female part of plants. Without carbon, oxygen and aerobic bacteria it is a troublemaker for crop and eventually livestock health.
Savvy growers, who used biological inoculants to help defend and feed plants through foliar and root zone nutrient exchange, had some measures of success in controlling blight infestations. (Potatoes)…Tubers may have been smaller, but had less hollow heart and internal color was good. There was less blight infestation where full nutritional packages were in the crop program.
Soil nutrition leading to higher BRIX readings and more ideal plant tissue sap pH levels (6.4), makes a big difference in a crop’s ability to defend itself.
Grains and hay had tough times with drying opportunities to cut and cured or be combined in optimum weather. Vomitoxins in lab samples have been high for ’09 grain and hay crops.
Potatoes and tomatoes in organic culture have in some cases suffered more from the overdosing of copper than from the blight itself. Some farmers were smart enough to apply foliar nutrients to the copper or other fungicide sprays to somewhat compensate for shutting down the soil life with fungicides.

The bottleneck-lack of new and effective ‘NOP allowed products’’ via OMRI or WSDA approval gate keepers, needs a serious overhaul. Farmer feedback about the system says it has become unwieldy and dogmatic, with rigid “politically driven science” and institutional control, allowing insufficient effective new options for growers to defend and simultaneously improve their crops. Often times this is a simple lack of timely product review by third parties, or a political boundary issue of whether a product or practice is deemed legal in one region or country but not the other even though both crops technically can occupy the same ‘organic’ section of the marketplace whether it is grown in China, Canada, Argentina or Maine. If the NOP was really about leveling the field of practices, then a Maine farmer should realistically be able to be certified by a Canadian organization that has allowed other useful products or methods to come to the forefront, or even use a European or Japanese agency to do the same job. Talk about adding expense when this needs done close to home.., (ouch)!
On a state-by-state or regional certifier basis there are many discrepancies to sort out.

Letting central government control the standards of our food supply may be an unfortunate conundrum since it dos not address the deeply needed nutritional information that reflects the function of the soil. An organic label is unfortunately more about what you can’t use than what life supporting methods and recipes the farmer has applied to achieve not just yields but excellent quality. This can and needs to be changed so that farmers and public consumers get what they pay for.

By using hind sight to guide foresight with new methods and better products to reinforce plant health in stressful conditions, maybe we will be better prepared for the likely repeat of similar weather events in coming years. So far this spring of 2010, the patterns are very unusual. Anything can happen really, and being prepared for it is no easy task.

More serious farmers need to have practical knowledge of how plants and soils really work than to rely on salesmen or basic agency advice as their sole support for information. There are amazing strides being made in the last few years that farmers need to witness first hand or at least be exposed to somehow even if it is counter to “the way things are done”.
Its kind of like having infomercials that convince the well intended farmer to use a bigger hammer on a problem than to ask a few well considered questions of the farm environment itself, such as “what is the underlying source of the problem to begin with?”
Or…. “If all my soil chemistry looks fine on paper, then why don’t the crops reflect that?”
Another classic situation is livestock supplementation. For example, check to see how much the nutritional supplements are really costing you, and are they not really the same thing by a different name that your crops should be getting from your soil? Is the veterinarian camped out on your living room couch because the barn is in perpetual crisis rather than predominant health.
Understand crop nutrition as an animal experiences it by allowing livestock free choice boxes to guide your soil recipes. It’s old fashioned agronomy but it really works.
Much harder though to understand what a plant in distress is telling us before the symptoms become so obvious.

Take calcium for example:
Consider that calcium is primary to plant and animal health, and NOT necessarily because it influences soil pH and release of common soil elements. Take into account that calcium regulates such a huge number of plant functions on the cellular level, including making up the lion’s share of cell wall tissue as part ofd the cellulose structure. It is primary to life, misunderstood, miss applied, often under-applied, over applied, or substituted by calcium equivalent (CE) industry by products such as paper mill fiber, wood ash and ash limestone mixes, much to the detriment of soil life, since ash is definitely NOT a replacement for calcium application for the sake of nutrition. Yes it supplies large amounts of potash and influences soil pH, which is mostly due to the Lye (sodium hydroxide) component of wood ash. Try leaving your hands in that for a few hours….hmmm. By the way, pH is simply the measurement of the negative log of the Hydrogen ion. It is not a measure of calcium by any standard. Liming the soil is best considered as a way to feed the living system a primary nutrient. Soil fungi and a very large segment of the plant supportive soil food web, needs, trades and delivers Calcium in exchange for plant exudates Most northeastern soils do not need more Potassium or Iron, which we already have plenty of, being a large component of the region’s soil types.

For grasses, grains, and row crops of all types, there is a need to supply more relatively low solubility, but highly bio available forms of elements. Calcium, Phosphorus, and to some degree, depending on crop use, testing and history; Magnesium, Zinc, Manganese, Copper, Molybdenum, Boron, Selenium, Silica and a large host of other traces that regulate functions of all life forms.
Stable soil carbon, (humus) different in it’s role than raw organic matter, is the storage battery of energy exchange between elements of different values, water and gas exchange capacities, and haven to soil life.
Lift out a well-developed plant and carefully observe what particles the roots most cling to. Observe if they are particles of humus, a lump of compost, char, wood or rock. Are there white fungi mycelium wrapped around the organic matter particles?
Try a jar test: Into two large mouthed clear jars of water, carefully place in each, an undisturbed, fist-sized lump of soil from two different fields but preferably the same soil type. One can be a biological or organically managed soil that has a good management history. The other soil sample can be from a field with a history of soluble fertilizers, herbicide use or just frequent tillage. Watch how the two different soil lumps either fall apart or hold together, how long the water stays clear, and how long air bubbles rise off the soil lump. You will be amazed at how many soils cannot pass the ‘LIT (Lump Integrity Test)’, even in organic practices.

The ‘label’ of agriculture does not necessarily make the farm.
It is the ability to translate the evidence of the land and language of plants and animals as representative of the real conditions that we adapt our practices to, which earns our place in stewardship.
In some cases, the big picture of nature and weather simply close us out of the game and remind us that we have never really run the show in the first place. Not all land is meant for human use and that which we do use is not as easily renewable in our lifetimes as we might think.
On a closing note:
Soil repair can happen very rapidly when some basic understandings of the primacy of soil life are adhered to.
The pecking order is thus: The soil microbes eat first, the plant eats second . And if there is something left of quality for us and our livestock, we eat last.

Read and study:
Weeds, Why They Grow Jay McCaman
Science in Agriculture Dr Arden Andersen
Healthy Crops - A new Agricultural Revolution Francis Chaboussou a recent work,
George Washington: Farmer Paul Leland Haworth
Topsoil and Civilization Carter and Dale
The Rest of the Story about Agriculture Today Dr Harold Willis
….if you can even find a copy these days.
A much more comprehensive list is in the making.

Copyright Mark Fulford 2010