At the end of Chapter 1, we revealed the secret to rich, fertile soil "that looks like black cottage cheese."
The mysteries of Mycorrhizal Fungi & Glomalin continue. Read on for the next key principles from Gabe Brown...
Armored Cover
Gabe Brown's 5 Keys to Building Healthy Soil (continued)
2) Armor On the Soil Surface
Where in nature do you find bare soil? You find it only in catastrophic or man-made events.
Cover the soil all the time. Never have bare soil in your gardens, fields or orchards. Soil-cover buffers summer heat and greatly reduces soil overheating which kills plant growth.
Soil Temperature & Plant Growth:
At 70 degrees Fahrenheit, 100% of soil moisture is used for growth.
At 100 degrees F, 15% of soil moisture is used for growth, and 85% is lost.
At 130 degrees F, 100% of soil moisture is lost through evaporation and plant transpiration.
At 140 degrees F, soil bacteria die. With the death of soil bacteria comes the death of soil fertility and productivity.
3) Diversity
Nature is diverse.
Mono-crops simply don't appear in nature. A plant inventory was taken on one of Gabe's true native healthy range-land paddocks that had never been disturbed. It had over 140 species of grasses, forbs and legumes.
Cover Crops
Cover crops can be grown anywhere with an average annual precipitation from 2 to 200 inches. This includes high-altitude desert, like the mountain valleys where we grow our Painted Mountain Corn seed. We never had much success with cover crop techniques in the past, but now, having studied Gabe Brown's techniques in some detail, we are trying again this planting season.
Cover crops should be multi-seeded combinations - not just 2 or 3. Use a diverse poly-culture. Forage culture can be tripled by seeding a poly-culture cover crop.
"Not only do the fungi provide for the needs of one plant but the fungal-hyphae pipeline connect to multiple plants… this helps satisfy the nutritional and energy needs of microorganisms and the plants" - Dr. Kris Nichols, ARS Mandan, ND
Different root systems from different plants bring nutrients and moisture from different areas of the soil profile.
Mono-cultures are not just a detriment to soil health – they actually ruin your soil.
It bears repeating: There are no mono-cultures in nature.
Living Roots
4) Leave Living Roots in the Ground as Long as Possible
A true cover crop is a diverse mix that enhances the soil's functioning processes. It's a positive feedback loop - the plants benefit the micro-organisms and the micro-organisms in turn benefit the plants. A true cover crop enhances the life and fertility of the soil.
Design your cover crops for what you're missing. Choosing the wrong cover crops can be disastrous (as we have learned the hard way). To avoid disaster with wrong cover crops before starting, you must decide and prioritize your resource concerns for each field.
Design a custom cover crop for each field. For example, if your resource concern is a hard layer of compacted soil, you may want to include daikon radish to break up the compaction.
Use radishes in combination with legumes to provide nitrogen for the next crop.
(This was a real eye-opener for me. I never knew radishes stored nitrogen. I've grown fall diakons before for the table and was always frustrated when the big suckers broke off in the ground when I was in a hurry to harvest them before the ground froze for the winter. In retrospect I guess that was a good thing.)
Of course, when planning your cover crop, take the growth habit and maturation of each plant into consideration. If your daikon is seeded too early, they will bolt and never get big.
Gabe's cover crops include warm and cool season crops, broad-leaf and grass varieties.
With armored cover, diverse cover crops, and living roots, you will soon start producing that "black cottage cheese" with all those natural, fertile pore spaces in your soil.
Pore spaces in the soil are essential for biology and water infiltration.
You've seen what happens when it rains on a hard, dirt driveway. Without pore spaces, water runs off and stands on the surface in low places during large rain events instead of soaking into the soil.
Your soil can become a huge underground reservoir.
Gabe's original poor soil only absorbed ½ inch of rain per hour. Now, 10 years later, the same soil absorbs over 8 inches/hour.
Successful dry-land farming does not depend on how much rainfall you get. It's how much rain your soil can soak up, hold, and store.
Plant & Grow Rich: Chapter 3
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