AdAgrA 2023: Digging Deeper

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Soil Fertility Fundamentals

Whitmar McConnell

Soil Fertility Fundamentals: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

I've spent my entire life in agriculture.

I've seen the good and the bad and the ugly.

Many times, God has been pleased to put me in situations of humility and failure so that I can learn things that I didn't know I didn't know.

And so I'm here, hopefully, to share with you some of those insights from that experience and the knowledge that I've gained and the understanding from that work.

You see the type of, this class is going to be on fundamentals.

The material, Benjamin Franklin said 1 time, forgive me for not being brief.

In order to consolidate material down, this is about 40 hours worth of material consolidated down into about 4 hours.

And it's going to be designed to give you some of the principles involved in actually producing a fertile soil that's going to produce healthy, nutritious food that's going to give you health and nourishment.

And so it will be fundamental, and so I'm sure there's going to be questions that are going to ask for details about some of these things, and I'll try to answer them as best as I can, but it took a lot to press this down into 4 hours.

So I don't want to take a whole lot of time doing that, but you see the first class here is called, soil fertility fundamentals, what could possibly go wrong?

You guys have never had any problems with anything, right?

Like insects or diseases or weeds or birds or deer or those type of things.

So lots of things can go wrong and We're going to try to figure out how to prevent those things from going wrong and making them go right.

It's actually a version that Lenny Marsh Wolf did of John Muir, the naturalist's quote, which is a paraphrase I discovered now.

And it's not the actual quote, but I like the paraphrase better.

It says, when you tug on 1 thing in nature, you find out it's connected to everything else.

And she put it this way, everything is so inseparably united, as soon as 1 begins to describe a flower, or a tree, or a storm, or even a chipmunk, up jumps the whole heavens and earth, and God himself in 1 inseparable glory.

You'll discover as we go through this class that God put in place an incredible system to provide for life.

And knowing what that system is and knowing how to employ that system is what will prevent all of these things from going wrong and will cause things to go right.

So we want to go, as it says in Job 12a, we want to have the earth speak to us and let it teach us.

So we're going to do that for a little while here.

But I want to talk about something briefly before we get into that.

In Matthew 5 45 and this is only the last half of the verse it says, for he causes his son to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

Well I'm supposed to be 1 talking so you don't have to answer.

And yet It seems like we suffer from so many things in life that are not good.

The reason we do is because we've plugged up, blocked up, broken up, deformed the channels of those blessings.

And so if we want to receive those blessings, just like the sun shining above the clouds, it's still shining.

If we want to receive those blessings, then we need to know what God's ways are.

We need to know how he designed this world to provide for us, to be a blessing, to give us abundant life.

And so that's what we're gonna pursue here for the next 4 hours.

You throw them in the ground and they're going to try to germinate and they're going to try to grow.

Now, I will tell you that we are dealing with some situations now that are making it difficult for seed to grow.

I used to buy seed and save it for 456 years and grow the same seed because it was less expensive to buy it in bulk.

But I've noticed over the last at least decade that when I buy seed, I'm lucky if I get 2 years out of it, let alone anything beyond that.

And the interesting thing is a friend of mine gave me some seed for a sweet pepper.

It's a small orange sweet pepper that's fantastic.

And I hadn't saved any seed for a while, and I'd gone to growing some other peppers, even though I really liked that 1.

But I decided I wanted to grow that pepper again, so I got some of the seed that I had saved.

I got some of the seed that I had saved and I sowed it and I thought, well, I wanted about 25 plants, so I planted 100 seeds.

Because I thought, well, I'm not going to, you know, the vigor of this seed is just going to be pretty poor.

Take a guess at how many of those seeds germinated.

Well, We're going to talk about that, but there's a couple of aspects.

So you know, you looked at the parable of the sower was talked about this morning and saying that there was nothing wrong with the seed.

Well, we've got some issues with the seed now, too.

1 is there's a nutrient, There should be a nutrient package in that seed that gives it a start.

It eventually has to connect to that soil and begin being nourished by the soil.

But it should have that nutrient package in it.

It should also have what's called a core biome in it.

And this is fascinating to me, and most of you have probably never heard of this.

There are actually microbes in that seed.

There's a package of microbes in that seed that as soon as the moisture hits and the enzymes trigger that seed to start germinating.

Those nutrients are available to it, but that microbial population that's in the seed comes to life.

And it starts doing all kinds of things just to provide for that plant, to connect it to the soil, and connect it to the resources that it needs.

An interesting statistic, babies used to be born with about a 20-year supply of minerals, trace minerals in particular, to start them off.

So we're gonna look at what we can do to return that.

And that's why that pepper seed germinated 5 years later and why seed used to do that.

But most of the practices, by the way, have their roots in war and destruction of modern agriculture, has largely destroyed what God put in place to provide for us.

And so we've begun to lean harder and harder on the ways of man, and the ways of man are more and more destroying life.

And so we need to turn back to the things that God provided for us to have abundant life, to prosper.

And so, Like I said, when that seed goes in the ground, it wants to germinate and grow, but it does have to eventually make a connection, and that's what those microbes do, but it eventually has to connect to that soil and transfer from that initial nourishment to the nourishment that that soil has to provide.

And when it does that, what does it find?

And for too many of us, if you tell me, well, it finds insects attacking it, and it finds diseases attacking it, and it finds weeds swallowing it up.

And you find, and the seed just doesn't seem to be growing very well.

And then, well, it just didn't produce anything to plant grew, but it didn't really produce anything.

I mean, all of those things, that connection has not been properly made with it.

Now I want to share another aspect about why we need to really be addressing this now is because the direction that the world is going, There are things that you're not going to have available to you pretty soon And there there are demands going to be put on you even as a gardener Not as a market grower, but even as a gardener there are going to be demands put on you that you have to meet or you will not be allowed to grow.

And there were some drastic changes that just happened this last year in relation to that.

And so we want to be the head, not the tail.

So we want to put in place a system that will address all of that before it has to be addressed.

Soil Fertility Fundamentals: Chemistry is Foundational

So let's just kind of fly through this a little bit more.

I won't talk anymore about that, but you got the point.

You got the point that there's a functional level which you achieve, and you have to address the soil, you have to address biology to get there.

But there is a level that you achieve where those problems go away and as they go away You get a whole lot better as a result of that Okay, so I'll just quickly on here What are the causes of weeds I talked about parent material a little bit.

Parent material is made up of certain chemicals, you know, chemistry, and structure and everything like that, and it's gonna encourage certain plants to grow that can-can function well in those conditions.

And I don't have the time to talk about the parable of the sower and the good soil.

They all, They all express themselves for what they are, and that in general, in some cases is better than others, and we don't have the time to go into that, but they all need help.

But weeds are caused by that parent material.

Certain plants are adapted to be able to grow in that material over time.

They've adapted their genetics to be able to function in situations where certain nutrients are lacking or they're very hard to get.

And so that they can get them because they can produce root acids that will extract what is in the soil, out of the soil, and-and the plants that you plant there don't have that ability very easily to do that, and so the weeds outcompete them and choke them out, and-and they don't do well.

If you cultivate the weeds out, your plants are still gonna have a hard time because they just cannot get the nutrition out of the soil that they need to get.

Now you can address biology, which we will.

They can help with that some, even if you didn't address the chemistry, but it depends on what the parent material actually is.

There's environmental influences, like what kind of weather stresses are there high rainfall high temperatures?

Cold or low temperatures or drought not much there are plants that are adapted to those types of conditions And they're going to outcompete the plants that you plant unless you address You know a more put to put in place a more balanced and productive system than that.

Incomplete and imbalanced mineralization.

But it's when the mineralization is out of whack, Certain plants are just going to struggle, and other plants are going to be able to do it.

I'll tell 1 story real quick related to that after this, an inappropriate porosity and capillarity.

In other words, your soil structure is terrible.

And so some things will grow on a hard heart a lot better than other things will.

And so if you try to plant good seed into that soil, it's going to struggle to grow.

And there are, on average, a million weed seeds in every square foot of soil.

And if you change the conditions, and I'll tell the story really quick, and then we need to keep moving.

When I was farming in Colorado, there was a lot of Canada thistle.

And the state of Colorado had declared that they were going to eradicate Canada thistle out of the state of Colorado.

And they initiated a spray program statewide.

And they declared victory over the Canada thistle until spring.

And the Canada thistle came back everywhere it was before.

And the reason why is because they didn't change the conditions.

And Canada thistle can function in low calcium soil, high potassium, high magnesium soils because it's got a tap root that can punch right through the hard soil that that kind of condition creates.

And so it's going to outcompete and proliferate until you change those conditions.

You change those conditions, and I don't have time to tell that story, but if you change those conditions, and guess what will go away?

Just because it simply doesn't have a competitive advantage anymore.

Now, it likes fertile soil, and it'll grow in fertile soil, but if it has competition, it will be out-competed.

So, I just want to look at this really quick.

Olivier Hassan of how Soils are affected based on different approaches.

And on the left, I really want us to look at the 2 to the left.

But what kind of growth you wind up getting in a balanced soil that has healthy and balanced plants and in an unbalanced soil where you use foliar nutrition to address those deficiencies in the plant.

They're not addressing soil chemistry and balancing it.

What happens is you'll see down under here, there's high soil inputs, and he's focused primarily on what the soil inputs are gonna be here.

Are we building humus in the soil and everything?

And what you'll see here is, you see that that bar is wider?

And then overall it's bigger than the second 1.

And that balanced soil where you have healthy plant balance plants, you get high soil inputs of carbon.

But you also get high root growth, high immunity, high top growth, and high productivity.

And if you look on the other 1, the big difference here is those other top ones there are not quite as much.

You're getting a lot more carbon being dumped into the soil.

That plant is expending a lot of its energy to put more into the soil, and the reason it's doing that is because it's trying to get the biology in the soil to help it.

It doesn't have the balanced chemistry there, and so it needs more help from the microbes in the soil to find the resources that it needs and provide it to it.

If you have to be here, well, that's better than being there or there.

You want complete and balanced chemistry, and you want that biology doing its thing for you.

Because it can do thousands of jobs for you.

Firing and gardening is as time consuming as it is.

If you've got some other resource that could provide that to you, and do it better than you could do it anyway, why wouldn't you want to do that?

Okay, I think that is, yeah, that's the last 1, And we don't have time for the, well, while I'm switching this, if you want to ask me a question, go ahead.

Then I'm going to go ahead and switch to our next class.

Is it a plant, which is a weed, or was that a product?

Yeah, it's focusing more of its energy on putting energy sources into the soil to try to motivate the soil microbes to help it.

And in the first column, you have it happening.

And that's the big thing that they say is so advantageous to regenerative ag is because you're sequestering carbon.

Well, you can sequester carbon and grow great, too.

Remember he had down there at the bottom, This is where the medicine is?

Soil Fertility Fundamentals: External/Environmental Influences

Okay, so this hour, we're going to look at external and environmental influences.

And the big thing we're going to look at here in this section is water and water quality.

And like I mentioned, I think, when I was commenting about something, Water can be a major problem for you.

And so we need to know how to deal with that.

And it's an external influence, because it comes from a pond, or it comes from a well, or it comes from rainfall.

There's moisture in the soil, but it comes from an external source.

So the things we'll look at will be weather, different weather influences like light, temperature, moisture, wind, and pressure.

And then we're going to look at contaminants that can potentially come in from external influences and then vectors that could bring things into your growing system that you may not want there.

Or they may bring something you do want there.

Well, I was at Eden Valley, but they were only about 5, 200, 5, 300 feet.

But where we lived outside of Colorado Springs, we were at 7, 000 feet in elevation.

And we got 10, 000 foot candles of light on average on a daily basis.

300 days of sunshine, you're closer to the sun because of that higher elevation.

And plants only need about 3, 000 to 4, 000 foot candles of light.

And so that excess light is actually suppressive and stressful on the plants.

So we put in a half acre greenhouse we put in to diffuse that light, at least instead of it being direct radiant light, to diffuse that light and reduce it a little bit from what it was.

And they made a big difference on how the plants grew compared to what we grew outside.

And our raspberry plants that were outside would grow to about 4 to 5 feet.

And our raspberry plants inside that we were irrigating and everything, and I'll tell you why they didn't do much better than this, would go to about 6 feet.

It was a golden raspberry that I had extra, and I just put it in a bag, a grow bag, and I had it set against the wall, just holding on to the plant, you know, in case something died or whatever, and we'd put it in or we'd put it in somewhere else.

And that plant, which was only getting watered by condensation on the side of the greenhouse falling down into this bag, grew 16 feet.

Distilled water can be a problem, too, and we'll get to that.

And the reason that it grew 16 feet and the raspberries I had in the ground, in the greenhouse, only grew to about 6 feet, is because we had water quality problems.

And this was 1 of the situations where God brought me into a situation where I had to learn something about something I didn't know anything about.

And I believe it was so that I could help other people understand, you know, how to deal with these kind of situations.

So we had high sodium water, high bicarbonate water, and we're going to talk about that in just a minute.

So it was really fighting everything we were doing with the soil.

The bicarbonate was locking up the calcium we were putting on, sodium was taking its place.

And remember, I said sodium was also affected soil structure because it actually disperses the soil, and it just plugs it all up and makes it...

If it dries out, it'll be hard as a rock if you have that kind of situation.

I first wasn't aware that that was what was happening, and I kept fighting it with soil chemistry.

So we were putting extra potassium on, we were putting extra calcium on, depending on how the soil tests were coming back and everything.

I finally realized, this is a water problem.

When I started seeing this white powder on my emitters in there, I said, this is something coming in on the water.

And that's when I had to Go back to school to learn about water quality and water issues.

But this raspberry that was in the bag was only getting condensate.

So it was only getting condensed water off the side of the greenhouse.

And the cane was about an inch, inch and a half thick.

It was 16 feet tall, and we harvested about 10 pints of raspberries off of that, I think, that plant.

And I share in that illustration because The potential that we have for to produce with our crops is tremendous.

We're nowhere near the genetic potential that these crops are capable of.

You think that God intended all those flowers, like on a melon plant, all those female flowers that it sets that don�t ever pollinate, what if they all actually pollinated?

What if they all actually matured and produced fruit, good fruit, not fruit that was tasteless and hard and everything like that, but actually produce good fruit.

In fact, actually, I live in an area of Kentucky.

It's east-central Kentucky, and just to the...

We're in kind of a transition spot, And just to the west of us are all these multi-million dollar horse farms.

And just to the east of us are all these Appalachian poverty shacks.

And the county we live in there is fairly poor.

And so here's, and the last thing we'll talk about is a grower's purpose.

How do I grow to produce enough food to be able to sell At a profit to people who don't have very much money.

It's 1 thing if you know if you're a market grower and you have a big metro area or university town or something like that.

Where you've got a different culture and everything like that and people spend all kinds of money on it.

But what if you're in a situation where nobody has the money to spend?

But what If you could actually be Productive enough to actually Get more production out of the Investment that you made so you Could sell it for less money and Still be profitable.

These are the kind of things we Need to figure out.

And the places where people have all kinds of money that they are willing to throw around are pretty soon not going to have all kinds of money to just throw around.

I'll just throw this out there before we move on.

What do you think the world record yield is for potatoes per plant?

The commercial yield is about 2 pounds per plant.

You still wanna stick with your 110 pounds?

100 pounds per plant, compared to the typical commercial yield of 2.

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Series

Soil Fertility Fundamentals

Soil Fertility Fundamentals: External/Environmental Influences

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Level 2 Home & Market Gardeners

Stepping into Hoophouse Growing, Should You Do it? Part 1

59m

Breakout Session 4

The Ideal Soil: Environmental Influences

58m

Advanced Track

Optimizing Your Greenhouse Production Part 1

1h

Soil Fertility

Environmental Influences

48m

Advance Farmers

Integrative Pest Management Part 2

1h 8m

Soil Fertility Advanced

Soil: Environmental Influences

57m

Soil Fertility Fundamentals

Soil Fertility Fundamentals: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

1h 16m

Level 3 Advanced Topics

Weather or Not Part 2

1h 1m

Breakout Session 5

The Ideal Soil: Insects, Disease, & Weeds

56m

Sound Doctrine