The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e105: Ramial Wood as Soil Amendment and More with Karl Hammer

Episode Date: February 21, 2019

This episode I speak with Karl Hammer, founder of Vermont Compost and all-around soil fertility expert. We focus on the use of wood chips as a soil amendment, and Karl also shares his thoughts about managing soil fertility on bio-intensive market gardens. Show Sponsors: BCS America and Dubois Agrinovation In our conversation, Karl refers to research done by Laval University and Cornell University on this subject. Go google for it! But here's something to get you started.

This episode of the Ruminant Podcast is sponsored in part by BCS America. BCS two-wheel tractors are versatile, maneuverable in tight spaces, lightweight for less compaction, and easy to maintain and repair on farm. Gear-driven and built to last for decades of dependable service. bcsamerica.com This episode is supported by Dubois Egg Renovation. For irrigation supplies, hand tools, mulch films, pest control, containers, and much more, visit DuboisEggRenovation at DuboisEgg.com and get free shipping on orders of $200 or more.

That's D-U-B-O-I-S-A-G.com. I'm Jordan Marr, and this is The Ruminant, a podcast about food politics and food security and the cultural and practical aspects of farming. You can find out more at theruminant.ca or email me, editor at theruminant.ca. I'm on Twitter, at Ruminant Blog, or find me on Facebook. All right, let's do a show. My guest today is Carl Hammer, a farmer and compost making wizard based out of Vermont. Many of you probably know his company, Vermont Compost, which produces potting soil and compost products that have a really good reputation. Speaking of reputations, when I was offered the chance to speak with Carl, I jumped because he's known to be a wealth of information on soil fertility, compost, and related topics. Hey folks, this is Jordan. I'm cutting in at a really late

stage in production with an embarrassing thing to acknowledge. In this episode, you're going to hear Carl and me talk about Ramiel Wood, and I will be explaining what that is, and so will Carl. But the thing I want to say is that until just a moment ago, very late in production, I thought that he had said ranial wood with an N, not ramial wood with an M. So I can't change it. It is way too late for that. But I just want to acknowledge that we're talking about ramial with an M. And since I'm cutting in, I'll take the time to mention that Carl refers to some research that has been done on the use of ramial wood chips in farming systems. And I'm going to try and include a couple of links to some of that research in the show notes for this episode and over at theruminant.ca.

So if you want to do some further reading, of course, you can Google it yourself and you'll have more luck if you Google rameel wood. But you can also you can also try and follow the links that I'll provide. Thanks, folks. On with the episode. In preparing to talk to Carl, I listened to a long-form interview he gave to the late, great Chris Blanchard of the Farmer to Farmer podcast. One topic they covered in that conversation,

which you can still access through your favorite podcasting app, was the use of wood chips in Carl's compost making. Carl and Chris didn't go into great detail, and I've always wanted to learn more about this topic, so I proposed to Carl that we talk about the use of wood biomass as a soil and compost making. Carl and Chris didn't go into great detail, and I've always wanted to learn more about this topic. So I proposed to Carl that we talk about the use of wood biomass as a soil and compost amendment. I started with this question. Why consider using wood chips in your soil or compost at all? Good question. Trees are in many bioregions, the climax soil organizer of the plant system. So plants organize soils. That's their role.

They utilize photosynthesis so that they can remunerate, provide the payment to and for the energy for the soil systems fungus bacteria etc etc are all the the energy comes from photosynthesis so trees are the climax organizer they have the longest residence in soil their roots go to the bedrock typically where possible, and they have extract a lot of mineral benefit, and they have a lot of silica. So all of those things are benefits to impart to an annual or even a shrub or perennial culture. The wood constitutes a big storage of beneficial componentry in a soil system. That's the reason you would add it. It gives you very tangible benefits. It can really benefit soils that are mechanically inadequate. It can help them to be much more erosion-proof,

and it definitely helps the, I mean, it feeds saprophytic fungus, the fungus that eat dead things, not the mycorrhizal fungus, which depends on photosynthesis immediately, but the saprophytic fungus help impart structure to soil. So feeding fungus in the system definitely improves the overall photosynthetic capability of a soil. In my conversation with Carl, I started out using the general term tree biomass and didn't take him long to emphasize that we needed to get a little more technical. Basically, I was like, hey, Carl, want to talk about the internet? And he was like, I'm interested in upgrading my 28.8 kilobaud internet connection to a 1.5 megabit fiber optic T1 line. Will you be able to provide an IP router

that's compatible with my token ring ethernet LAN configuration? Okay, here's what Carl actually said. Any of those words, tree, biomass, or wood chip are relatively non-specific nouns. You really do need specificity. Trees have anatomy. You know, on the outside of a tree is the bark, which I think of as the clothing the tree greets the world with, the raiment. There's the cambium layer where there is so much nutrient density, and then the core of the tree has a much higher percentage of relatively durable carbon structures, lignin, cellulose, and hemicellulose, all of those things. So the age of the tree and the species of the tree all have a lot of impact on the tree's likely effects on soil where it's applied. Okay, to be more specific then,

Carl wanted to talk about the benefits of using ranial wood for amendment purposes, which is the wood produced in a tree's growing tips. He also tends to use the word brushwood as a synonym for ranial wood. Here we're retreading material from the Farmer to Farmer interview, but it serves as a good review and sets us up for more details. Note that when Carl defines ranial wood as 2.5 inch minus, he means shoots and branches that are less than 2.5 inches in diameter.

We'll start about with a concept called ranial, which comes from an old English word which means brushwood, comes from the French root, lemache. And big tree has a very different carbon to nitrogen ratio than brushwood to give you an example of big conifer pine tree two foot through its bollwood may have a cn ratio of 500 parts of carbon to one part of nitrogen the growing tip of that plant the ap apical tip, could have a CN ratio as low as 8 to 1, so a factor of 50. So obviously the ratio of apical tip to bollwood really matters in terms of the bioeffect of that material. So ramial is usually defined as about two and a half inch minus, and it's typically deciduous or hardwood trees, ramial. And the reason I mention ramial is that a lot of ongoing work has been done with supporting vegetable productivity on lands that are tilled annually. In both cases, conclusion over these years is that if you're going to subject soil to

a lot of tilling, you have much more productivity relatively quickly and continuously if you apply about 10 ton of ramial to the acre per year. So on behalf of every lay gardener ever, I asked him the obvious next question. Won't all that wood tie up a lot of available nitrogen as it's broken down? Carl's answer, definitely, which is one of the main reasons why he recommends using rainier wood. It has a lower carbon to nitrogen ratio. Now, one of the things that has to be a cautionary for growers always when we talk about this is that wood chips, depending on what they are, can have a strong initial nitrogen demand and can stunt vegetable growth. So I think it's fair to say that many growers have hurt themselves by applying undifferentiated wood chips and or sawdust without a good protocol to utilize. Same. But this can be learned by doing. It needn't be intimidating. But it's why the emphasis and why growers and why the word rain meal carried weight when, you know, back when people knew that brushwood had

a very different fertility effect. In fact, he told me that rain meal wood chipped to the appropriate size can even be added to your compost piles and allowed to self-finish without turning. Anyway, even using rain meal, Carl explained that the ideal situation when adding chips to your soil is to add it to your cover crops rather than alongside a market crop. You know, I would encourage people to consider using the, if they're going to use an uncomposted wood directly in soil, they should put it on in relatively small applications and they should intend to put it on into a legume that they're growing as a cover crop. Ah, okay, okay. Rather than try to plant the onions right in where you put the wood chips.

The principle that you need to understand is that bacteria will be fed ahead of a plant, typically. So if bacteria need available nitrogen for reproductive reasons and you have a lot of bacteria they can in the short term prevent a plant from getting sufficient nitrogen um so you know that that's a thing that grow that growers can do to themselves that i'll give you an example i was probably 20 20 years old. I cleared a piece of land. We logged it. It was all softwood. So we took the spruce and fir, anything suitable, and sold it.

And I had this Valby chipper. So we chipped everything else. Anything that couldn't be sold as a log was chipped because we didn't want to burn anything anymore because we didn't want to. We wanted a longer-term carbon benefit than the quick nutrient blast of ash. And we had an unbalanced market for broccoli. Broccoli was one of the big products on our farm. We were wholesaling broccoli, and we needed rotation space and that's why we're clearing these woods and you know i decided that all right i'll we'll just chip everything and spread it and then i will apply at a neighbor who was not keeping up older folks not keeping up with

their spreading their cow manure i would apply uh you know 40 or 50 tons to the acre of uncomposted green cow manure from the winter before, with the notion that that would all balance as numbers. And in fact, on paper, the numbers seem to me to be appropriate, but time was missing. And so you could see beautiful broccoli plants marching out across the field adjacent. And they get to the, you could see the line exactly where they went out into the field, stunted little purple things. They looked like there was no phosphorus. It was a total catastrophe, okay?

And I said, okay, there's a textbook event, basically, and planted a legume. okay, there's a textbook event, basically, and planted a legume. I drilled in vetch, I think, and clover and possibly some alfalfa, whatever I had around. And the following year, it grew a beautiful crop of fantastic crop of broccoli. Okay. But in the short term, I had, I had starved that crop because of the imbalance of it. So in moderation is the trick and or composting. Today's episode is supported by BCS America. BCS two wheel tractors are often mistaken for just a rototiller, which is really funny to me because I own a BCS and four attachments, and the tiller attachment is probably the one I use the least on my five

acre market garden. I invested in a BCS just ahead of my second year in business. That was six years ago, and I still consider it the most important investment I made for my farm. Check out bcsamerica.com to see the full lineup of tractors and attachments, plus video of the BCS in action. bcsamerica.com. And thanks to BCS for their support. This episode is supported by Dubois Ag Renovation. Renowned for their customer service, Dubois can be your one-stop shop for tools and supplies for the modern farm and market garden. Irrigation supplies, hand tools, pest control, mulch films, containers, and on and on. Visit them at DuboisAg.com and get free shipping on orders of $200 or more. As a market gardener myself, I've benefited from their huge selection and it's really easy to get someone on the phone

to ask questions and build an order. That's DuboisAg.com. Thanks to Dubois for their support. Hey there, one more note while we're talking about show support. Producing this podcast is a ton of work, so if you're enjoying it, please consider supporting it. You can do so at theruminant.ca slash gift registry. That's theruminant.ca slash gift registry. Thanks folks. Okay, so let's review. Carl thinks that wood chips, and ideally, ranial wood chips from hardwood trees, can be a very effective soil amendment, either added directly or as an ingredient in your compost. By the way, I asked Carl why hardwood

over softwood ranial, and he told me that one reason is that you tend to see a narrower carbon to nitrogen ratio in hardwood ranial. Anyway, Carl says that your soil can benefit from up to 10 tons per acre per year of the stuff, but ideally not if you're going to grow a market crop there right away. Another point Carl made is that you really need to make an amendment plan based on what's available to you. Carl actually stressed this a few different ways during our conversation. One thing that stood out to me actually is Carl's emphasis on practices and strategies for his business that are efficient for his context. When he says that chipped hardwood ranial is a deal, he assumes you can get or make the stuff affordably. Here's Carl again. You know, we haven't started to talk about cost and benefit at all yet, which obviously at some point becomes relevant, how to actually,

what does it cost to get this stuff home and what kind of manipulation ought it to have. And those all affect the value to the farm. We are able to get literally thousands of yards of wood chips a year because we're a convenient dump on Main Street here. year because we're convenient dump on Main Street here. People bring us, the tree services bring us a lot of wood chip. In our case and in our practice, we utilize that wood chip for a lot of things that are, those wood chips really don't find their way into compost if they do typically for four years or so. But that's not to say you couldn't utilize such wood chips much more quickly if that

was the resource you had and you wanted to use it appropriately in market gardening. So finding other things to blend with those wood chips might give you much better efficacy and protect you from some of the potential consequences of overindulging in raw wood chips in market gardening. So, if you can't get hardwood ranial chips cheaply, you need to adapt your plan. Use softwood if that's all you've got, or maybe don't plan to use wood chips at all if you're farming on Easter Island or something. When Carl found out that I would likely need to apply wood chips to soil actively growing market crops because I don't leave much land fallow each year, he suggested I try putting them in the pathways in between beds. So actually, see, that's where I would start putting rain meal actually pretty substantially is in those pathways.

And even trying to develop some composting in your, you know, composting trash in your betweens because you're trafficking that and you're scratching it. You're probably doing various things to try to keep it from becoming, having invasive weeds, right? Exactly. Yeah, so trafficking your wood is a really good way to, and by the way, credit to Albert Howard again, that in Indore they established,

and Indore was a place, but also in the tea plantation in Sri Lanka that he managed, they had cartage roads, and they harvested sun hemp, which is a tropical legume, and they'd lay the sun hemp, they'd run it in the margins of the farm, and out, not where the tea was, but they had places where they could vigorously grow this very productive legume, and they would cut it as, you know, tall pieces of shrubbery, and they would lay it across the stone roadway and travel it with their oxen

so that it was constantly getting traveled and trafficked and broken. And so that's another strategy on certain kinds of small farms with brushwood, if you don't want to invest in the chipping technology, is to literally traffic it into soil. I'm not sure that that's – we might be off in the weeds again for the market gardener. But there's a – in the betweens, and then it can be pulled up into the beds as it ages. And you can grow, actually, it's an opportunity to put some legumes to work and have the wood prevent them from getting so rooted that they

can't be disrupted. Right. Finally, he stressed the importance of the right size wood chips, and also mentioned a couple options for blending them with other ingredients before application. Yeah, well, I would advocate that, you know that to the extent that people can get small diameter chips, ramial wood, and much of what's available from landscape work is small diameter stuff. And certainly from power line clearing, that's usually small diameter stuff because it's regularly harvested. So it really becomes like coppice wood. And then utilize it carefully, no more than 10-ton acre.

And if possible, blend it with other beneficial, a compost of some kind. If you have access to leaves, blending wood chips with leaves, and if you have the opportunity to tumble, if you have a bucket loader and you can tumble it and get a little heat before you spread it, that's a good thing to do because it makes the lignin. And wood in the right amounts, and this is why I mentioned at the beginning of this the Cornell and Laval work, the soil system can usually kind of manage. I mean, this is where they were teetering on the question of when would you have nitrogen demand.

And I would encourage anybody to go look at the work because it was voluminous with a lot of different things tried. And, you know, the takeaway that I have these years later from I read it in a while but was that basically you could if you were opening soil for vegetable intensive vegetable production you could safely put ten ton of fresh ramial wood chip out every year and never and and that that would sustain your your productivity over decades um in that circumstance because it provided enough uh uh added carbon and durable carbon structures to really improve the outcomes over time. So 10-ton acre, which is not a lot of ground coverage, right? That's not like mulching something.

I mean, you see the wood, but it wouldn't look like it was covering the ground at all. But can we break that down a bit? Are you essentially saying that if you happen to have access to decent ranial wood, and I think just referencing an earlier part of our conversation, deciduous, ideally, and let's say it's a relatively small chip that that you could be directly applying just scattering

at that rate for an enormous benefit yeah okay yes you could and i have done that everything matters and and the variables are substantial so at a certain point you kind of get something that seems to be working and that you trial and um and and then you try to adhere to that even though the climate changes you know uh you can be buying bark from somewhere and they can get a different debarker and it will actually start to have a very different ratio of wood, you know, bollwood, as you would call it, to bark. And those anatomies matter. At this point in our conversation, we moved on to another topic. I really wanted to ask Carl for some of his thoughts about the modern biointensive market gardening methods

championed by people like Jean-Martin Fortier and practiced poorly by chubby podcast hosts. Carl's a guy who's devoted his life to improving soil and building compost, so I asked him to share some of his thoughts about the notion of exploding lots and lots of vegetables out of small spaces and relying on off-farm fertility to keep the soil happy. Here's what he said first. off-farm fertility to keep the soil happy. Here's what he said first. Market gardening, okay, so here's a sort of slogan. Arable takes, sod makes.

Have you ever heard that? It's an old one. No. It's kind of a chestnut. Arable takes, sod makes. This is about soil, okay? So the market gardener typically and historically has been willing to burn soil to get produce, right, and has traditionally needed to put a lot of effort into putting back. Then along came chemicals, right?

So market gardeners traditionally live near eaters. Eaters actually waste things. Waste is a verb, not a noun, okay? It's a set of choices. And one of the tricks about getting these elevated production levels, and Jean-Martin talks about this a lot, is that you've got to get some actual stuff to put back because you don't have the timescale luxury to really grow all your fertility in most market gardening circumstances.

Right. Now, if you're in the middle of the woods, you can actually go harvest it out of the woods. And and, you know, this is back to the why do animals matter even if you're not going to keep the animals oh my god is it easier to maintain fertility in a market gardening system with animals involved even relatively small amounts and you know it can be even wild animals we we haven't i've been really wanting to understand how to calculate the contribution of birds like wild turkeys, where we sometimes have 60 or 70 of these huge animals work in a windrow. And they're making a significant contribution, not only in volume, which is small relatively, not only in volume, which is small relatively, but each manure is a different bolus of biota contributing to more diversity in the compost making.

And we know over and over again, as a rule of biology generally, that more diversity increases productivity. So, you know, we can accept that and kind of keep saying that poem to ourselves, that we want to welcome, we want to engage with the ecology that surrounds us and support the friendlinesses with our, does that make any sense? It sure does, Carl. It sure does. But I also wanted to know if he was concerned, as in concerned that fertility replacement is being overlooked in the biointensive model. I mean, Jean Martin certainly doesn't overlook it in his book, The Market Gardener. But as a grower myself, I also know how easy it is to let your fertility plan slide a bit because you're just so dang busy. And meanwhile, you're asking a

lot from your soil. Well, sustainability and profitability concern me. Sustainability of the soil in the practice, of course, should concern us all. Sometimes I think of the compost maker I've described as the thin brown line connecting specialized husbandry to specialized horticulture. specialized husbandry to specialized horticulture okay you know compost man like it's like a brown streak uh yeah like a streak of shit yeah so general farms of the night of at the turn of the 19th century 1900 anywhere in north america european uh you European, influenced, still peasant-informed from the old country a bit, but production agriculture still had, on general farms, had equines for power, typically did have cattle of some kind, typically did have small ruminants and often had poultry. If I were the czar of small farming, I would demand of most market gardens that they start

with chickens or get a neighbor who has chickens. First of all, chickens produce food that you don't need teeth to eat every day of the year, right? Eggs. The foundation of traditional market farming was equine power, right? The French intensive gardeners, New York City, New Jersey, they all hauled drayage manure back to the farm going home from bringing in the vegetables right so these systems were driven by actually hay fields further out because of all of the uh the moving of goods around had this manure source that primed the pump for market gardening and for hotbeds and for all of those things so i would encourage market gardeners that want to see their soil,

want to leave their soil to their progeny in better shape, yeah, get in the flow of some animal manure because that's one of the main magic sauces. It really is. It does, but it just strikes me that this kind of orientation, there's nothing inherently wrong with dividing up, you know, the output of different farms and specialization. But it just seems to me it does put a lot of pressure on that thin brown line, that it depends on really good compost being made if it's going to be imported onto the farm. Well, and the distribution, you know, this is one of the things in terms of food security in communities, okay? Frankly, I think eggs, and we have produced eggs for sale on our

farm on Main Street in the capital city every day of every year since 98. We have produced eggs for sale on that farm, okay? It's now, whatever that that is 21 years of continuous production of eggs without purchasing grain for those animals on the fruit of the the surfeit of a combination of community discarded food and cattle manure and equine manure and spoke crops from neighboring enterprises so between stables and dairy farms and all of that and and and are of course are we develop the enterprise of producing media

for sale adam added at a gave us margin way beyond frankly that you know the the eggs are, over time, somewhat like karma yoga. They've paid wages to people. They've helped to improve the quality of the compost. And we've all been eating eggs. I personally, in 20 years, calculate I've probably eaten 20,000 eggs.

Because in our world, when you're hungry, there's eggs. You don't need teeth to eat them babies old people they can be laid every day of the year in a place where it's frequently snow on the ground very tiny amounts of additional life really you know unlike they don't photosynthesize they hormonal trigger so we can input light to really control egg supply from a from a food safety point of view in a community and at the the end, you get to eat the chicken. Not to utilize them is kind of nuts. And I don't understand why more utilization of birds to drive the fertility for market gardening.

I mean, you know, yeah, I would want every market gardener to say, the reason we don't do this is we can't because. Now, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not by much, really. Do you think it is sufficient for a gardener like me to use a standard soil test as a report card to tell me if I'm moving in the right direction as far as caring for the soil? Well, soil testing is a very good subject, perhaps. Is it a sufficient report card? Well, you know, we do a lot of soil, we do a lot of plant trials, okay, in media. And one of the things over time I've learned to think about that is that

ultimately, and frequently in our case, we're making entire media, which is, you know, has a certain hubris. We're going to assemble all the things. A human cannot make a soil. We can merely, you know, participate in the mystery. We can curate a soil. But we actually make a soil. We can merely participate in the mystery. We can curate a soil. But we actually make these decisions. We assemble ingredients. And then we always ask plants about how they're feeling about it because our client is really the plant. The grower is the middle person who may or may not sign the check

but the client is the plant and we would rather ask plants at the we do a lot of lab work too more to see if something radical might be changing but i would much rather see excellent plants and dubious labs than sketchy plants and labs that are saying, no, everything's fine. And I have seen both circumstances. So, you know, you need the feedback from plants to know how you're doing over time. And growers, of course, if they're paying attention, do get that. But I would agree that many growers are are trying to buy their fertility in a bag they're trying to manage they you know market

gardeners get a lot of training in marketing in making sure you have a market in all of that stuff and presentation and rarely have a lot of extra um time in their lives. So the fertility thing is often, you know, okay, if I go to a farmer's market and I see that people who are growing onions in a transplant culture are selling onions that you can almost touch your thumb and forefinger on the onion, right? Not quite. Instead of onions that are hard put put with to you know get your middle finger and your your thumbs you know you should be able to put both i mean that tells me that their fertility is challenged and you know i look at onions because this is directly at profitability, really directly at their profitability.

So, you know, it's hard to – for most growers, it would be much better to farm less land and have it be highly productive. And that's part of the principle that john martin is teaching which is to get very intensive with your production well here's a concern i have a lot of people are looking for the goal of a rule a set of rules that will solve all their problems and and and sometimes that's helpful to have certain kinds of rules but really starting to visualize the root shape and mass and what's happening down there is good discipline for growers. And sometimes it makes sense to give plants more space rather than less for productivity.

And there's actually very good science about that. And I see people often crowding themselves and hindering themselves that way in intensive gardening. And ask the plants. Ask your plants. If you're making a compost and you want it to germinate plants and be a kind of plant, put some seeds in it, stick it in a plastic bag in your pocket, and see how the seedlings look. Ask plants a lot.

And, you know, plants are great composting mechanics. So plants will support the fungus that will make the lignin and cellulose structure. So, you know, a pile of brush with a pile of wood chips and some legumes growing on it and a little bit of compost to get the seeds started and then pay attention and harvest it when it's been growing for a while. Watch what the roots are doing. Carl Hammer, it has been an absolute pleasure to talk to you today, and I just want to thank you again for coming on the show.

And thank you for having me. You know, these subjects fascinate me, and any one of them could be the subject of more conversation when you're ready. All right. So that is episode two of a batch of five episodes that are being released all at once or pretty much all at once over the space of 24 hours. And I hope you enjoyed it. So go look for Vermont compost and and Carl Hammer if you want to

find out more about him and it. Thanks to the show sponsors today, BCS America and Dubois Agri-Innovation and I'll be talking to you very soon. I have to keep working away at uploading these things and I'm having a good time. I hope you are. You can always let me know what you think at editor at theruminant.ca. Thanks folks. Right outside of the city's reaches, we'll live off chestnuts, spring water, and peaches. We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves and live life like it was meant to be. Because why would we live in a place that don't want us A place that is trying to bleed us dry We could be happy with life in the country with salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands. I've been doing a lot of thinking, some real soul searching, and here's my final resolve I don't need a big old house

Or some fancy car To keep my love going strong So we'll run right out Into the wilds and graces We'll keep close quarters With gentle faces And live next door To the birds and the bees

and live life like it was meant to be ba ba ba da ba ba ba ba ba da da da ha ha

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