The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e76: Winter bale-grazing, biodegradable mulch research, amending poor soil

Episode Date: March 19, 2016

This episode we're back to the practical aspects of farming. I speak with: Blake Hall of Prairie Gold Meats about his Winter bale-grazing program. PhD Candidate Shuresh Ghimire of Washington State University about his research on biodegradable mulches for field crops. Market Gardener Matt Coffay of Second Spring Market Garden about the value of regular soil testing and how he dealt with some really, really poor soil he leased.

This is the Ruminant Podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. The Ruminant Podcast and blog wonders what good farming looks like and aims to help farmers and gardeners share insights with each other. At theruminant.ca, you'll find show notes for each episode of the podcast as well as the odd essay, book review, and photo-based blog post. You can email me, editor at theruminant.ca, I'm at ruminantblog on Twitter, or search The Ruminant on Facebook.

Okay, on with the show. Hey folks, it's Jordan. Okay, so last week's episode was a longer conversation focused on ideas and politics, which means that this week I zoom in with some short conversations on the practical aspects of farming. This time, I've got three voices lined up for you to hear. First, I speak with Blake Hall of Prairie Gold Meats in Red Deer, Alberta. Blake is a pastured livestock guy who has had some success with his winter round bale grazing program, and he joined me to talk about it. After that, you'll hear from Suresh Ghimri, a PhD candidate at Washington State University,

who joined me to talk about his research on biodegradable plastic mulches for ground crops. Finally, market gardener Matt Coffey of Second Spring Market Garden in North Carolina joins me to talk about how he improved the very poor soil he started out with on his first lease. All right, so first up, this guy. My name's Blake Hall. My wife and I run Prairie Gold Pastured Beets. We're on rented land at Tamara Ranch, just south of Red Deer in Alberta. We direct market grass-finished beef, pastured pork and lamb,

and sell eggs into Red Deer in Calgary. Blake Hall, thanks a lot for joining me on the Remnant Podcast. My pleasure. Blake, I'm really thanks a lot for joining me on the Remnant Podcast. My pleasure. Blake, I'm really excited that you agreed to come on the show and perhaps come back again, but tonight I just want to talk to you about winter bale grazing. That sounds awesome. Jordan, bale grazing is the best.

Okay. Yeah, I can go into the many phases of why it's the best. Okay, so you are a dedicated pastured livestock guy, but you live in Alberta, and a lot of the winter I'm assuming at the very least the vegetation in your fields is dormant, but a lot of the time you have snow. So I assume that's why you're doing bale grazing in the winter, am I correct? Yeah, that's right. I assume that's why you're doing bale grazing in the winter, am I correct?

Yeah, that's right. Not too far east of Red Deer, when it first got settled, they thought it might be the next great rangeland, like Texas or Kansas. And maybe nine years out of ten, that's true, because we're in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains, so we don't get all that much moisture. And the native grasses would basically freeze dry come winter and so the nutrition stays relatively high especially in the native species that's how the bison were able to thrive

for so long so maybe nine years out of ten you can get away with it but then that one year out of ten where you get a snow cover, the settlers would lose a great portion of their stock. And so, yeah, we rely on winter feed as insurance to get through. We stockpile quite a bit of grass so we can graze through the shoulder seasons. We also plant some different cocktail mixes so we can extend our grazing season but we're not willing to go hay free in this climate just yet. Okay so but is that to suggest that you're only doing bale grazing in a major way only once every few years or do you find you're just doing it every year at points during the winter? Sorry yeah we do it every year that's just to say that

we don't want this each winter to be the one year out of 10 and so as a result we always buy in winter feed and because it you know realistically it's not going to keep all that well past one or two years so we opt to feed it out partly because bale grazing is such an awesome soil builder and fertility booster that we can help remediate poor spots of the farm or improve our best spots through bale grazing. Let's talk about orientation of the bale. Like you can either place the bale down on the side of the bale as if you were going to roll the bale. So these are big round bales. bale as if you were going to roll the bale so these are big round bales um but or you can place it so that it's on kind of its end so that you wouldn't be rolling it because it's essentially on its edge which way is better yeah it's tempting to put it on its edge so that you can cut the

strings off and uh as you go through the winter so that if you do have any carryover then your bales still have the strings on them and you can move them around after but we opt to put them on their round side the way they come out of the baler and cut all the strings in the fall and the reason for that is they just weather way better and having their core exposed to the elements and what I found is that if it's on its edge the cattle have or the sheep have a really easy time tromping the outer layers of the bale down and they end up stepping on it fouling a lot more of the hay so by putting on its round side the cattle will have to work a little bit harder to get into the bale and they don't spoil as much. Right. Okay. So that makes sense. And while we're on the topic, later in your webinar, you talked briefly about how you

actually place the bales to provide a bit of shelter for your animals. Can you just talk about bale placement in general? Yeah, sure. So basically, in the fall, we make about 30% of our own hay and then we buy in the rest. So once we start buying in our feed, rather than stacking it in a hay yard, we just have it delivered right into the field. And it takes me a day or two on the tractor to get it placed in a huge grid pattern. And I'd say the bale placing is probably 10 meters in all directions around each bale. And that gives enough room for the cattle to kind of be butt to butt between one bale and the next.

So they're not bumping into each other, bumping into the electric fence. And the bales aren't spaced so far that you're getting really patchy distribution of nutrients. And then we're a little bit strategic in how we so then we'll use an electric fence to ration how the bales to the cattle so i'll set up a fence they'll get one row of bales in the grid and i'll make the grid such that one row will last them about a week and typically depends on what your setup is like how you're positioned with wind breaks and whatnot. Wind is our main enemy in the cold weather here. The cattle can handle pretty cold temperatures, but as long as they've got a wind break,

they'll do just fine without a full enclosure or a barn to go into. And so what we've done in the past, if we've got them in an open field, is we'll have our bale set out in a grid pattern and we'll graze from south to north so that when there's bad weather that comes in, the cattle have the whole bale grazing patch to act as a buffer. And it's pretty amazing. You'll go out in a blizzard and the little calves will be, like we don't, we keep the calves with their mums through the winter and those calves will be nestled in completely out of the out of the wind and sitting in the bale and they're just totally comfortable so it's been a real win for us

so i guess a takeaway point given that people in different areas are going to have different prevailing winds is to perhaps be thoughtful about the placement so that you maximize the chance that the livestock can benefit from a windbreak. Yeah, absolutely. Or, you know, you can consider putting portable windbreaks out or, yeah, it's worth being mindful in your bale placement what, you know, what your winter wet is going to look like and how that's going to affect your strategy. Okay, so now let's move on to straw mulch because you made some comments that I heard

you talk about in terms of you've started to introduce, I think you're laying down straw mulch underneath the bales or you've just got bales of straw out there. Can you explain what you're doing with straw and why you were doing it? Yeah, I've got both. I started putting out straw bales with the hay. So if I had, let's say, a dozen bales in one week's worth of feed, I would maybe add one more bale of straw. Straw in our region is plentiful and it's cheap.

It's a great source of carbon. It's a great source of bedding. So I put it out there so the cattle can bed down in it and so they've got a little extra to chew on when it gets really cold the cattle crave a higher fiber because it really fires up their rumen and actually creates quite a bit of heat so you'll notice when it gets below minus 20 they'll start eating quite a bit more and they'll especially go after the straw so i put that bale out and that was a win but i got an idea from my friend peter lundgaard in the peace country um this year because he's an avid composter and so after he's also a bale grazer and after bale

grazing in the spring he'll push up all the residue and compost it and so what he's done because he's in a region similar to us in terms of rainfall it's fairly dry and so water can be a limiting factor in a composting program and so he started rolling out straw bales first and then placing his hay bales for the bale grazing on top of the straw. So that way he's able to leverage all the precipitation that falls as snow in the winter. When it thaws in the spring it just soaks into that straw and it provides the needed moisture to start the compost pile. So we've started doing that and it's been a win on many fronts, doing that and it's been a win on many fronts partly for the reasons I just mentioned but also like it keeps the hay up off the ground so we have very little

spoilage that way and what I'm finding is you know typically the cattle will graze their bale down to the ground but there's always a little bit of residue left behind and that's unavoidable and that we factor in when we budget for how much feed we're going to need. But what I'm finding now that I'm putting straw underneath is because there's about a foot of mulch under, the cattle eat the hay down into the straw. And there's almost like almost 100% consumption of the hay, which is a huge saving for us. And not to mention that there's that much more bedding for the cattle to lay down in. 100% consumption of the hay, which is a huge saving for us. And not to mention that there's that much more bedding for the cattle to lay down in.

And that bedding is huge in terms of animal performance through the winter. And I'm really excited to see what happens this spring with an even layer of straw and manure over this whole bale grazing patch. Well, that was another thing you mentioned is that when you're going to bale graze, a heavy load of manure in a more concentrated area kind of is inevitable. But so you were thinking that the straw would also just add more carbon to balance out the heavy manure load in terms of eventual, I guess, composting on site. Exactly right. Yeah, that's where the soil building potential of

bale grazing really starts to shine. It's just really fun to go around in the season following bale grazing two and three years later and digging holes and doing earthworm counts and doing yield tests. And it's really validating. The main detractors of bale grazing say, you know, why do you do that? You're so lazy. Oh, you're wasting so much feed. But the fertility boost you get from each bale is huge. And then that brings up a whole other side. I don't know if we have time to get into it, but labor saving side like i i do about 30 minutes of labor per week through

the winter compared to my neighbor who fires up the tractor every morning and hooks onto the silage wagon and spends an hour mixing silage and grain and feeding it out in his feedlot you know not to not to knock that style of production but that's at least a half a day just to feed cattle, whereas I can either do my business planning for the year ahead or focus on marketing and processing or take an off-farm job and work 40 hours a week and make that extra money in the winter when things are slow on the farm. Or hell, even give a few minutes of time to a podcast

with listeners who really appreciate hearing what you have to say yeah or or develop my own podcasting habit and take in awesome content like that found in the ruminant what a guy what a guy okay okay so let's uh we're almost done i just want to move to the spring now and talk a little bit about the benefits of of this system i guess um let's start with, I don't know, you mentioned pigs as well. So you've actually placed pigs in the spring, you've placed pigs where the bale grazing was for the cattle. And what did you, how did that work out? Yeah, that's right. Well, last year was our first year putting the straw out with the hay.

And in the spring, I was a little daunted by how much residual matter was left like there was a lot of straw left over and so we turned our pigs out into the bale grazing patch just to let them root through and find any uh you know spoiled hay that was left over to root through the manure to root through the straw and find any sour grain kernels that might be left. So that was great. They turned everything over. They rooted it up without breaking the crown of the perennial pasture that was underneath the pails, like when we first placed them.

We placed them in our pasture rotation. So that was the key with the pigs was not to leave them there long enough that they started to root into the actual soil, but just to get them to root up the residual material from the bale grazing. So I had them in there for about two weeks. Of course, that's relative to how much bale grazing you've got out there, how many pigs you've got, etc. you've got out there how many pigs you've got etc then i came in with a no-till seed drill and sewed in a cocktail mix that was really high in brassicas and this was something that gabe brown suggested from north dakota he did a speaking tour through here and that's where this uh the idea was well for me was born anyway i think this is something he's been doing for a while where he's so a cocktail mix and high in brassicas because brassicas are heavy feeders

and so they need quite a bit of nitrogen but they also need the balanced carbon to nitrogen ratio and so as a result they digest a huge amount of litter and i thought okay i've got all this straw here all this hay residue uh this might be the ticket for dealing with it and it was just great like we had a bit of a drought this spring germination wasn't fantastic but where the bales were all that thatch kept the soil moisture high enough to allow for germination and we had a hundred percent ground cover which if you're bale grazing, and you'll find that come spring, if you're not putting anything in, you typically won't have 100% ground cover because of that thatch layer. It'll choke out the grass for the next season.

Anyway, so these annuals came up, and we had no weed pressure as a result, 100% ground cover, and those brassicas keep their feed value after freeze-up, so we used it as fall grazing, and we grazed it down to the ground, and it was just amazing. All that straw had been digested, and underneath it just looked like the rest of the ranch, just a perennial stand of grasses and legumes that were coming up.

It was just really a win. So I'm very excited to see how the yield compares next year from where we had bale grazed two years prior to where we have never bale grazed. And last question, I guess, Blake. i have to assume you're not producing the grain that produced the straw you're bringing the straw in is that correct yeah that's right so i i guess i guess i mean i would assume that a lot of places where people are doing pastured livestock there's probably a decent supply of straw nearby but but all of this all of these tips kind of kind of necessitate that you need uh affordable

access to to straw to make this work yeah undoubtedly it's like uh like anything you've got to build a system that works in your climate with your rural farm economy and as it happens where we are is a very big grain producing area so everybody and their dog has all the grain farming equipment and so straw is plentiful and it's cheap and it's fairly easy to find non-desiccated straw and to have it delivered and everything and so maybe if you're farming on salt spring island straw in your bale grazing program might not be a great addition but maybe maybe there's something else. That's right. Yeah, so this is the system that works for us. I would think it would work across the prairies. I've got friends that have tried bale grazing in eastern Ontario,

and it was a disaster because the freeze-thaw cycle is so much stronger there where they'll have a big thaw and their bales will thaw out and all the snow will thaw and melt and then freeze back up. And you've got these big green ice cubes sitting in your field that the cattle can't get into anymore. I mean, that's a pretty tough situation to find yourself in. So, you know, I don't know that it's prescriptive everywhere, but certainly it's been a success for us. Well, Blake Hall, I'm hoping that this is the start of a wonderful podcast relationship between the two of us. And I really appreciate you coming on the show today.

Jordan, I really appreciate the opportunity and the feeling is mutual. Hello, I am Suresh Khamire. I'm a PhD student at Washington State University. I am working on biodegradable plastic molds with Dr. Carol Miles at Northwestern Research and Extension Center, Washington. Suresh, thank you very much for joining me on the Ruminant Podcast. Thank you. Suresh, you are studying the use of biodegradable mulches for horticultural purposes. And I'm wondering if we could start by talking about why you're studying that.

Like, maybe we could talk a bit about the use of those mulches in the industry and some of the problems that I guess have existed that led to you doing this research. Sure. First of all, the use of mulches, generally, polluting mulches in agriculture has greatly increased in the last two decades throughout the world, not only in the U.S., because farmers use mulch to reduce weed pressure, moderate soil temperature, conserve soil moisture, and which result into the higher crop yield. However, disposal of used polythene molds causes pollution and has created a threat to soil and environment. So there is a need to develop an alternative that can function as polythene molds at the same time biodegrades into the soil after uses

and will not be a problem to soil health and ecology. So we are working on to identify potential biodegradable mulches that can function as PE and at the same time biodegrade into the soil without leaving any harmful effect. You tell me if I'm wrong, but the first generation of biodegradable mulches have proven to be a problem because they're not fully breaking down properly in the soil. Is that right? During the late 1980s, they came into market, but they were not totally biodegradable, which created more problems to the farmer. They thought the mulch would biodegrade into the field

and they wouldn't need to remove and dispose but at that time it didn't biodegrade very good and created the problem because you can't easily pull or remove the molasses if it's partially degraded it's worse in the situation so at first it didn't biodegrade, and there has been much of research done to develop biodegradable mulches that can actually biodegrade into the soil. So as you said, at first it was not fully biodegradable. Instead it was oxo-degradable, which means

in the presence of oxygen, it biodegraded. But when you till into the soil, there would be less availability of oxygen, and the process is reduced, and then the biodegradation cannot occur quickly. Right, right. And I mean, I know it was a bad enough problem that up here in Canada, Suresh, the Canadian organic overseers in Canada, the Canadian organic regime, it's called, recently banned the use of biodegradable mulches because of the discovery that they were not fully biodegrading in soil. So it sounds like your research is coming along at a very good time as part of the effort to develop what I guess we could call the next

generation of biodegradable mulches. Can you tell me a little bit about your research? What are you doing? So now here at Washington State University Research and Extension Center we are testing for biodegradable mulches that are currently available in the market. So we are testing, we are evaluating those mulches in terms of pumpkin fruit yield and quality and biodegradation of those mulches over time. And this experiment will be repeated for four years. We will lay down the mulch each year, fill into the soil for each year, and then we will see if there is any accumulation over time. And does the accumulation affect the crop yield and quality?

And these are the main focus of our research. And I imagine you're using some sort of a control. Are you using traditional non-biodegradable plastic mulch in your trial as well? In terms of measuring yield and quality against the traditional non-biodegradable mulch? Yeah. For the comparison, we have two kinds of control. One is regular black polythene mulch, and the other one is fully biodegradable paper mulch so we can come so that we can compare our result with those two controls so okay i want to ask you to explain let's forget about the certified organic farmer for a moment let's just let's just think about someone who uses organic practices is not certified and is currently using biodegradable plastic mulches

or so-called biodegradable plastic mulches if they're using a mulch that is not fully breaking down in the soil what's wrong with that like what's happening in the soil that that could be problematic you know for the soil or for our food or anything are there negative consequences when this stuff doesn't break down properly? So if it's partially breaking down, a farmer just can't till it down because it will hamper the soil quality. It will hamper the root growth because penetrating through the plastic would be difficult for plants. So the other thing, if you apply chemicals, pesticides to the soil, to the crop, those leftover fragments could be a potential source to capture those chemicals and can be really hazardous.

And then they can be taken to the rivers, ocean, and can be hazardous to the animals, birds. So it's not ecologically sound. And when we talk about the productivity, if you apply the mulch that doesn't break down well, there would be accumulation over time. If you apply for more and more years, there would be accumulation, so the soil quality will be degraded, and eventually the productivity of the soil will be reduced.

Will decline. Okay, interesting. the productivity of the soil will be reduced. Will decline. Okay, interesting. Suresh, what is an acceptable, have you defined or has anyone else defined an acceptable level of decomposition with these mulches? To be considered biodegradable, as per the rule, it should reach at least 90% degradation in the soil within two years or less, according to the international standard. But in our experiment, I just completed the first year of experiment,

and my results showed that some of the mulches degraded quickly. I don't have the full year data because I just took the data immediately after the till down into the soil, so I just have the baseline data. Very soon, at the end of this month or the beginning of the next month, At the end of this month or the beginning of the next month, I'm going to the field and taking those soil samples to see how much the mulch is degrading. So I'll know after a few weeks that how are those mulch performing in the soil. And so what is your hope for your results? Because you mentioned you're actually testing mulches that are on the market, like brand name mulches. If you find that a certain brand performs very, very well, like to an acceptable standard, what is the result is it is it just that we simply your your research advocates purchasing that brand or their broader implications like essentially it becomes an endorsement of whatever process that

that company is using to make their mulch so we are working with a different group of scientists which also include the chemical engineers and i think our result would be more like if any mold contains this particular ingredient, a combination of these resources, like we call it 3D stocks, they can biodegrade quicker than the rest. So we will find that the combination of different kind of polymer will lead into quicker degradation. So it not only will help a particular manufacturer, but also will help all to design a new polymer that can biodegrade into the soil and that ultimately can be used in organic crop production in the U.S. or anywhere else. So our approach will be to help not only a particular manufacturer, but also to design a new polymer that can biodegrade.

What would you recommend to farmers today who want to use mulch, plastic mulch, but do not want to use it, they don't want to use biodegradable mulch, if they can't be sure that it will break down properly? Is your advice to avoid using biodegradable mulches at the moment, or is there a brand out there that you can recommend right now? Right now, until our research is done, I cannot recommend any kind of mulches. Though we see some of the mulches are performing, we think performing better than others. So at this point, I cannot tell anything about the performance of those maltes. So provided you remove all the black plastic from the field, you can use it in organic production.

So you can use the regular black plastic malt and then remove and it will be your, it still will be organic. So for now, I cannot tell much about this. So how can people follow up on your research? I mean, is there something they can be looking at now or down the line? Where will they find information about your results? So I think after a month, I will have one more data series. So I will know which models are performing better in terms of biodegradation in the soil. So we can talk a little bit about these things after a month, I guess.

Well, I'm going to try your full name one more time. Suresh Ghimire, thank you so much for sharing your research with us on the Room in a Podcast. Thank you for calling in here, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my work. I'm Matt Coffey. I'm the owner of Second Spring Market Garden in Asheville, North Carolina. It's an acre-and-a-half diversified vegetable farm, and we do a lot of four season production and run a four season CSA. Matt Coffey, thanks a lot for joining me on the ruminant podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me. So Matt, for this conversation, we're going to talk about soil fertility and general soil health and what you and I have been doing to, I guess, improve or fix our soil year over year. And I previously spoke to you, and you mentioned that when you got to the farm that you're currently on, you had a pretty challenging soil fertility situation. Can you expand on that? Yeah, it's where we're, like our first growing site, the first place that we ever started growing full-time when we showed up, we were dealing with probably the worst soil I've ever seen.

So what had been done was the owner of this land that we were renting had decided that they wanted to flatten the property out to rent it to a farmer. So they hired some construction graders, like a grading crew, and these guys just scraped the topsoil off of the property. So when we got there, we were dealing with this heavy clay, almost subsoil kind of substrate material. And we had to figure out a way to do this intensive, you know, 30-inch bed, market garden-type production in that soil.

So we definitely had our work cut out for us. So you basically got there, and the landlord said, I got good news for you, we fixed the farm for you. Yeah, basically. That's pretty much how it went. Can you give me a summary of how you approached to tackle this challenge? Yeah, absolutely. So what we did was we went ahead and dealing with this really heavy soil, we had somebody come in with a tractor and chisel plow it and just get for us so that it would be a little bit more malleable with the BCS. And then we basically went ahead and BCS-tilled our entire growing area so that it would be easier to shape our bed.

And we shaped our beds with a rotary plow. And once we had these 30-inch beds of this basically like heavy clay, we ended up wheelbarrowing compost directly into the beds. And so we made a very deliberate decision there where we said, okay, we want to add a lot of organic matter to try to prevent the compaction that's going to start happening with the clay when it settles. But we want to be selective about what types of organic matter we're adding.

So we added a large amount of leaf compost because we don't have access to something like peat moss down here in the southeast. So we added about two and a half to three inches of leaf compost to all the beds and tilled that in deep to try to incorporate it, you know, particle by particle with the clay. And then we went back with a very high quality compost that we had tested to, you know, ensure what sort of nutrients we were adding to the soil. And we added about an inch and a half of a really nice compost to the surface and harrowed that into the bed. So we were trying to fix the structure as well as any, you know, nutrient deficiencies that we had at the time. So Matt, at this point I'll ask you, like, did you end up,

when you consider that you first started with kind of a bulking compost and then a more nutrient-dense compost, did you spend a lot of money in the end and were you, did you consider that you first started with kind of a bulking compost and then a more nutrient-dense compost, did you spend a lot of money in the end? And did you find that stressful or were you able to get the stuff for cheap? And how did you feel about what you spent? Well, you know, where we are in North Carolina, we're kind of, you know, things can be a little challenging in the southeast. So we don't have like a municipal composting companies and that sort of stuff here so we we had to look pretty hard to find something in our area that was affordable but also that we

felt good about uh in terms of of what was in it and what the analysis looked like on it so um we did end up spending i think our first year we spent about $4,000, something like that, on compost for an acre and a half. But when you're talking about, you know, grossing over $100,000 an acre, it's okay to make that kind of initial input onto a site, I think. So we felt good about it when we were doing it, and it definitely worked for us so that that's kind of why i was asking matt i think having now five years into my own market garden business i was a lot more gun shy on those kinds of expenses at first but i don't i've since spent quite a bit more you know i've bumped up my yearly uh budget for various kinds of amendments significantly

and i haven't regretted it at all i just just think it's so important to always be trying to improve your soil with whatever options you have. Yeah, and I will say that I completely agree. And I will say that for us at the time, we knew that we had a limited lease on that property. And so we were trying to balance making enough changes to the soil to where it would produce for us the way that we needed it to. We were trying to balance making enough changes to the soil to where it would produce for us the way that we needed it to. We were trying to balance that with not just pouring an endless amount of money into soil that didn't belong to us. But I really strongly feel that once you're on property that you actually own, that no amount of money spent on your soil structure and soil quality is ever wasted. I mean, you just can't.

It's one of my favorite things to spend money on. I always feel good about it because it's the one thing that you can never do too much work to improve, I think. Yeah, right. No, I feel the same way. Okay, so I want to just now just kind of sort of just jump to a different part of soil maintenance. I'm wondering, so you've been on this land for a few years, it sounds like. What did your annual maintenance plan look like? And can you start by saying, do you take annual or do you take regular soil tests?

tests um yeah we do and it's it's kind of it's kind of a a little discouraging to see how small your you know your improvement in organic matter can be when you're when you're starting with something really awful um in terms of soil quality i mean but uh but yeah we do do annual soil tests. And the one nice thing about clay, I guess, is that it's fairly nutrient rich. You know, especially where we are here in the southeast, it's pretty rare to have something like a, you know, boron or molybdenum deficiency or something random like that, because all these minerals and things are generally there in the clay. all these minerals and things are generally there in the clay. But so our annual maintenance is pretty simple. We weren't deficient in any one thing in particular that we really have to worry about with the vegetables that we grow.

So we do a spring amendment of an inch of compost on basically all of our beds. And then in the spring, we add some chicken manure from organically fed laying hens. And we do that in different quantities depending on what's going into the bed. And then we end up generally double or triple cropping all of our beds because we do this four-season CSA. So whenever we do a succession planting, maybe summer or in the fall, we'll do another half an inch of compost on all the beds. maybe summer or in the fall we'll do another half an inch of compost on all the beds so so we managed to turn something that that started out uh pretty awful and into something that was really workable for us you know by by slowly reincorporating organic matter okay well i'm

curious to know your opinion i'll share mine too like i just i was asking about soil tests because i get a sense that there's probably a good number of our colleagues who don't take soil tests very frequently, if at all. And I've personally found it to be super important. And especially, I don't have clay soil and I have a few deficiencies that it's really important, I find, to keep track of. Anyway, I'm an advocate for annual soil tests. They're so cheap and I don't understand why I don't, more people don't do it. And I'm wondering, you already said that, that, that the money you spend on soil is money well spent. What about soil tests?

Do you think it's really crucial or would you disagree with me a little bit? I do. I do think it's important because it forces you to think in a very particular way about what you're doing with your soil. So for me, when I'm out in the field and, you know, I'm working, like the people that work with us, where, you know, we're out there and we're wheelbarrowing compost or we're raking a bed smooth or whatever, you know, prepping a bed to plant into, the whole thing is very intangible, right? Like you're just, you're adding the stuff that you know is good to your soil

and you know that it's going to make it better so that your plants will be healthy and whatever else. But all of that is a little too, it's all a little too vague for me to really feel content with, I guess. So having something like some sort of baseline or frame of reference for what's happening is, for me, really important to actually be able to track, you know, from year to year, an increase in organic matter, just for example. It just reminds you that what you're doing is important, and it gives you a sense of what's really happening, uh, with your soil. And, uh, yeah, I can't, I can't imagine not doing it,

honestly, because like you say, it's so cheap and it's really, it's, it's easy. And, um, yeah, I just can't, I can't imagine not doing it. Yeah. I, I, I agree that even, even the, the, the, just the percent organic matter alone metric is so important. And if you're like me and you have like a number of deficiencies, it's important to be seeing those. And then your cation exchange capacity, which is related largely to percent organic matter, is so crucial. And I've really found it's helped me.

Well, listen, Matt Coffey, this is the first time you've been on. I'm really grateful you came on to talk a bit with me uh thanks so much for joining me on the ruminant podcast yeah absolutely thank you so much for having me here all right so that's it folks i hope you enjoyed that episode oh man it was a it was a long day today and it's late right now i can't wait to to hit the sack um i had to start off my day by driving into town to prove to the police that I'm not a sex offender. I'm not a sex offender, but I recently applied to volunteer with a classroom program that teaches kids about food and agriculture and cooking and stuff.

And I had to fill out a criminal record check. And it turns out there's another guy in Canada who once committed sexual offenses who then stopped reporting his place of residency as he was supposed to. And it turns out we share the same birth date. So I had to go and give my fingerprints to prove that I'm not him.

But the good news is I'm not a sex offender. And I think I will find out, or they will find out in a couple days, that that's the case and I can proceed with some pretty cool volunteer work and with some kids. And then I did some deer fencing and brought it on some peppers and a whole bunch of other good stuff. All right, that's it.

You don't want to hear me. You'd rather hear Vanessa singing the outro song. So I will leave it to her and I will talk to you next week. Have a good one. 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 braces 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 If anything, I commit sexual flatteries, okay? I, I, honestly.