#SoilMatters: Soil Management by Nature or Man? - Natural Food and Farming: 1965

In our studies of how Mother Nature was growing crops which were able to protect themselves against pests and disease to survive the ages, and to be available for domestication by man when he took over the soil and crop management, we find that two basic requirements had always been met or fulfilled.

In the first place, rock minerals were weathering in the soil to remind us of the poetic claim that "The Mills of God must grind.” In the second place, the organic matter grown on the soil was naturally put back in place on top or within the soil for its decay there. That served to put microbial life into the soil. It generated the carbonic acid there (and other acids of decay) to break some of the nutrient elements out of the rock more rapidly for them to be caught up and held, or adsorbed, by some of the more stable, weathered, non-nutrient elements like the silicon of the clay. That adsorption holds them for plants services when the plant uses the same kind of carbonic acid to take those nutrients off by trading the hydrogen, or acid, for them.

By means of grinding fresh rock regularly as natural mineral fertilizers in the soil, and by conserving the organic matter to go back to maintain the soil’s humus at higher levels, nature had protected her crops so they grew annually from their own seeds. By a unique self protection they were doing well when man came along to take over what we call “scientific” crop management and “scientific” soil management. Certainly we are not now duplicating those practices in which nature was more successful than we appreciate.

According to our knowledge to date, the soil’s total capacity to hold electrically positive nutrients in available form should have about 60-75% for calcium, 6-12% for magnesium, 3-5% for potassium, and not more than that much of sodium and also all the needed trace elements and non-nutrient hydrogen, or acidity.

Those figures represent the soil’s content of positively charged elements in what, to date, we may consider a balanced plant ration… In our preceding remarks, we have not spoken about the soil’s organic supplies of nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus in the required plant’s ration. We have not mentioned some of the trace elements also connected more actively with the supply of organic matter than with the reserve minerals.

We need to look to the organic matter of the soil to make these last three more essential major nutrient elements available to the crops. We need to remind ourselves that it is the organic matter that makes the surface layer the “living soil” and the “handful of dust” with its power for creating life.

We must not forget that microbes are what make a living soil “alive.” And far more important, we must remember that soil microbes, like all other microbes, eat at the first sitting, or first table. Plants eat at the second. Microbes go first for energy food, since they cannot use the sunshine’s energy directly. Plants go first for “grow” food, since they can use sunshine energy that way.

A sprouting seed “roots” for a living, or for “grow” food first. It puts up its advertising of growth by showing its leaves above the soil in the sunshine second.

Microbes are the decomposers of the organic matter and the conservers of the inorganic fertility, of the nitrogen, of the sulphur and of the phosphorus. Those three elements do not escape so much from a soil which has plenty of organic matter and growing crops to conserve those elements. We need to consider organic matter to conserve, to mobilize and to increase the nitrogen, the sulfur and the phosphorus of the soils, if those are to be fully productive.

Soil microbes oxidize carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus to get energy thereby. It is in their oxidized forms that those elements are taken into the plant. Carbon is taken into the leaves. The others are taken into the plant root and, thus, all are in cycles of re-use.

It was by that more complete recycling for conservation that nature built up the soil in organic matter which we are compelling our microbes to burn out so rapidly when we return primarily chemical salts and little carbon of organic matter by which in this combination for microbial service, these fertility elements must be held in the soil. Plants and microbes must be in symbiotic activity and not in competition for fertility if our productive soils are to be maintained.

Carbon, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus are the negatively charged elements with which the positively charged hydrogen, calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium combine to make the readily soluble inorganic salts. But in those combined forms they are not held by the soil as such. They are ionically injurious to plant roots. They are leached out by percolating rainwater. It is the clay-humus part of the soil which filters the positively charged ions, or elements, out of those salts; much like the household water softener takes the calcium, or lime, hardness out of the water supply. The clay-humus holds them as insoluble, yet available, to plant roots which are trading acid, or hydrogen, for them.

The negatively charged, soluble nitrates, sulfates, phosphates, so oxidized by the microbes, serve as nutrition for them and for the plants to be reduced into the organo-molecular states of living tissue where they are insoluble but functional in large organic molecules and not as salts. On death, they are oxidized again for microbial energy and repeat the cycle.

It is in this natural plan of soil management where we must recognize the real service by the fertility elements of soil, air and water playing their roles in creation before we can take over for wiser management of nature’s part in crop production. Her two phases of management stand out. Nature returned the organic matter as completely as possible, in that she held many of the fertility elements and kept them available. She grew crops where she also added unweathered mineral salts and dusts through winds with their storms of such and by overflowing waters with their inwash of deposited minerals.

By that simple, two-phase procedure of fertility management, nature had many different crops of healthy plants here for man when he arrived. But each crop was on its own particularly suitable soil in its specific climatic, geo-chemical and balanced fertility setting with man and warm-blooded animals on the high-calcium soils. We have not yet included calcium as the foremost fertility element when we list the contents of commercial fertilizers, for the inspector, even though we lime the soil to combat its acidity and, thereby, work against the very mechanism by which the plant roots feed our crops.