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During the past 50 years, standard
farming practices have relied on chemical fertilizers or manure
to improve soil fertility and crop yields, but a growing number
of farmers and ranchers are becoming disillusioned with results.
Excess application of commercial fertilizer or even too much
manure can be detrimental to soil and plants, run-off can
contribute to water pollution, manure may spread weed seeds or
disease pathogens, etc. Some people are looking at alternative
ways to enhance soil health and production on fields and
pastures, especially since commercial fertilizer has suddenly
become much more expensive.
A number of products are available
for improving soil quality and fertility. Several companies
market soil-enhancing additives. For instance, Bio-Ag (located
at Coaldale, near Lethbridge, Alberta) sells a product called
Black Earth (a trade name for several products made from
humalite or humate). Agri-Boost Inc is another company (located
at Ludac, Alberta), selling a patented organic soil amendment.
Agri-Boost was begun by Sam
Lentz, who does reclamation work on abandoned oil well sites. “I
am not a farmer; I work for the oil companies. This is where I
came up with the idea of using pelleted alfalfa (with a few
other things added) rather than chemicals or manure, and we
tried it on our reclamation projects and it worked awesomely,”
says Sam. He then became involved with producing the soil
enhancement product for farms and gardens, and was amazed at the
results.
His colleague in oil well
reclamation projects, Tim Chidlaw, is an agrologist with
Northern EnviroSearch, Ltd. Chidlaw is an environmental
consultant and for 10 years prior to his introduction to Agri-Boost
had used a variety of soil amendments and conditioners to
achieve reclamation certificates on oil and gas well sites and
facitities around Alberta. In 2002 he saw the results of Agri-Boost;
a construction supervisor was using it as an organic amendment
to alleviate compaction issues on these sites.
“As with most claims for quick
fixes on the market, I approached Agri-Boost with skepticism,”
says Chidlaw. “However, after monitoring the sites to which it
was applied, looking at soil quality and vegetation
establishment, I saw that the Agri-Boost was successful in
mitigating the admix caused by poor soil stripping practices
previously employed at the sites, and it also helped increase
the soil’s tilth and water retention capability. The vegetative
cover on the reclaimed well sites and access roads was observed
growing with greater health and vigor than those observed
off-site. The added benefits of the Agri-Boost were that weeds
were not brought onto the site (as they would be, in manure) and
the soil nutrient additions tended to be released over a longer
period of time than that of fertilizer applications,” says
Chidlaw.
Lenz explains that commercial
fertilizer has a life span of about 90 days. “Manure has a
longer benefit, but not as much as Agri-Boost, and an
overabundance of manure is not healthy for the plants; the acid
will kill them. Agri-Boost, by contrast, works 3 to 5 years and
even longer in some cases, with one application. It’s about the
same as taking a crop of mature alfalfa that’s been in
production for 3 years and plowing it under. This practice can
add adequate soil fertility for 7 to 9 years. Since our product
is in pellet form we don’t claim that it lasts quite that long.
But you’ll still get 5 years’ benefit from it,” says Lenz.
“Some farmers use anhydrous
ammonia, but it makes the soil hard like a brick. Our pellet
product won’t exactly break up the soil, but if you use it on a
soil where fertility has been depleted, it will enhance and
fluff it up, making it easier to work. The benefits are far
superior to any chemical or manure,” says Lenz, and you can use
it on organic crops. Anyone producing organic beef, for
instance, must use organically grown hay, grain or pasture,
without any commercial fertilizer.
In one of Lenz’s experiments with
the pellets, he applied them to his lawn that had only had
chemical fertilizer for 30 years. “The fertilizer would make it
nice and green for a short time, but after 6 to 8 weeks it would
go back to a dormant stage again. I put Agri-Boost on the lawn,
worked the pellets in and watered it. After that it just kept
growing,” says Lenz.
The cost is more reasonable than any fertilizer can ever be,
because of the long-term effects. “This is what’s hard for many
people to understand. They are accustomed to using modern
commercial products rather than natural methods. Some of the
older farmers understand it better, because rotating crops and
plowing under a crop for soil fertilization was something they
used to do,” explains Lenz. After patenting his product, his
customer base has been growing, and he now has a distributor
(Ron Wilson, in Arizona) for U.S. customers.
Another company that markets
natural soil enhancers is Bio-Ag, which has been in business 15
years. Dave Lapine, who farms near Lethbridge, Alberta, is a
dealer for Bio-Ag products, which are used on crop and hay
ground. “We promote a biological system that enhances the
natural systems and processes in nature. Our fertilizer, for
instance, contains all natural products. Our blends are calcium
based and also contain sulfur, phosphorus and humalite (humate),”
says Lapine.
Humus is the organic portion of
soil—decomposed and partially decomposed plant and animal
material. Humate is a concentrated form of humus that has been
further processed by microbial activity. Humalite is the name
given to large deposits of a natural soft brown humic material
(decomposed organic matter) found in several locations in
Alberta and the U.S. The actual composition may vary from one
deposit to another, but in general humalite is 30 to 40 percent
organic matter, 30 to 40 percent humic acid, and 25 to35 percent
carbon. It also contains a variety of elements and minerals such
as silicone oxide, iron, copper, sulfur, zinc, nitrogen, sodium,
etc. It is biologically active (containing microbes) and formed
in aerobic conditions (with oxygen) whereas coal, by contrast,
is a deposit of organic matter formed under anaerobic conditions
(no oxygen).
Crops grown over the past several
decades have often taken more from the soil than we’ve put back.
“All we are trying to do with any fertilizer program is to
replace what we’ve taken out,” says Lapine. “In a biological
system you do it in a way that enhances the natural system and
doesn’t hinder or degrade it, or overdo any part of it. Most
manufactured fertilizers are salty and increase the salt content
of the soil, even though many soils have an inherent salt
problem already,” he says.
“By contrast, in a natural
program in which you add calcium and sulfur to the soil, you
remove salt from the equation. It’s still there, but it doesn’t
adversely affect the plants. Humalite is a natural product that
is basically acidic. It is important to the soil for natural
fertility, encouraging soil biological activity, germination of
plants, nutrient flow into plants, adjusting the pH of the soil,
etc. so you get a superior forage,” he says.
“People often put nitrogen on
grass and it looks green and lush for awhile, but it’s not
healthy and not as nutritious, though to our eyes it looks
good,” says Lapine. The effect doesn’t last very long, and it
degrades the soil in the long run because it is not providing a
balance. “There are microbes in soil that generate nitrogen.
They take it from the air (which is roughly 82 percent nitrogen)
and through a natural system make it available to the plants,”
he says. This can create a more healthy, rich, high quality
crop.
“We are not only producing a
better plant, but improving the soil while we do it, rather than
taking things out and degrading the natural fertility. Fertility
is very complex. If you do things positively, it multiplies
positively. If you do things negatively, it multiplies
negatively,” says Lapine.
Some farmers and stockmen are
using humate instead of manufactured fertilizer, even though
humate should not be considered a fertilizer because it does not
supply plant nutrients in the conventional sense. It is merely
part of the natural fertility process in the soil. Fertile soil
contains many microbes—bacteria, fungi, algae--important to soil
health. “Some companies have identified the good ones, the
aerobic bacteria, for example, and have been able to reproduce
them and stabilize them in a form that can be used to re-innoculate
the soil. Degraded soil that has poor biological activity can be
helped. Live organisms have the ability to some degree to change
their environment to improve it. Once you stop using salty
fertilizers and use a natural system, the soil is healthier and
you start to see indicators like earthworms coming back,” he
says.
“All of our granular fertilizer
ingredients are mined and natural and we are very particular
about our sources. Two are in the U.S. and one is in Canada. We
are also particular in terms of biological agents, and work with
a company in the U.S. that supplies those,” says Lapine.
Black Earth is the trade name for one product made from humalite.
“Super Cal SO4 is another product we sell, along with Soft Rock
Phosphate and potassium sulfate. The producer needs to know what
his soil is lacking, using soil samples (a complete standard
analysis plus a water soluble test). The standard analysis tells
us what’s there and the water soluble test tells us how it
relates to actual fertility and plant nutrition. You may have
all the calcium in the world in your soil, but if it’s not
soluble it does the plant no good,” he explains.
Soil fertility is a complex function of water, sunshine, parent
materials in the soil and the processes those have gone
through—along with what we add to it and what we do to it. “We
often overcultivate it, using up the humus. We may add poor
fertilizers, like anhydrous ammonia that burns out the calcium
and organic matter and can destroy the biological activity. So
it’s not only important to do the right thing, but also to not
do the wrong things,” says Lapine. “It’s a learning process.
Today there’s a shift in thinking—toward biological agriculture
as opposed to conventional agriculture as we know it.”
Another Canadian farmer-stockman
who has been using Bio-Ag products for several years is David
Takeda, with a farm and feedlot near Iron Springs, Alberta.
“We’ve used these products on all our crops (barley silage,
corn, etc.) and also broadcast some of the granular products on
our hayfields, which helps reduce weeds. The granular products
contain calcium, and dandelions don’t like soils high in
calcium. These products also loosen the soil particles and
reduce compaction,” says Takada.
He also uses Bio-Ag’s N-Fix, a
nitrogen-fixing microbe product, which seems to supply a
significant portion of the nitrogen needed by most plants. “It’s
not host specific so you can use it on any plants, and is soil
activated—fixing nitrogen from the air that’s in the top 2
inches of soil profile, making a form of nitrogen available to
the plants.”
He’s very pleased with the way
these products have performed, but says the local fertilizer
dealers are very skeptical about them. “I don’t blame them. I
had the same mind set earlier, because I was brought up using
chemical fertilizers and macronutrients available through the
dealers. But I also like to think I’m open minded enough to try
something else, if there’s a better or a more natural way. I’d
like to take advantage of what’s around us rather than forcing
something that’s unnatural. I’ve used this now for a number of
years had have consistently seen yield and soil improvements,”
he says.
There are many different ways to
do things on a farm or ranch, and Takada feels it’s worth
looking at some of the alternative methods. If they work, they
may be better for the land, or better for a certain operation.
“Bottom line, the dollar is always important, and drives the
majority of our decisions. If we can raise crops in a more
natural way, with good yields (and less cost for fertilizers),
this may work well. Our operation is by no means organic. My
goal has never been to farm organic, but it doesn’t hurt to be
open minded to try things that may be beneficial for the crops,”
says Takada.
David Unrau, a farmer in southern
Alberta, has also been using Bio-Ag products for several years.
“We’ve been playing with natural products even longer, using
things like rock phos instead of diamonium phosphate or
monoamonium phosphate. What led us into this was that I read
that weeds are an indicator of the condition of our soil, such
as the lack of certain nutrients. Most weeds are an indicator of
a lack of calcium in the soil. If you use rock phos before it’s
processed, it’s better for the soil because the processing
strips away the calcium,” explains Unrau.
“If you use it in raw form, the
calcium is still there. So this was our start in using natural
products. After doing that for a couple of years instead of
commercial phosphate, we started playing with other zone
products (seaweed kelp-based products). They have various
nitrogen-fixing bacteria and phosphorus-fixing bacteria. The
first year (2000) we did 60 acres of spring wheat and soil
tested throughout that year.”
Where they banded commercial
fertilizer versus where they used the natural products, yields
were identical. “But where we’d used the natural products our
protein was about 3 percent higher. So the next year did the
whole farm—more than 2000 acres. We applied zero commercial
nitrogen and used just the zone products on our recrop acres,”
he says.
“We thought at first we’d made a
mistake, because you don’t get as much growth of the plant. The
nitrogen is produced in the soil and released over time. From
the previous year, when we were doing our soil testing, we
noticed that the nitrogen peak was at about the flag leaf stage,
just as the head was being produced. We didn’t get as much
straw, but when we cut the crop our grain yields were the same,”
he explains.
“We’re finding our input costs
are a little lower. We put anywhere from zero to a maximum of 20
pounds of nitrogen with these products, because they do require
a certain amount of nitrogen to work. The different families of
bacteria and beneficial fungi require nitrogen to get them
kick-started and growing, and colonizing the soil,” he says.
“We’ve been finding that the
cationic exchange is better. The ability of the soil to transfer
nutrients improves. There are different things you can do to
soil to help get those numbers in balance. Flowable calcium
should run about 70 to 75 percent. There are certain nutrients
that you want to be moving up and others that you want to keep
low, like sodium. You want sodium to be down around 5 to 7
percent,” he explains.
“I attended a seminar where a
lady was talking about how you can increase soil health with
minimum till or zero till. She was talking about cation exchange
numbers, and that after about 10 or 12 years of zero till these
numbers are starting to come in line with where they should be.
What we are finding, using these natural products, is that we’re
having those same results in about 5 to 6 years,” says Unrau.
The worst soil responds most
noticeably. “We are really pleased with what’s happening in our
saline areas and alkali problems. We’re finding a pretty decent
response, there. We’re not an organic farm, so we still use some
chemical fertilizer, but very little. We have not applied
phosphorus to our soil for probably 5 or 6 years, and the levels
in our soil samples keep rising, without having to apply it. We
are very intrigued by how this is working. It’s a learning
process as we changed what we do, a number of times, to find
what works best for our soil,” he says.
He’s also finding the organic
matter is climbing significantly. “We have about 3 sections of
fairly sandy land. Those started with an organic matter of about
1.2 percent, and we’re up to about 1.8 and the pH is dropping on
our soil. We normally have a fairly high pH soil (high 7s) and
now we’re down into the high 6s and low 7s. The soil is just
more healthy,” he explains.
This past year he had a quarter section of winter wheat that was
all recropped. Half was on canola stubble and half was on barley
stubble. “Surrounding it was another farmer who does things
conventionally and uses heavy rates of fertilizer. He had the
same variety of winter wheat right next to ours. We’d been
looking at it all spring and their crop looked quite a bit
lusher and thicker. But they also had disease issues, which we
didn’t have. When all was said and done, their crop yield was
slightly better, but our input costs were lower,” says Unrau.
“This past year we had a very
hot, dry July. Most people had issues with light grain,
especially Durham. In order to make a number one, you need 63
pounds per bushel. I don’t know of anyone in our area who had
Durham that was heavy enough to be number one. Our protein
wasn’t quite as high as usual, but overall on our farm, our
Durham was heavy enough that it all made number one,” he says.
“Those are some of the things
we’ve seen—an increase in soil health, increase in quality, etc.
The previous year, it got hot and dry in July also. Our crop
stayed green a week longer than the wheat across the road from
ours. We find that our crops have been able to handle drought
stress a little better; we are noticing all kinds of things and
some of it we don’t necessarily understand, but it just seems to
be working quite well.”
He says it’s frustrating trying
to communicate this to other people. “A few have used these
products, and have seen the benefits, but traditionally it’s not
very accepted. When you talk to fertilizer companies about
putting calcium down, they seem to think this is a very bad
thing, but we’ve found huge benefits,” he says.
“One of the other benefits right
now is that prices for commercial fertilizer have risen, yet
prices for the Bio-Ag products we use have not gone up at all in
the last 4 years. So it’s getting more economical all the time,”
says Unrau.
Another benefit is the way these
products retard dandelions, such as in a hay crop. “It doesn’t
kill them, but it makes them easy to kill—such as in your yard.
You can use a very low concentration of herbicide and it kills
them. Dandelions are an indicator of a lack of calcium in the
soil. The same with Canada thistle, wild oats, and Russian
thistle. That’s what intrigued us initially, when we started
using this. On the sandy land, especially on the eroded knolls,
Russian thistles were growing like crazy. That’s where we
started, and then expanded to using it over the rest of the
farm,” he says.
Many people have been using
commercial fertilizer for a long time and haven’t thought about
other ways to enhance the soil. “One thing rarely taken into
account is the salt index of commercial fertilizer. Most of it
is very salty, yet one of the things we fight in our soil is too
much salt. So you are continually adding it when you use
fertilizer. Anhydrous ammonia is another issue. Originally it
was used during World War II to make airplane runways out of
dirt—to harden them. You don’t want your soil this hard if you
are growing crops. I have a cousin who used to work at the
research station and he says one of the ways to kill earthworms
is to use anhydrous ammonia. Yet we want to promote earthworms,
for soil health, not kill them. When you start looking at
everything you see a pattern developing and realize that maybe
we haven’t been doing exactly what we should be doing, for soil
health,” says Unrau.
“We’re finding we’re using less
and less commercial fertilizer all the time. Most people in our
area, and we used to be like this, have to keep increasing the
rate of fertilizer in order to maintain our yields. It’s not
sustainable. What we are doing now is helping, and we’re hoping
to eventually eliminate the use of commercial fertilizer
completely. We’re putting only 15 to 20 pounds of nitrogen on
our recrop. Most people in our area apply more than 50,” he
says.
“These products work a little like the rhizobia activity does in
a legume. They colonize the soil and create nitrogen, pulling it
out of the air. The form of nitrogen you get is NH4, a natural
type of nitrogen that does not leach and is readily available to
plants. But it’s not the kind of nitrogen that commercial
fertilizer companies look for in their soil tests. So we have to
specify this test, since this is the kind we end up with more
of. It’s a learning process. We need to figure out how much of
these products we really need to apply, per acre. Some years the
budget is a little tighter and we think maybe we should cut back
a little, but realize that isn’t the answer. We’re still
learning.”
He’s happy with the way things
are going, especially when comparing numbers on the soil tests.
“I have no idea how our numbers compare with someone else’s.
We’ll have an opportunity this year because we purchased more
land and rented some land, adjacent to what we already farm.
When we do those soil tests we’ll have a better picture of how
that soil health compares with ours. It will be interesting to
see if ours is better!” He plans to use a GPS unit so he can do
site specific soil sampling to keep track of it through the
years in the same locations, to get a better idea of what’s
happening.
The manufacturer of the Zone
products, and the U.S. dealer, is Carroll Montgomery, a farmer
in Dexter, Missouri. “We’ve greatly benefited from his
information. He’s been working with these a lot longer than we
have. One product is called N-Fix, a dry powder that comes in a
5 pound container and works out to about $6 an acre. It has
several families of nitrogen-fixing bacteria and a few
phosphorus-fixing bacteria, and 1 or 2 families of
nitrogen-fixing fungi. There is also a plant biological that can
be used as a foliar feed and also a transplant solution; we
apply that to the seed, mixed with the N-Fix. The plant
biologicals and the N-Fix are very similar, but they all have
little niches where they work best. We’re going to experiment
with adding the soil biologicals to our mix, to broaden the
activity a little. We don’t know if it will work or not, but we
are going to try it,” he says
“We used to do trials, where we
compared commercial fertilizer to the natural products. What we
found in side by side comparison is more straw where we used the
commercial fertilizer, with yield about the same. When we used
the soil biologicals and added the N-Fix to it, we noticed a
definite yield increase. The N-Fix has the potential to produce
70 pounds of nitrogen in your soil. Since it’s a living
organism, this all depends on moisture, and what it’s got to
work with in the soil, soil health, etc. So this is part of what
we work with, figuring out our variables and what we need to do
to give it the best chance to do the job.”
Some of these things have been around for a number of years, but
many people still don’t know about them. “Mostly it’s by word of
mouth, how the information about these products is spread. Our
goal is to improve our crops so that people will ask us what we
are doing. In many ways we are bucking a stacked deck,” he says.
Alternative Soil Enhancing Products May Be a Boon To Organic
Producers
Manure is the “fertilizer” used by organic growers, since they
cannot use chemical fertilizer. Yet manure carries the risk for
spreading weed seeds and pathogens such as E. coli, even after
being composted. E. coli, for instance, has been shown to
survive for at least 70 days in a compost pile. It takes
temperatures of more than 160 degrees F. to kill it. For this
reason, there is often more health risk to humans in eating
“organic” vegetables than in eating conventionally grown crops
that utilized commercial fertilizers and pesticides.
Even though many people have
become obsessed with the dangers of chemicals and pesticide
residues, the Centers for Disease Control have not yet found a
single consumer death related to pesticide residues in food, and
only a few dozen illnesses due to misapplied pesticides, even
though a lot of money has been spent looking for cancer and
illnesses caused by pesticides. By contrast, as of 9 years ago,
the CDC records showed more than 25,000 cases of illnesses per
year and 250 deaths per year in the U.S. caused by eating
“natural” and “organic” foods, and these numbers have increased.
The trend today is for
agriculture to become more environmentally responsible, yet many
of the farmers and ranchers trying to do so (using natural
fertilizer such as manure) are not aware of some of the
drawbacks and human safety issues. In the search for better
methods, other alternatives have surfaced, such as soil
enhancing products that are beneficial for soil health and
fertility—not only for the vegetable grower but also for the
rancher raising hay, grain or pasture for cattle. |
