EPISODE I

By PETER SCHUTT

There are many pieces to the puzzle of healthy soil and the decline thereof thanks to industrial scale farming of the modern era. In my opinion, no piece looms larger than the role of glyphosate in agribusiness.

Glyphosate is the active chemical in Roundup and other similar herbicides. Though it was first synthesized in Europe in 1970, Monsanto Corp. chemists coincidentally produced glyphosate in the early 1970s; the company subsequently patented it, said patent expiring in the early 2000s. So now other ag chemical companies are making and selling similar herbicides.

Glyphosate basically put Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) into our food culture. What better business than to make a supposedly nontoxic herbicide that kills all plant life, then find a gene that can be modified in any agribusiness crop that shields the crop from being killed by glyphosate. Thanks, Monsanto.

Objectively, I will grant that “advances” like GMOs and Roundup have increased yields of important grains over the years. By as much as 300% for corn and soybeans.

But I also suspect that, after many decades of taking chances with chemicals in farming (especially this one) we are just beginning to open our eyes to their longer term damaging effects on the soil and the plants and animals that live in and on the land.

Glyphosate kills plants by keeping them from taking up certain vital minerals, especially magnesium, from the soil. That is a simplistic but accurate explanation accepted by all. Early testing by the federal government and Monsanto claimed that glyphosate was pretty much nontoxic to lab mice, fish, ducks, the soil, water and so on. I could find no such studies done in the past 20 years, at least in the US.

Except one.

This one was done a year ago by MIT scientists and was recently published on the National Institutes of Health web site. It finds that there is an almost exact correlation between the increased use of glyphosate on US wheat crops and the rise in diagnoses of Celiac disease and gluten intolerance.

It finds that there are now increased instances of traces of glyphosate in the urine of Americans.

About 66% of US wheat harvested is done so by applying glyphosate onto the almost mature wheat plant in order to kill the plant so it will dry and be ready to harvest sooner.

Also of great importance is the work that German and other European researchers have been doing in the past 5 years on glyphosate. This work points to growing evidence that glyphosate in the soil and/or livestock feed may cause infertility, weight loss and other abnormalities in livestock by attacking beneficial bacteria in the digestive system and tainting the reproductive hormones.

A well known university researcher and equine expert with whom we’ve been consulting about the health of our soil at Winchester Farm is pretty certain that the relentless and increasing use of glyphosate in the US is creating new soil-borne pathogens that are previously unknown in animal science.

At issue on our farm are the questions: why has the nutritional content of the hay we grow not increasing, even though we have used no glyphosate or other chemicals on the farm in almost 10 years? Why do some of our cows now get a stomach ache when eating certain plants in our pastures that didn’t used to make them sick?

We know that the use of glyphosate in agribusiness has skyrocketed over the past 10 years; many common weeds have evolved so that they are now immune to the herbicide. For years, the common practice was to use stronger and stronger dilutions of the chemical and spray it more often in an effort to kill the weeds. So much glyphosate is now sprayed on ag fields that the USDA cannot keep up with the number of pounds or gallons, as it does with many other farm chemicals.

Could it be that in some agricultural areas where the chemical is used alot, glyphosate might be in the air?

I’ll address that and other questions in my next post.

 

Jan. 22, 2015
By Peter Schutt

NOW AVAILABLE! Winchester Farm has organically raised, pastured pork for sale. We have hogs now ready to process – find some friends to share a pig! Approx 150 lbs of packaged pork per hog, $4 a lb. cut and packaged. We’ll handle the processing and making sausage for you!

At Winchester Farm we know that healthy soil is the foundation for growing healthy food. We think of soil in the context of humus. That is the richest, living soil on earth, and for the most part, it occurs naturally only in areas where humans haven’t added or subtracted to the natural way of things. In biblical Greek, the second creation story in Genesis describes God creating Adam from Adamah, which is translated to English as humus. Soil that is alive with all sorts of bacteria, minerals, microbes, etc.
An example of humus in these parts would be the soil beneath an old growth stand of hardwoods – decades of leaves, twigs, nuts, etc. that have slowly rotted with the help of earthworms, insects and billions of bacteria.
So it is for urban gardeners, we are best advised to follow nature’s lead and return our home gardens to some semblance of a natural, living soil. As Wendell Berry says, “ . . . we have no right to look at the land and ask what we can expect to get out of it, but rather we are required to look at the land and ask what it needs from us.”
Most soils in any city are not in any sort of natural state, because modern subdivisions have been built in a fashion that first removes most native trees and plants, then scrapes topsoil to make building sites. Nature has been defeated in its effort to build humus, and thus most earthworms, insects and bacteria therein, have been lost.
Now, the home gardener has his or her work to do.
Here, let me say this: rebuilding spent soil is a job that takes patience. And observation. What I have learned over 40 years of gardening is that the health of the plants you grow, and the presence or absence of weeds, worms and insects, will tell you as much or more than can be found in books. The handful of true soil scientists out there all agree that there is much more unknown about soil chemistry and biology, than is known.
The biggest unknown is the role of bacteria and other microorganisms that we can’t see. Most of these experts agree that there are more bacteria in one spoonful of humus than there are cells in the human body. That’s why I recommend paying more attention to what’s happening in your garden than reading books. These unseen building blocks of healthy soil can be airborne and/or arrive at our plot with the amendments listed below and can somewhat magically establish in your beds once the soil becomes healthy in terms of minerals and organic matter.
Here are some basics to get the process started:
1. Apply calcium (aka “lime”) in copious amounts to your beds. (Lime is the generic term for some form of calcium – not all “lime” is the correct form of calcium for your plants. The best is calcium carbonate, CACO3). This form of lime, unlike hydrated lime, can be applied and planted in at the same time. At Winchester Farm we were reluctant to throw out the conventional wisdom regarding soil pH, when we were told to just pour the calcium to our pastures, vegetables and cropland. Wouldn’t too much lime raise the pH of our soil too much? No. Because calcium has a pH of 7, you cannot put “too much” calcium in your soil. Conversely, without enough calcium, the plants you want to grow will not be able to take up essential nutrients in your soil, especially nitrogen. Calcium is the essential catalyst! Pelletized lime comes in 40 lb. bags and is inexpensive at Lowe’s, etc. Make sure you buy calcium carbonate, not dolomitic lime. The latter contains too much magnesium, which is not healthy for vegetables or humans in large amounts. I recommend 20 pounds lime for every 100 square feet to start. It generally takes two years for even pelletized lime to dissolve and become available to plants. I repeat this application every other year.
2. The next most important nutrient is nitrogen. The air we breathe is mostly nitrogen, but plants must take their nitrogen from the soil, so we need to get it into the soil. The best way to do this is to apply composted manure that has been rotting at least 2 years. Chicken manure is the “hottest”, if you can find it, so use sparingly. Also, be aware that if chicken manure comes from a commercial (e.g., Tyson-sized) operation, it is likely to have antibiotics and traces of arsenic in it. Commercially raised chickens get antiobiotics and medicine laced with arsenic almost every day of their lives. Cow manure is next best, then comes horse manure. The latter contains only a fraction of the nitrogen that cow manure contains. You can also compost leaves, but make sure there is some soil and water in the pile to move the process along. (As a side note, do not use hardwood sawdust or commercial bark mulch on vegetables– hardwood saps nitrogen from topsoil as it rots.) Work in your grass clippings, if your lawn is not sprayed with herbicide. Clippings also are an easy way to mulch plants after they are tall enough. Wheat straw is another great amendment for vegetables, as it rots quickly and adds organic matter to the soil.
3. Don’t let your soil remain bare during winter. For vegetables, either plant a cover crop such as mustard greens, crimson clover or rye grass, or cover your bed with wheat straw or shredded leaves. If you use a cover crop, till or spade in the plants early in the spring – this is called “green manure” and will keep nutrients from leaching away with the winter rains as well as adding organic matter to your soil in the spring.

Making the healthiest soil is hard work, but it is good work. That is to say, it is good work compared with hopping in the car to go buy various chemical fertilizers, etc., in order to make your plants grow. Chemical fertilizers only temporarily mask symptoms of unhealthy soil and, in fact, do more harm than good.
Happy gardening!