The Future of a Sustainable Farming Medium: Living Soil, No-Tilling, Composting & Electroculture
Feb 16
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The Future of a Sustainable Farming Medium: Living Soil, No-Tilling, Composting & Electroculture
What if I told you the way we have been farming for generations is in large part why our farmlands and soil health has decreased to such a threatening level? The fact is, just about every way we go about farming food (and animals but that’s not this blog) on a commercial/corporate level is wrong. Profit and yield is the number #1 priority and when that’s the model we set ourselves up for long term failure. We spray the crops and soil with synthetic chemicals, genetically modify our seeds and now grow plant meat in a lab!
It’s said our soils are heading to a place of no return where they will be dissolved of their natural nutrients and unable to produce food no matter how many chemical are doused into the ground.
We face immediate recourse if we are to return our soils to a sustainable medium in the hopes of taking care of and feeding us, forever.
The answer lies in having the soil become one with itself again by building its microbiome with nature opposed to trying to restructure it ourselves for a short period of time, over & over again.
In this blog post we will talk about the future of a sustainable farming medium, living soil and share some information & thoughts about a new wave (but not new way) of gardening called electroculture. If you are interested in learning more about these topics or even how to do this stuff yourself, follow along and see where this new knowledge may lead you!
Table of Contents
Living Soil vs. Composting (is there a difference?)
Composting: What to Put in There & Not
What to Not Throw in the Compost Pile
Covering, Turning, Cooking, Managing and Using Your Pile
Shift the Focus Things to Watch Out for When Composting
Living Soil vs. Composting (is there a difference?)
While both living soil and compost are soils teeming with life and working towards the same thing here’s the difference:
Living soil is thriving through its own devices with things like cover crops, companion plants, worms and insects aiding & making up its microbiome keeping it healthy and happy.
Compost is soil that a person hand-makes with kitchen & yard scraps. They help it decompose and tend to it for some time before being able to use.
We will teach you more about these soils and the techniques to start this way of gardening/farming. Also, try to help you decide which you like better and if it’s something you’d like to try this season!
Enjoy!
Living Soil
Benefits of Living Soil:
Increased Yields
Lower Operating Costs
Protection from Pests and Diseases
Reduced Irrigation Requirements
No Need for Fertilizers
Weed Suppression
Soil Erosion Protection/Prevention
Carbon Sequestration
Protection of Insects and Birds
Better Water Absorption & Soil Aeration
Contributing to a Sustainable Planet
What is Living Soil
Biology and diversity in the right quantities is living soil.
Living soil is an organic soil you create utilizing the nutrients only from nature to contribute to the nutrition & microbial life within. In turn, this produces the healthiest & strongest soil on Earth, making the soil and your farming/gardening sustainable forever.
You use plants known as cover crops, companion plants, earthworms, bugs and carbon cover layers to create a microbiome deep within the soil which essentially “keeps the blood pumping” all year round. Done properly this is the most sustainable way of farming in dirt because we create natural, balanced soils, letting the land take care of itself.
Where is the line between living soil and not?
Well, if worms are living in your soil and you’re not killing them, you have a living soil.
Issues
It’s said we have only a generation (25 years) to turn this around and the chronic spraying and extreme demand we have on our soils is not a long term solution to reusable farmlands. A fundamental issue we face is the simple fact that people and farmers don’t have a good understanding of living soil and the negative, nearly irreversible effects of modern and corporate farming practices.
The biological element is what needs elaboration and clarification on in order to understand soil health. As per the Living Soil Documentary by Soil Health Institute, I infer the educational institutions could try a little harder in teaching future farmers more about proper soil health as they said the folks who take soil classes in college only learn about the physical & chemical properties of the soil. Hmm, interesting…
They went on to say 30-60 years is the limit for our topsoils’ life due to erosion & wind and that our current farming modality contributes to the short lifespan.
We truly are in the midst of an ecosystem collapse and it’s like no one even knows it.
Insect population declines 25% each decade for the last 3 decades
This leaves 57% less insects than 35 years ago.
Think about that just 35 years ago there were 2x the amount of bugs on our planet. Absolutely wild.
Bird and bug populations are also dropping due to pesticide use.
The climate effects aren’t helping either.
They also said between now & 2060 we need to produce as much food as we’ve produced in the last 500 years! We sure do have a lot of mouths to feed and it starts with healthy earth.
I’m not a proponent of genetically modified foods or synthetic plant meat created in a lab that looks like flesh so I believe if we wish to steer ourselves away from a world where that is necessary, we must get to work on putting the life back into the ground.
“Food security is soil security”
Cover Crops
Cover crops are plants not planted with the intention of harvesting. They are planted in between main/cash crops to help put carbon back in the soil, provide a ‘living shield’ to protect the soil from erosion, excessive sunlight/heat.
This is what you want to do instead of spraying chemicals to kill off a remaining field after harvest.
You cut out the tilling & spraying process
Plant cover crop seeds and insulate it using a carbon layer like mulch, leaves, straw, old corn stalks, etc …
This provides a shelter for your cover crops, retaining moisture, providing additional food and allows the soil and life beneath to remain undisturbed.
It’s very important to touch on this potentially overlooked fact:
To put it simply, you need to be methodical about what cover crops you are using. (So what will the cover plant/s do for your soil? Are they higher in one nutrient than another?)
And know how your cash crop will benefit from these plants. (Does your cash crop need a lot of nitrogen? Is the cover crop we chose going to lay enough Nitrogen in the soil?)
In other words, just any ole’ cover crop won’t necessarily promote the healthiest soil for the lushest harvest — research the info you need for what you’re growing to have the best shot at success.
What you’re doing with cover crops is pulling the nutrients from them, and using those nutrients they leave behind in the soil for growing your next crop.
For example: if you’re growing corn, a plant that consumes a lot of nitrogen, you can plant a cover crop like the Austrian pea that’s potent in nitrogen giving the cash crop a good foundation.
You gotta feed the soil for it to feed you!
When it comes to cover crops the more you put in there, the better it gets. Find what nutrients you need for your next crop and plant accordingly!
You can plant various cover crops, up to a dozen different seeds (3-13 I’ve heard the range), this will help bring in beneficial insects and enrich the soils organic biodiversity.
It [living soil] takes awhile so be patient and keep with it. It may be 2 or 3 seasons until you really see the soil you’re striving for.
An option if you have the space, is to cover crop a field for a year instead of planting your main crops, let the soil get healthier, then plant the following year. If not, you can intercrop where you plant cover crops alongside your cash crops, these are also called companion crops or plants.
Fun Facts:
Carbonomics: A lot of plants can’t take nitrogen out of the air so they grow colonies of bacteria that converts the atmospheric nitrogen to useable nitrogen for the plant. They trade the plant carbon for this exchange. This is called rhizobial symbiosis through nitrogen fixtion.
Carbon is more important than nitrogen. This is where cover crops come in handy to keep the carbon in the soil.
Comes down to good management practices to maintain healthy soil with enough carbon.
Terminating Cover Crop
When the time comes, using cattle to graze, mowing, deploying a roller/crimping machine (if effective for the crop) to help create a mulch (carbon) cover are ways to conclude cover crop growth so you can plant your cash crop.
Here are some more effective ways smaller scale farms or home gardeners can easily try.
You can lay a tarp over the area, using the sun and heat to kill off the cover crops.
You have the option of undercutting. Which is just ripping the roots in the soil, leading the plants to die and remain on top of the soil as the needed biomass for carbon cover and additional feed.
For the gardener on a schedule you can utilize the frost to terminate some cover crops.
There are a number of ways to do this, just be sure what you choose is conducive to actually terminating the cover crop.
No Tilling
What is No-Tilling
First, what is tilling? Tilling is disturbing the topsoil in preparation for planting. Think of it as mixing up the bowl of soup before taking a ladleful out.
NO-Till is a gardening/farming style that helps maintain your living soil by keeping your soils’ microbiology thriving through minimal disruption and continual feeding.
You may be surprised to learn the method we’ve been taught and have used for generations is not a sustainable farming modality, in fact it is contributing to the demise of our soils.
Tilling never allows you to establish a real living soil that is taking care of itself. Which means you will have to add nutrients and eventually chemicals to keep your soil in the place it needs to be to produce crops.
So, when tilling you’re perpetuating the soil health crisis by disrupting the microbiology, killing it with chemicals, burning it with the sun and leaving it working harder than it can to regenerate and keep up with our demand. This can also lead to the necessity of using chemicals just to grow anything — your food cannot grow in real soil so it needs to grow in chemicals only using soil as a medium — does that sound appetizing to you? Certainly doesn’t for me.
When practicing no-till techniques you avoid literally all of that. Is that not a win for everybody?
When you till you expose a lot more dirt to the elements and make it liable for a solar scorching. Once the soil gets so hot, 100ºF+ the microbial life is not operating as well, compared to a more stable 75ºF which is considered peak efficiency temperature.
Interestingly, that’s around the same temperature humans are at their most efficient operating power.
This is where spreading a carbon layer, something like straw or mulch on the top of your field comes in handy -- and in some cases it’s crucial. This keeps it 20-30º cooler, retains moisture and avoids evaporative loss. If you till, adding a carbon layer after won’t be as effective.
Such damaging heat disturbance is another great reason to avoid tilling and opt for living soil practices.
Through tilling you’re also causing a detriment to the microbes in your soil which are the very things allowing your soil to produce life in the first place. This is a practice that is taking 1 step forward and 2 steps back, in my opinion.
You’re not going to open a wound even more to heal it, are you? In the long term that will prove to be a bad idea.
It Makes You Think
Another fun point to make on a more spiritual level, not so much gardening is the message that everything we need is within us -- or all answers are inside.
You see, as long as we introduce the proper necessities (microbiology) to the mind/body/soul, (soil) all the work is then done within to bring to fruition the seeds planted. It goes to show the interconnectedness between nature & people and displays the effortlessness in the laws of nature; I think this perspective is worth bringing some attention to.
Also, I don’t know about you but it sure sounds nice having all that extra time on my hands not spent tilling my field, letting nature work for me!
Where Does This Leave Us?
A lot of the setbacks and problems plaguing modern agriculture today are caused by a lack of diversity. Humans are all too caught up in the imposition of our will on nature, so it’s no wonder we see things like resistant weeds, pests and diseases manifest in response. In bringing diversity back to our soils these problems will begin to dissipate as we once again let nature reign.
When we start a living soil, create a compost pile, and practice no-till gardening we are giving nature that fighting chance she needs to make a comeback and it’s the people doing that making the difference. These soil stewards have said they’re more-so treating the dirt than the plant and in doing so the plants treat you! I keep hearing and seeing these stories of people adopting living soil and coming to harvest beautiful crops!
You’ll notice the folks that grow in this sustainable way are passionate and fully believe in what they are doing. It’s a major refresher for me as I believe we all should do what we love and have passion for. I think this is the hope, action and result of a one with nature future.
“Farmers in the US are growing cover crops and using other soil health practices on at least 17,000,000 acres of farmland as of 2017 a dramatic increase over a decade earlier However, that acreage represents less than 10% of the crop land in the United States. So there’s still lots of room for improvement.”
- A Living Soil Documentary by Soil Health Institute
Where are we now, 8 years later?
Composting
What is compost
Compost is essentially a living soil you create with your kitchen & yard scraps.
The common household practice is to collect your food waste like that head of broccoli you couldn’t get your kids to eat, veggie scraps you didn’t want to throw in the soup or the mornings’ coffee grounds and toss all that into one big pile outside. Add some yard clippings and last falls raked leaves, cover it with a tarp, then let it cook! Once you do that it begins to turn into a nutrient rich soil for you to plant your food, flowers or whatever you’d like in!
Let’s learn about the basics of composting! Below we’ll go over how to compost, what to & not to put in your pile, where to locate your project as well as some things to maybe look out for when giving this a go.
Location, Location, Location:
First and foremost, please be sure to locate your pile in a place with good drainage. If absolutely necessary put wood chips or an organic buffer on the bottom of the pile.
Be sure to stay away from spots harboring weeds — you certainly want to avoid your compost pile getting seeded.
Lastly, make sure to have enough space to “turn your pile over”.
Composting: What to Put in There & Not
First, you need to aim for at least a 3x3x3 mound for this undertaking. You can go bigger but it's recommend to at least have this size of a pile.
You will need to have carbon and nitrogen containing materials.
Carbonaceous: wood chips, dry leaves, straw, hay (the brown stuff)
Nitrogenous: (the green stuff) fresh, wet, dark in colors or colorful.
What to Put in the Compost:
You can add fresh cut grass, rotting fruit & veggies, fruit peels, coffee grounds, rice/pasta, eggshells, *anything from an animal (high protein = high nitrogen), etc…
*Up for debate, do your own research.
For every bucket of compost materials (nitrogen) add a layer of carbon (the brown stuff) to cover the smell and accelerate the process.
If it’s wet scraps you’re dumping, be sure to use more carbon material like wood chips, straw, etc… opposite for dry scraps. You DO NOT want be able to smell or see it.
What Not to Throw in the Compost Pile:
You’ll want to avoid things like oils and fatty things, nuts, pet or people feces, raw meat, yard trimmings with herbicide/pesticide in them or that are diseased, and treated wood products.
Meat & fish (cooked) is a debatable one so that’s up to you — I always recommend doing your own research to educate yourself & make the right decision for you. You’ll find mixed opinions on more than just meat; bones and citrus peels among others spark debate but like I said, do your own research and decide for yourself.
Personally I'd recommend material that will decompose easily, even consider things like cutting up that whole apple or pepper you didn't eat before throwing it in!
Covering, Turning, Cooking, Managing and Using Your Pile
Covering your pile
When it comes to covering your pile with carbon, don’t get too caught up on the suggested C:N (carbon:nitrogen) ratio. I’ve seen from as low as 15:1 up to 78:1 with a general consensus hanging around 25/30:1.
A good rule of thumb is to make sure to visually cover the green material providing an even layer of carbon and ridding the smell.
@ 130ºF-160ºF you can ‘turn it’. Get yourself a thermometer
Turning you pile
You turn your pile to mix the ingredients, add air to help in the decomposition process, to break up anaerobic pockets, evaluate moisture and to observe your pile. You 'turn' your compost over in the clear space next to your pile.*
*See 3rd pic posted in the composting section above for reference.
Managing & Cooking your pile
Water is mandatory for all life to exist and in this case we’re talking about moisture for your soil. Check there’s enough moisture in your pile by squeezing a handful of dirt and watching water ooze out of the compacted soil.
If you need to add some moisture try using a pure water source or purify the chlorine and chloramine in the city water which are anti-microbial & counter-productive.
Next, cover the pile with a tarp and let it sit.
In the next day or two you’ll want to check on the temps.
not heating up: add nitrogen and check moisture.
too hot (165ºF +): flatten pile; you could add moisture.
warm but not hot: pile it up better & add some more nitrogen like fresh grass clippings to the top of your pile, then soak. This will help the heat up process.
if it starts to smell you can add some more carbon.
Turn the pile 2-3x the next week to encourage the process, then try to turn it once a week from there on out. Sometimes it may be more or less. The big part of this is to make sure the temps reaches the 130º-160ºF range before turning it.
Keep an eye on it when turning watching for moisture, decomposition and smell.
Using your pile
Remember it can take 1-6 months to be fully ready so try to wait a few months to actually use it. In about 80 days if all is going well you should technically be good to go but of course this may not always be the case. Anyway, after some time of letting it decompose & turning your pile accordingly you can start to use your compost!
Shift the Focus
Another great thing to do is add some worms to your finished compost or use chickens to also help in scratching at the pile and add their own excremental contribution. Remember this part is only to be done after the high heat part of the process is over and you’re ready to use your pile.
If you choose, this will begin the process of a new phase of your living soils’ life where you no longer have to sustain it though composting. Instead, introduce living soil gardening techniques that we talked about above like cover crops, intercropping, no-tilling and continuing to feed the soils microbiome. If you go this route you will be authorizing nature to take over, ensuring a healthy soil for years to come.
Things to watch out for when Composting:
Here are some things to consider when composting or if still deciding to start a compost pile:
Compost can take 5 years to fully decompose.
It’s harder for microbes to feed off the compost because of what it’s composed of: starch, fats, lignin, carbohydrates & proteins.
The microbes use a lot of their stored energy to digest these things and decompose them 100% into the soil. This is not an efficient use of energy.
During the composting journey a lot of carbon is released in the atmosphere, some even say too much gets released when using the soil, resulting in minimal carbon retention in the ground (not what we’re looking for). Others will tell you the carbon levels are sufficient, so again, do your own research and decide what resonates with & works for you. It is a viewpoint out there so it may be worth bringing attention to for some.
Your soil can become over abundant in nutrients like phosphorus or nitrogen. Remember everything is balance and it can be the difference between a successful garden or not. You can run tests on your soil and amend appropriately but that’s more time spent tinkering around getting your set up right. Know what material you’re adding into your compost and understand how it’s going to nutritionally effect your soil.
Ultimately, I’ve come to the conclusion and my research would support that overall, compost is not the best food source for microbes in your soil. However, I still think we should continue to practice composting as it’s a fantastic way to recycle our food waste and promote a sustainable world. Not to mention a fun project, allowing you to contribute to the future of a sustainable farming medium!
What is electroculture:
I bet you haven’t heard of this one! I figured I’d save the most far out one for last! This is considered a controversial gardening practice and for logical reason too, however, I’d like to present to you what this is and my personal thoughts.
Electroculture is harnessing the energy from the atmosphere to help grow your crops. This gardening method allows you to get away with not having to use any fertilizer or use and pesticides as this helps deter pests. It also causes abundant growth and in quicker time while increasing your yields!
How does it work:
What you do essentially is use a copper wire that you adhere to a stick through wrapping in a vortex pattern (some use a zinc bolt at the top too), submersing the bottom into the ground and reaching the top to the sky. What you’re doing is harnessing the energy from the atmosphere and pulling it into the soil.
I recommend ensuring you have decent soil with good drainage, moisture and microbiology before doing this. A quick way to know if your soil is “good” without running tests or anything fancy, just smell it. As the saying goes “the nose knows” — it holds true in this application! Give it a whiff and if it smells like the rich Earth, you’re on the right track!
Something to Think About
While this sounds great and many people have shown results, there are still those that not only say this isn’t a long term solution but also doubt the results.
The argument against electro culture is that you cannot only rely on the harnessing of atmospheric energy to grow your plants. You need to give your soil time to regenerate so it can preform just as well the next time. The problem comes when you continuously use your soil with the electroculture technique back to back to back. Overtime the soil is believed to get depleted from its… well, life — and begins to produce less and less of a crop.
You have to think, if your plants really are growing faster and bigger, it’d only make sense you’re using a lot more energy contained within the soil. So in turn, you should probably give it [the soil] some time to rest, plant some cover crops and let it do its thing.
Also, consider starting a garden in dry, dead dirt and implementing electroculture… to me it wouldn’t make sense that the electroculture would even make a difference. You must have healthy soil, that’s the first thing to worry about.
“What you put in is what you get out”.
After my research and my own experience I would have to agree with those who say if you’re going to use this tech., use it as a supplement, not your primary way of growing.
In what I’ve tried once before with a Dahlia plant, I experienced beautiful rapid growth for a month and then it completely stopped. But I’m also wary that my plant just ran out of nutrients and the electro culture simply didn’t help at all. There too is always the possibly it was a destined-to-fail low quality HomeDepot plant purchase.
Again, there are two sides to this story so it’s worth learning more about and possibly trying yourself. I know I will be giving this another go! I think there are some fun experiments to be had with this!
Have you ever tried electroculture?
let us know in the comments!
Conclusion
To conclude on this post I will say I think as long as we’re not spraying chemicals and we’re feeding the soil, we’re headed in the right direction. I think all of these farming modalities are important and have their right place, like electroculture and composting. They should all be considered and used accordingly but above all the goal must remain the same: to have & maintain healthy soil. Overall, living soil is the life-force that keeps our natural world spinning, if our soil was to no longer live, everything else on our planet would follow. It’s a foundational core to our existence and we must accept the honor & responsibility of restoring it, for everyone, forever.
Thank you for reading, I hope you were able to get something out of this! :)
Remember without our pollinators, living soil only goes so far! Save the Bees and plant a Monarch habitat this spring!
Links
Living Soil Film — a documentary by Soil Health Institute
A Soil Science Masterclass by Dr. Elaine Ingham
Dr. Elaine Soil web website
Dr. Elaine Soil Food Web School youtube channel
Podcast w Joshua (YouTube video)
What is Living Organic Soil by BuildASoil
We have been doing it wrong! Making healthy soil is now easier than ever - video
Study on Cover Crop Mixtures Delivers Surprising Results by Cover Crop Strategies
Government programs are hlping with cover crop initiatives
No Till Growers — Composting for Beginners video
Northwest No-Till Farming for Climate Resilience
Elements Mountain Composting Arkansas Valley, CO
How to Build a Biodynamic Compost Pile by Biodynamic Trainee
A Homeowners Guide to Backyard Composting by Perkiomen Watershed Conservency
Great READ. I like it