Structure of the soil ??🤔

Anniekay

Anniekay

Well-known member
Location
Quitman, Ga.
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I hear this mentioned a lot: " You don't want to ruin the "structure" of the soil !"
*wags finger at your face* 😤

Well, I just don't really get this. I realize that if you dug down to the subsoil and mixed it all into your top soil, you'd be disturbing the natural "structure" of the soil, ie; Top soil's benefits being on top the nutrients in it will be washed down by rain (or watering) to be used by the plants roots. BUT, so long as you aren't doing that, what's the problem?

Your soil "structure" automatically changes every time anything is put ontop of or into the soil. Water, leaf mold, fertilizers, worms, worm castings, bacteria, fungi, pill bugs, everything IN the soil is changing the structure every minute so, why do we try to avoid disturbing the soil? I just don't get it. So long as you aren't compacting it much, the worms will aerate it for you. Makes no logical sense to me and I've never seen any detrimental affect from disturbing the "soil Structure". Have you?
 
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I've always quite happily dug the soil over, sometimes 2 spade spits deep when digging over new ground. Like you say, rain washes nutrients down lower and the worms will dig it back up.

One time I try to keep off it is during rain as that will compact it and destroy the structure. I saw recently that archaelogists excavated a building that had been submerged for centuries and it was built out of mud bricks so you can see where I'm coming from with that.

I know some folk like "no dig" methods, that's fine if they like that but if I've got dock plants or nettles then I'm gonna take a fork to them 😁
 
Zigs said:
I know some folk like "no dig" methods, that's fine if they like that but if I've got dock plants or nettles then I'm gonna take a fork to them 😁
Click to expand...
Ah ha... so how about if you grab your trusty fork, and dig out those bramble roots up in the top field then 🥺
 
Anniekay said:
I hear this mentioned a lot: " You don't want to ruin the "structure" of the soil !"
*wags finger at your face* 😤

Well, I just don't really get this. I realize that if you dug down to the subsoil and mixed it all into your top soil, you'd be disturbing the natural "structure" of the soil, ie; Top soil's benefits being on top the nutrients in it will be washed down by rain (or watering) to be used by the plants roots. BUT, so long as you aren't doing that, what's the problem?

Your soil "structure" automatically changes every time anything is put ontop of or into the soil. Water, leaf mold, fertilizers, worms, worm castings, bacteria, fungi, pill bugs, everything IN the soil is changing the structure every minute so, why do we try to avoid disturbing the soil? I just don't get it. So long as you aren't compacting it much, the worms will aerate it for you. Makes no logical sense to me and I've never seen any detrimental affect from disturbing the "soil Structure". Have you?
Click to expand...
I think people are just copying the Regenerative Ag movement. I'm sure you've heard of how we only have about 60-years before we run out of farmable topsoil. I don't know if that's true, but it is true that conventional farming does degrade soils, not only from tilling, which actually compacts soil, but also from use of various synthetic chemicals, i.e. fertilizers and various x-icides, monocultures, etc.

Farmers cannot manage their soils like gardeners, simply because typical gardener practices do not scale to thousands of acres of cropland. It's easy for gardeners to add compost to the beds, but you just can't do that with thousands of acres.

And that's the basic genesis of Regenerative Agriculture. It's developed a system of regenerating soil that has been degraded over the years due to constant tillage and other conventional farming practices.

Regenerative Farming is totally different than Organic Farming, which is simply conventional farming without the use of synthetic chemicals. Organic farming still degrades soil.


Here's a good quick introduction into Regenerative Farming.

 
This is a pretty good video that shows the impact of not only tilling, but also synthetic inputs and other things on soil structure.

It's a long video, but much of the soil structure parts are between the 32 - 48-minute points. This is where there were direct comparisons between a fully Regenerative farm (Gabe Brown's farm) and his neighbors' farms all of which had various forms of management.

Such as:
Tillage, Medium Plant Diversity,
No-Till, Low Plant Diversity
No-Till, Medium Plant Diversity, High Synthetic Input

And Gabe Brown's
No-Till, High Plant Diversity, No Synthetic Input, Animal Integration



 

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