NPK FERTILISERS

Soils; it's an anormous subject. In fact, there is less understood about soils than there is about, more or less, anything else.

Let's look at the process of roots in the soil and paint a scenario that we're going to grow a crop. We've got some ethics about our behavior, but our main aim is to make money.

Say, we plant some sort of crop out in a field. We put quite a lot of energy into preparing the field and getting ready. Our crop grows and puts down roots in the soil, but they're not just roots.
There are two distinct variations to the types of roots that plants put down.

There are the large roots; the tap roots, and they, more or less, drink. They are the hydronic function of the plant. They suck water up. The plants transpire from the leaves. The sun shines down, and there is transpiration going on from the leaves. The plants suck in moisture up from the roots.

In reality, these tap roots are like miniature pipes, but they are considerably larger than the other roots that are on the plant's underground parts; the hair roots. These are incredibly fine roots that are going out off the tap root.

All these hair roots are interacting with the soil. They're all getting down there and doing things. And what are they doing? If you have a look in there, you'll see them pushing their way through the soil, and the soil is made up of all sorts of elements, with different types of minerals and organic materials.

What are they?

Some of them are major elements. There's kind of a pyramid of elements. There's three at the top; which are nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, which is indicated as a K. This is the NPK that we see as the main fertilising elements included in synthetic fertilisers, and then there are 12 minor elements, and then 25 trace elements, which we only need a very small amount of.

The main element of life sits on top. It's not often spoken about this way, but it's called carbon. Carbon is the main building block of life, freely available from the sun, through photosynthesis, as a sugar, as starch, and all our organic matter and humus that's in soil, all organic materials, are built from it. So, all those are in there, or should be in some in some proportion, in good soils. 

Our crop keeps growing...

Our plant is growing and building its body with the assistance of the sun and photosynthesis as a process, and it has hydraulics that's sucking the water through. And it wants to build its body out of some of these, and it's finding them with its hair roots. In its natural sense, that's how it's going to feed.

It's a little electrostatic process where the root itself is negatively charged, and all of the elements in the soil are positively charged. And the root wants a particular element. The plant has got a deficiency that it needs to build in its body, and it wants to suck-in that particular element. So, it sucks it in. The positive charge of that element is matched by the negative charge of the hair root, and it sucks it in.

But there is no give without take in natural systems. There is always some return. And the plant, in surplus, has starch; sugars, which are also food for the soil. So, it takes in this element and it gives a starch back to the soil. Starch exudes from the little hair root, just a very small amount of it. And this is a very primitive sugar, and it is food for the microorganisms in the soil.

The life in the soil...

And this process goes on. The life in the soil, which we know very little about, starts to increase and colonise groups of elements into a particular pattern, and aesthetic pattern, that most farmers know and look for; and what he's looking for is a crumb structure. He's looking for tiny crumbs in the top soil.

The aesthetic structure he's looking for in the top soil is lots and lots of burbles of soil, little crumbs, and that gives you great airspace between the elements in the soil, and it gives you the ability to infiltrate water. The crumb structure receives water, it has a good airspace, and each little crumb is actually a very populated colony, or multiple colonies of soil life.

You can crush it in your hand because of the airspace between the crumbs, and you can compact it in your fist, and it'll compact up into a ball and rub apart again. I want you to look for those crumb structures. They may appear in places that you just don't expect. Have a look under a carpet of ground cover plant, such as sweet potatoes, or under any ground cover that's dominating the ground. Under that micro-canopy, there's all sorts of shelter for small life forms. Don't discount the small life forms. They're all living, dying, breeding and pooping down on the soil and adding to the soil food which adds to this process.

Ethics / Pressure...

It's bloated. It's over-supplied. It's like force-feeding you with meat, potatoes and two veg, or some base foods. It hasn't got the diversity because these plants are now full of those elements. It's bloated with water, and it's hair root-function shuts down a little bit because it's so full. 

But you're ok, you're going on with your cash crop. But sooner or later, with a monoculture of this in the field, and these plants being bloated with water, they will become really obvious to insects. Not everything sees the same way as we do. If you ever look into how ducks see the landscape, they don't see much at all except for water; the element they interact with. A lot of insect pests see the water in plants, the bloat in plants, so sooner or later, after putting all this investment in, you're gonna get a problem.

It might not be this year, it might be next year, but sooner or later you're gonna get some problem fly in, some insect problem, and you've invested in the crop.

Pesticide...

So, you can't afford not to, maybe... now, this is when your ethics come into question... give those a bit of a spray. Now, that's a pesticide, and that doesn't just kill those, because gravity takes everything down, and it gets into the soils. And now, if you are in worm or ant country, but generally those are hte larger soil animals anyway, they get wiped out.

And the soil life, the soil life that is helping you structure the soil, these microorganisms definitely start to get wiped right out of the soil. These larger elements, worms, termites, etc., are helping to structure and open up the air passages and water passages in the soil, they get knocked out. But you're ok. Your crop is still going. You're fine, you're gonna make money.

Fungicide...

But then also, until the plant grows on, bloating away, coming towards your crop, sooner or later, you might be in rainy season or you might have an extra wet period, and you've got a lot of humid air. And this bloated plant is more susceptible to get a fungi problem.

So now you've spent the money, right? You've had to spend more money than you thought you were gonna spend. You've had to spend money on preparing the field, the seed, the fertiliser, probably the irrigation, and now the pesticide. And you really owe quite a bit to the bank... You might just compromise again and put down, over the top of that, a fungicide.

Now, down in the soil there can be 600 meters to 6 kilometers of gunal hyphae in every square meter, and they're interacting with all kinds of things. They're connected to the plant roots, they're bringing in a lot of phosphates, and they get wiped out... Not all the fungicide hits the plant. Gravity takes it down and it soaks down with the water.

So, now we've knocked out the fungicide, the fungus, and the funal assist. We've knocked out some hair root, quite a bit of hair root, because we're fertilising and stuffing the plant with three mejor elements. We knocked out the soil life, or most of it, especially if we repeat this over a few years with pesticides.

We knocked out the fungus, the hyphae, by letting the fungicide through the soil, so the soil is collapsing. The crumb structure is collapsing down. There's very little airspace. There's very little water space. Most of our water is now running off because it won't soak in, there isn't enough porosity in the soil. So, chances are, if we get caught with a ploughed field, we're actually removing soil off the landscape now and sending it to the ocean fast.

The Biocide Cocktail...

Of course, there's one more thing to add now, isn't there? Because what happens when you knock out the structure in the soil? What's the response? We're physically eroding the soil, and the response to damaged soil is a reparative function, in that some of these hardy, little pioneer plants that we demonise, hate, and take on as enemies, come in to try to restructure the soil. Their germination condition is to send down big tap roots to de-compact.

There are de-compactors in germination condition, and, where the soil erosion is taking place, there are hair root weeds that try and hold the tops together for us. That's their germination condition.

So, what we'll do now is complete the biocide cocktail. We'll put on a herbicide. And there's your biocide cocktail. And on you go, and soon or later, you'll be out. It's just a matter of time. It depends how good your soil base is in the beginning.

You are farming the soil...

But where did we start? Well, we actually started with trying to make money with a monoculture, and we started with a shop-bought bag.

We tried to feed the plant, and not the soil. It's as simple as that. You are not farming the plants. You should not be demonising the weeds. It's the germination condition you're looking at, not the weeds. It's the cause, not the symptom, that's the problem.

And it's ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The base element is the soil, so until you've got that right, you're not gonna be successful at producing something as difficult as annual crops. It's a lot easier to do perennials. It's a lot easier to do long term trees, but when you start mucking about with ploughing fields, especially in climates which are very dangerous to plough in, and you start doing a monoculture, and then you start a monoculture over large areas with ploughed fields in inappropriate climates, you're gonna end up like traditional people who have taken ill advice, with no food to eat. You're gonna end up moving to the big city.