I woke up this morning asking myself - how did we miss what’s missing?
When was the last time you saw dragonflies, butterflies, black ants, earth worms, bumble bees on your property? When I go to assess soil the commonality I find on 99% of farms is an abundance of red ants, wasps, bomber flies, deer flies, house flies. I wont spend much time driving home the point that we have caused this unbalanced ecosystem.
If you are ready this article then you are already aware and are thirsty for ways to repair and restore. First we want to ask ourselves what choices or “have to’s” did we accept on the way here? Our society has become kneejerk, impatient, and fear ruled. The soil did not wither away to dead dirt overnight and restoring it wont happen in one or two planting seasons no matter how much money gets thrown at it in that time frame. However, making key changes immediately will provide huge rewards that will snowball into massive positive change. We need to bring the life back. How do we do that? We need to create an environment for life to live. Herbicides and pesticides are not a “have-to”. These chemicals alter the soil on a microbial level for an undetermined time period. Using these chemicals multiple times prevents the soil microbes from being able to break them down and restore health to the soil.
Weeds tell you a lot about the soil. Weeds are not the spawn of the devil, they are opportunists. They are showing you there is an imbalance in the nutrients of the soil, that the PH is changing, or this area needs different management because the desirable species are being overgrazed and cannot recover fast enough. I have successfully restored over a dozen farms without using chemicals. Here is my question to you. Are the weeds really taking over or are the desirable species disappearing and all you have left is weeds? Many of my restored pastures still have a few weeds. Weeds can feed the wildlife, the birds, provide shelter for animals, etc.
For my restored pastures there is a fierce competition for nutrients, sunlight, space and water. We have planted a diversity of species, shouldering out the weeds. We can outplant weeds. We can improve the PH, we can use brassicas to take their sunlight, we can restore the organic matter to hold more water making the environment less than favorable, we can use deeper taproot plants and more fibrous plants like sunflowers and legumes to choke out the nutrient availability. Using this method, in the meantime, we are also restoring our soil, preventing erosion, capturing more water, adding oxygen to the soil, creating organic matter to give back to the soil that gives so much to us.
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