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Posted on September 24, 2014 Categories: Comments are off for this post

Continual Live Plant/Live Root

Diverse perennial grasslands include plants that can grow most months of the year: cool season grasses, warm season grasses, and flowering forbs. And in croplands, cover crops can keep live roots in the soil during dormant periods before planting and after harvesting.

Keeping continual live plant roots in our farmland, rangelands, and pastures harvests CO2 and sunlight and has multiple benefits:

Feeding the soil as many months of the year as possible with carbon exudates: the primary food source for the soil food web.
Stimulating microorganisms to build soil aggregates and pore spaces, improving improves soil infiltration.
Catching inorganic nutrients, keeping them out of creeks and streams.
Managing salinity.
Providing pollinator and wildlife food and habitat and wildlife food and habitat

Increase Biodiversity

Biodiversity benefits the soil food web, improves rainfall infiltration and nutrient cycling, and reduces diseases and pests.

Our native soils evolved, were built over geological time, and received carbon exudates (food) from polycultures: diverse perennial plants harvesting sunlight and carbon dioxide. Human settlement and agriculture drastically changed this picture. Our soils now often receive carbon exudates from a far less diverse landscape or even from monocultures: just one annual plant at a time. This limits soil fertility and reduces habitat for many living organisms.

We can improve our rangelands and pastures by mimicking original plant communities. There are many ways to do this, such as growing diverse crops and using crop rotations and cover crops.

Integrate Livestock

Why return livestock to the land?

Spring or summer grazing, with short exposure periods followed by long recovery periods, allows the plants to regrow and harvest additional sunlight and CO2.
Fall or winter grazing converts high-carbon annual crop residue to low-carbon organic material: balancing the carbon/nitrogen ratio.
Allowing livestock to graze makes economic sense compared to hauling feed to a feed lot, and recycles most nutrients, minerals, vitamins, and carbon to the land.
Grazing animals can manage weed pressure without herbicides while reducing waste associated with confinement: helping to manage water quality and nutrient management concerns.

Minimize soil disturbance

Soil disturbance occurs in different forms:

Biological disturbance, such as overgrazing, limits the plants ability to harvest CO2 and sunlight.
Chemical disturbance, such as over-application of nutrients and pesticides, disrupts the soil food web functions.
Physical disturbance, such as tillage and compaction, eliminates pore spaces that hold water and air. This restricts infiltration, kills microorganisms that make essential nutrients available to plants, and destroys the biological glues that hold soils together, causing problems such as wind and water erosion, ponding, crusting, and organic matter depletion.

Can we reverse these impacts and improve soil function? Yes, we can! Minimizing soil disturbance is a good way to start rebuilding soil aggregates, pore spaces, soil glue, and organic matter.