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Agriculture

Soil Fertility 101: Step by Step Directions

Bob Gregory

Part 1- Fixing Depleted Soil

For those of you that don't know me, I'm Bob Gregory.

We have been involved with the True Education Series since Bob Jorgensen first established it down in North Carolina about 10 years ago.

And Bob was a very, very dear friend of mine.

Over the years we have cooperated with him in true education seminars through time.

And in 2009 we actually held the first true education agriculture combination meeting at our facility in West Virginia.

We did that for 2 years and then The agriculture portion of those meetings was held at Uchee Pines for a couple of years, and from that was birthed this organization, the Adventist Agriculture Association, and we are greatly indebted to the service of the Dysinger family, to the members of the board of directors of Ad Agra, and also to Bob Jorgensen and his memory for really providing inspiration to do this.

I have been involved in agriculture for the majority of my life.

I began as a crop consultant out in California.

I did very large scale monoculture agriculture and managed very large farms and have had quite a variety of different things that I've been exposed to over the course of my career.

About 30 years ago I became convicted that organic agriculture was very important for a variety of reasons and not the least of which was my own personal health and since that time I have kind of left mainstream agriculture industry and I spent 10 years teaching agriculture at 1 of our colleges in Virginia and I have since in the last 7 years established a training program and a market farm in West Virginia where my wife and my daughter and I basically do everything.

And part of our reason for doing that was that we felt a calling to minister to folks such as yourselves that realize, you know, perhaps a little later than Sister White counseled us to realize it, that agriculture should be the A, B, and C of education, but we've realized that now.

And I respect that we need to provide opportunities and venues for studying agriculture.

So we moved to West Virginia, we bought a 120 acre farm and an old school building and in that setting we have for the last 7 years been offering agricultural training classes as well as supporting ourselves from agriculture.

So that's a little bit about me but this day isn't about me, It's about you.

So I want to move on and really try to cover a lot of ground with you today, no pun intended.

But we have much to discuss and to think about today.

I want to first, though, open with a word of prayer and ask for the Lord's leading today, both for me and for all of you, that we might receive the blessing that he has in store for us.

Father in heaven, we're grateful for this beautiful place, this wonderful opportunity to freely come together for the liberty and freedom of mind to speak your truths and your thoughts.

And I ask, Lord, that your Holy Spirit would attend each of us today as we continue this study on agriculture.

And please bless and be with those that are within my hearing this morning that your truths may be heard and not just the words that I utter.

May I be a vehicle in your service today I ask in Jesus name.

Over the course of today we have a number of topics that we're going to cover.

My first 1 this morning is titled Fixing Depleted Soil, and really what I'm going to be sharing with you over the period of time here is that really all of our soils are depleted.

There are no ideal soils on this planet, and there haven't been for quite some time, and we're gonna see what some of the consequences of that are.

Later, in our second presentation today, our second and third presentations before lunch, we're gonna be talking about something called the base saturation.

That's gonna be probably a new term for many of you, but it's really 1 of the most critical elements of our understanding for really getting the most out of our gardens.

And we'll be going over some explanation as to what that is and what we need to do in regard to that.

Now we're gonna talk about nutrients and how to calculate nutrients, not just for our plants' sake, but also for our sake.

And we're gonna see some of the flaws in the current understanding of agricultural science, even within the cutting edge of the industry today, and the science both of organic agriculture and conventional agriculture, there are some components to the puzzle of understanding soil that are just absolutely missing.

And then my last presentation today will be on what can we use on our soil to correct these things that will provide us with some safety.

Because there are all kinds of materials out there that people are very happy and willing to sell you.

And some of them that you think might be safe or probably not safe.

Others that you deem unsafe, especially from an organic perspective, may be a better choice in terms of safety and utility for you.

So that's what we're going to cover this morning.

I'd like you to take a moment and write down this website address, www.bareagardens.org.

And the reason that I want you to write that down is because what I'm covering today, especially when we get into some of the more complex aspects of the soil science, There are some free downloads of a PowerPoint presentation and some other videos on our website that you are welcome to help yourself to.

And that will definitely help you, because, frankly, we're going to have to move fast enough today that you probably are not going to be able to digest everything that I have to share with you.

If you've got the website and the web address, you can go to a link on our webpage and actually find some of what I'm presenting to you today in free downloads there.

The other resource that you have available to you this week is that we will have a table over in the main meeting hall and we do have a DVD series also that's available for purchase over there too that covers much of what I'm going to be sharing with you today and gives you the opportunity to kind of do it at your own pace.

These are just some pictures of our farm.

We bought an old school building, as I said earlier, and we've been blessed with being able to use that to host people literally from all over the world at this point that have come through our training programs.

And we converted the upstairs rooms in this school building to guest rooms and it's you know, it's an old building it's a wonderful resource, but we We just feel that the Lord directed us to that location Particularly for that facility It was not my desire to have all the maintenance duties, and it wasn't my wife's desire to have all the cleaning duties for a 24, 000 square foot facility.

But nonetheless, we've been blessed in putting it into service for the Lord.

And it was provided to us at a very, very low price and has been a real blessing to us.

We grow about 3 acres of produce and fruit.

We intensively farm on about 2 of those 3 acres And with the produce that we have coming off of the farm, we've supported ourselves for the last 5 years.

We do have other revenue streams coming from the classes that we teach and from the DVDs, but basically most of that revenue is to support the facility that we have, which we wouldn't normally have.

And in terms of the farm produce that we, that we put out, if we lived in a modest home and were, were free of debt, we, we, we generate a very good living just off of what the produce of the farm provides.

The Lord gave us, you know, 2 books for our understanding and when it comes to agriculture, I want to emphasize this a little bit because many of us, especially that are awakening to the to the importance of agriculture in our lives today, have probably neglected a little bit the second book, and that is the Book of Nature.

And when the Lord provided us these 2 books, he provided them because in them are all the lessons that we need in order to successfully walk in the path that he has desired for us to walk.

And because we have lost a little bit of our understanding of that book of nature over time, and because of the consequences of sin, many of us are in a state of confusion today that we don't recognize that we're in.

You know, we're blessed because of our pioneers in this church that gave us a very firm understanding of the prophetic messages in the Bible and the importance of the 3 angels' messages.

But when it comes to our understanding of nature, we've really taken some steps that are a little bit perhaps out of line.

And I just want to point out something to you for emphasis of that.

If you go to Google and you look up the 10 most widely sold Christian books, that's the Google search that I did.

I wanted the 10 all-time best-selling Christian books.

Now, obviously the Bible is important for our study, right?

And if I was someone that was was new to the message of Christianity and I wanted to do due diligence in today's modern world, oftentimes we go to that internet resource for research, don't we?

And my point here is that as we look at this list, the Bible is number 1, the Common Book of Prayer by Thomas Cranmar is number 2, Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, a book that most of us have read, is on here.

Tolkien, and We have a few other books on this list too.

Now if I was studying really earnest in my desire to understand Christianity, would those books be of help to me?

But yet, That's what society says and that's what the world tells us are the best-telling Christian books.

So by contrast, if we're trying to understand agriculture and we go to the internet and we Google whatever the topic is that we might be wanting to understand, we're going to be fed a lot of distracting influences, aren't we?

So this is why it's so very important, I believe, to make agriculture the ABC and the foundation of our education, to have practical experience, practical knowledge, and to test everything according to God's word, to what the spirit of prophecy tells us, and our own experience with that book of nature.

And that experience has to be honest, scientifically balanced experience.

Again, I want to emphasize that our perspective is very, very important.

And what we look at becomes very, very important.

This is a picture of a rose farm that I used to manage in northern California, we had 2, 400 acres of rose bushes.

We used to have people that would come out for Sunday drives, and they would bring the whole family out and just look at the beauty of this, but there's a lot of hidden deception in this picture.

And when we look at it from the basis of perspective, we can look at that field and it has beauty in it.

We can look at the single rose and it has beauty in it.

We can look at the single petal from that rose and it has beauty in it.

And we can look at a microscopic view of that petal of that rose and it also has beauty in it.

So this is an important aspect of what I want to share with you over the course of today is we have to look at things in perspective.

And when it comes to dealing with soil science, we also need to look at things in perspective.

Most of us as human beings have this great desire just to find the right formula or the right recipe or the right menu to follow and we follow the steps and when we follow those steps we get to a given result.

And I suspect that many of you are here today because what you want to hear from me is that if you do this and this and this and this, you will have this as your final result.

Circumstances in the farm and on the garden require that we understand the principles behind those steps and not just the steps themselves.

In the Signs of the Times in August of 1896, Ellen White wrote that agriculture should be advanced by scientific knowledge.

It means that whatever is being studied is studied well enough to realize that there are laws in place.

And a scientific law doesn't just apply in 99% of the cases, does it?

So if we're going to advance agriculture from a scientific perspective, what it means is that what we do and what we apply has to work 100% of the time.

Part 2- How to Balance Your Soil’s Base Saturation

Father in heaven, thank you again for this opportunity and for this venue and for this blessing of so many willing hearts to know your will.

Father, we pray that you'll abide with us, that your Holy Spirit will attend us.

And though I know I will be covering some things that may be elusive in the minds of some here, please give them your presence to give them confidence that this is something that they too can comprehend, understand, and implement.

Abide with us now, we ask in Jesus' name.

Alright, I'm going to talk about some stuff here that gets a little bit complicated but again I don't want you to panic.

And I'm going to point out more the principles of what we're doing and I'm going to show you some steps to follow but don't feel like you've lost it if you're not following me on the steps, because the presentation is on our website, and this is something that actually, it takes about a day and a half to convey, just with what I'm gonna share with you before lunch this morning.

So, you're getting an overview of it, I'm exposing you to it, I'm sharing some principles with you, but don't panic if, at the end of this session, you're going, what in the world is he talking about?

So The concepts that I want to convey here, though, are extremely important.

And the most valuable concepts that I have learned in terms of soil chemistry and soil fertility in my career in agriculture.

Everywhere I have applied these, they meet that test of science.

And this has been applied in everything from container growing for large nurseries.

I've applied this on a nursery scale of up to 2, 400 acres of a crop that had a market value of 2000000 dollars an acre.

And again, for those of you that may not have been here this morning, we are instructed to advance our understanding of agriculture by science.

And our science comes from the word of God, from the spirit of prophecy, and from proven, tested, scientific method, which means that we replicate trials over and over again when we get the same results every time we can establish a scientific law.

And unless that takes place, anything else we discuss is anecdotal information.

And the vast majority of information in agriculture today that you read about in books at the gardening centers, that your neighbors share with you over the fence, that's anecdotal information.

The first time you take a single step in your garden and you get a result from that, if you're sharing that result, you're violating scientific principle.

Because the reality is that unless you replicate something for 4 years in 7 different locations and 7 different trials in each of those locations and you get the same results after 4 years in all of those trials and all of those locations, then you've established cause to effect.

If you haven't done that, if you've gone out and you've used, you know, grandma's garlic and cayenne elixir to keep the potato bugs off your potato plants, and you do it 1 time and you don't see potato bugs, or you see fewer than the year before, and you share that information, you're not sharing something that's scientifically valid.

And in every situation, whatever we do to our crops has just as much potential to damage our crops as it does to do something good for them.

When we start talking about pest control a little later on this week, when we discuss methods for dealing with pests, we've got to realize that anything, anything we apply to our plants, any spray we apply to our plants has side effects.

Just like any medications or any treatments that we do on ourselves.

These things are powerful and they have side effects.

That's really a very, very important perspective to maintain.

And again, what we're gonna talk about this morning is this first step of building a soil bank.

And the primary principle behind what we're doing here is to develop an environment in the soil.

We're going to talk about plant nutrients as we do this, but we're not talking about these elements in their role as plant nutrients.

We're talking about building an environment in the soil that is conducive to biological activity.

Even though these same elements are also nutrients that plants need, we are talking about them in a different role, and that is to build a nice house, a nice structure, a nice living environment for the bacteria, the fungi, the enzymes, the algae, all of the other constituents of the biology in the soil.

And again, I'm just gonna skip through these because we talked about our soil this morning.

Now, when we talk about soil, we better have a definition for what we're talking about because not all of us say that word soil and mean the same thing sometimes and not all of us know what we're referring to when we're talking about soil.

Soil is basically a combination of ingredients.

About 50% of those ingredients are minerals.

There are 114 different elements today on the periodic table of elements.

Those are all the building blocks for all of nature, and the minerals in our soils can contain a wide variety of those various different elements on the periodic table.

So simply knowing that we have 50% minerals doesn't really tell us much about the chemical nature of the soil, but 50% of the soil is mineral.

This is a really important thing to understand because air is as important to the health of plants in the root zone as water is.

Plants that are deprived of air in the root zone will not flourish.

And this is where sometimes our methods of irrigation become very important, because there's actually ways of getting more air into the soil by applying water, for example.

And we'll get into that a little bit later on.

Water makes up 23 to 25% of the soil surface, and it is an important constituent too, obviously, because water not only serves to keep the plants hydrated, but it's the vehicle by which minerals enter the plant.

They're taken up through the roots in soluble form in the water.

And organic matter in most soils constitutes about 3 to 5 percent.

And again, the organic matter is anything that is living or was living, right?

In understanding soils, and we probably got people here from all over the country this week, In our part of the planet here in the southeastern United States, most of our soils fall into this first category, acid soils.

In fact, about 70% of all the arable land on planet Earth is in acid soil.

They have free hydrogen in something called the base saturation.

We'll get to a definition of that shortly here.

And the vast majority of our planet's soils, especially in moist climates, are acid soils.

The second category of soils that are used for agriculture are called calcareous soils, And these have typically a slightly alkaline pH.

These can be anywhere from about 6.5 to about 8.3.

They can run a little lower than the 7.1 I have written here.

But they're called calcareous soils because they contain lots of calcium and oftentimes magnesium carbonates.

They're often high in phosphates and these are around the planet the most fertile soils that we grow our crops on, our calcareous soils.

An example of calcareous soil is where I grew up, in the Sacramento Valley of Northern California, and the San Joaquin Valley of California, the Willamette Valley of Oregon, and some of the western soils are, and also in parts of Arizona, there are calcareous soils.

The third soil classification I'm gonna list for you here are what are called sodic soils.

And these are soils that are very highly alkaline, usually a pH well above 8.

They have lots of free sodium in the base saturation, and they're very poorly drained, and they have very poor water penetration.

Soils that you would find out in the areas of western New Mexico, Arizona, southern California deserts, those types of areas.

And these soils can also be very productive, but they have to be managed appropriately.

Important point for you to understand here is that you've got to know what type of soil you have to start with before you even start doing a soil analysis.

Because these 3 different types of soil actually have such different characteristics that 1 soil analysis size doesn't necessarily fit all.

And you need to understand what type of soil that you've got.

Now if you don't know which of these classifications you fall into, my suggestion would be to talk to your local extension agent and ask him, do we have acid soils, calcareous soils, or sodic soils?

All you want from him is the answer to that 1 question, but until you know the answer to that, you're not really going to know how to best analyze your soil.

In analyzing your soils, I strongly recommend that you use a privately run soil laboratory.

Many of our state university systems have soil labs and they'll often analyze your soil for free.

And if not for free, for a very nominal fee.

And I would ask that, sir, that light is really distracting to me, I'm sorry.

The reason that I recommend a privately run laboratory is because many of the state laboratories are geared towards mainstream monoculture agriculture.

They're interested in analyzing how much nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium you have in that soil so that you won't inhibit the potential for yield, okay?

That's great if you're a commercial farmer and you just want to grow tons of stuff per acre.

But it doesn't work very well if you want to grow crops over a long period of time on the same soil and you want to actually get nourishment from those crops.

So the paradigm that we're gonna use in going through what I'm gonna explain about a soil analysis here is very, very different than what the agronomist at the soil laboratory uses, than what the extension agent is gonna think when you tell him what your plans are to do with your soil.

And, you know, It's a unique perspective.

We're using a different paradigm of making use of the information from a soil analysis.

So it's important to know a lot of the detail about that soil that the land-grant universities simply don't provide.

So I'll give you some suggestions for labs here too.

At the bottom of this slide you'll see a few of them.

Be certain that your soil analysis includes something called the base saturation.

Minerals are reported on a soil analysis, sometimes in parts per million, sometimes in pounds per acre, but what we're really interested, first and foremost, is something called the base saturation.

And not all soils analysis have that on their reports.

That's another reason why I prefer to use the soil lab.

The other thing to recognize is there are different extraction methods on that soil sample to determine how much of each element is in the soil.

And this is where knowing what soil classification you have becomes important because we use a different extraction method for a sodic soil than we do for an acid soil.

Part 3- How to Balance Your Soil’s Base Saturation

All right, we'll pick up and continue where we left off.

And as I pointed out, Albrecht's contribution to soil science was far more extensive than this, but this is just an element of 1 of the contributions that he made.

But he helped us understand the importance of calcium in the base saturation.

Now, we also have calcium reported up here in parts per million.

We have magnesium here reported in parts per million.

And we have potassium here reported in parts per million.

So what is the difference between these numbers and these numbers?

And in order to kind of express that, I want to go back a slide or 2 here.

And when we're looking at the reported amount of calcium in the base saturation, what we're looking at is the amount of calcium that's actually attached to the mineral particle with that electrical bond, right?

But if we look also into the other constituents of the soil in the organic matter, in the micro colonies of bacteria, in the minerals that are dissolved in the water, because this water isn't just pure distilled H2O, it's got minerals dissolved in it, and in arthropods or tree roots or anything else that is not attached to that soil particle, we've got a larger amount of material that we're measuring then, because we're measuring not just what's attached to the soil particle, but also what's between the soil particles.

So, and this is why we have both of these ways of expressing what's in the soil.

Here we have the potassium that is tied to the soil particle with that electrical bond in the base saturation.

Here we have potassium that might be parts of microbiology that was in the soil, potassium that was streaming through the soil, moving in the soil, and the soil solution and other dissolved minerals and so forth.

So here we have a representation of the total amount of potassium in that given amount of soil.

Here we're just looking at a specific aspect of the potassium that's in the soil.

And having that understanding, what I want to do first, and don't get hung up on the numbers here again because you can look at this and download it from our website.

I just want to explain the process to you and have you comprehend what you're doing.

Because as we go through each of these steps, I want you to understand what you're actually doing, what's actually happening in the soil.

And the first thing that I look at, as I said just before we broke, is I want to see where the pH is.

Lots of hydrogen in that soil, doesn't it?

Because that measurement of pH is a measurement of the hydrogen ions in the soil.

So if there's lots of hydrogen ions, I'm gonna have an acid pH.

I also want to look at my CEC to determine, to some degree, how expensive is it going to be to work with this particular soil in terms of addressing the problems that it has.

And this, again, is a consideration for some of you that might be looking for properties.

If you have a soil that is very deficient in calcium, for example, and the CEC is very high, it's gonna require lots more inputs to make that soil productive than a soil that would be more like a silt loam in its character.

And you'll see how these numbers work out here based on this calculation.

Now, 1 of Albrecht's equations was this 1 here that's at the top of the slide.

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