AdAgrA 2014 Conference

Soil Health

Shawn Speidel

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

6- Good Information, Good Decisions, Good Outcomes

Heavenly Father, you've blessed us so abundantly.

We just ask that you would give us the wisdom on how to bring out more abundance, both for our families, our schools, for the people you want us to minister to.

I pray, Lord, that it would show, the produce that we grow would show your character.

And the things we learned here, it wouldn't be too complicated, but hopefully it's enough for people to take it in and learn more.

Lord, we just ask that we would see your character in all that we do.

And that, well actually that other people would see it and we wouldn't.

But, you know, we're talking today about good information, good decisions, and a good outcome.

Everything that we do in life requires that we know something about something.

You know, we, you know, just driving here, you had to know what directions, you had to know where you're starting from.

I mean, how in the world can you get to the right place without knowing where you're starting from?

Now, there's situations where the Lord will provide the way, but in many cases, he's given us a brain, and he's given us the ability to exercise the brain.

He's given us the glucose to burn and the Krebs cycle and everything else that has to go along to make a body function.

If you'll forward on to the next slide if that's possible yet.

I'm the new farm manager at Daystar Adventist Academy and our farm is called Castle Valley Farms.

I've only been there since about July of this year, but I've seen how the Lord has led up to me coming there.

Well, let's not worry about the chart just right now.

We may not actually get to it this session.

So when you build a house, you want it to be built just right.

But unfortunately with soils, Somehow soils don't meet that same criteria where things aren't measured very well and things aren't cut very well and you know you have a powdery mildew laden cucurbit crop and you know aphid infested Alfalfa crop or you know, whatever whatever it is.

That's because the construction is not right inside the plant.

In the Garden of Eden, it talks about a mist coming up out of the ground and watering the garden.

It was the original subsurface irrigation system.

Like in greenhouses, they have subsurface flood floors.

Well, or in hydroponics, they have things that miss the roots with a nutrient solution.

But the Lourdes system that he developed actually was the ideal.

When you're building a house, you need to analyze where are you?

How many soil colors do you have as you cross your landscape?

Are there places that seem to be deep soil, other areas are thin soil?

You need to draw it out, knowing your starting and ending points at each phase.

So you need to know what direction you're going, but you also need to know how far you can get in a given period of time.

When we take a drive, when I was planning out the drive down here, I was thinking, well, we're going to stop over in Kansas City and sleep the night before coming on farther on down here.

Well, the same thing is true with the soil.

You can't overload a system that is a biological system with clay and humus as part of it.

You need to get all of your tools in order.

And believe me, most gardeners probably don't have the right tools or enough tools.

It's like when you fix a car, a lot of times you need multiple tools.

Well, to fix the soil, like Whitmar's talked a little bit about compost, Compost is a wonderful tool, but it is not the only tool.

You need a measure for each cut that you make.

You need to keep the home in good repair once the construction has actually happened.

So we still live in a sinful world where the soil is degrading.

You know, the rainfall leeches are excessive.

Some of the things that we do can harm the soil as well.

We have to constantly be connected to Christ.

Well, that's a picture of our farm from like a couple thousand feet up or so, and that was given to 1 of our farmers market people.

She just came over and she emailed the pictures.

So I just want to make sure we all understand, we all know we're created in God's image, after his likeness, but to have life abundantly, it's not just, We need a physical body as much as we need the Spirit of the Lord.

Everyone has inherent successes and struggles from sin.

You look at an Amazonian soil versus something from the dry areas of Peru, totally different soil.

I've taken a front yard and a backyard soil sample.

1 may have come 1 day and another 1 came another day.

Well, it's a different soil type altogether.

You know, I have sinful tendencies that maybe you don't have, and maybe you have sinful tendencies I don't have, you know, but we do need intervention.

I'm just here to say that We all are designed to be a husband, men of our soil, if that's the right term.

I think it is, but we are supposed to be caretakers for what the Lord has provided for us.

You know, it's just like Christ is our righteousness You know we we can affect that change in the soil kind of like that like Christ can affect in us You know, it's like the full nutrition in the soil is like Christ to us.

This is not to imply that either Whitmar or I are perfect in our soil making decisions, but you know the nutritional aspect has really been avoided in most organic gardening and farming.

So consider what are you nourishing your soil with?

What good, bad, and no changes do you see from your past actions?

So you always have to have a goal in mind.

People will know that we're Christians by our love.

So consider, do you even know what a restoration looks like?

Do I know what somebody who truly has Christ in him looks like?

What is a person after the latter reign gonna look like?

To direct our lives, we require the Holy Spirit, Scripture, Spirit of Prophecy, nature, and are connected to divine brothers and sisters.

We need these lenses into our lives because sometimes we can't see the reality that's just staring us in the face.

Look into the soil requires similar types of lenses.

Whitmar McConnell

5- Environmental Influences, the Other Part of the Growing System

The 1 thing, and I know some of this stuff may be a little bit overwhelming to you, some of the stuff that we did cover.

There are some, you're not gonna remember everything.

The 1 thing I want you to remember is that there is a model.

And that understanding that model, then you can start filling in the details on that model.

And if you will focus on that and apply it to your situation, not to somebody else's, you know, and when it works great for you, don't go tell somebody, hey, these are the things I put on and everything went wonderful.

I have complete confidence that if you'll apply this model, just like if you'll embrace Christ, it doesn't mean that the world stops being a mean and ugly place sometimes.

It just means that your life will have peace and fruitfulness.

But you need to be in harmony with Christ and let everybody else find their way there too.

Have you thought of writing a book or developing a training?

Yeah, Robert Fair at Lightbearers has been harassing me for about a year now and we're working on it.

I shouldn't say harassing me, he's encouraging me.

Father of Heaven, this morning again, we're thankful that you love us We thankful that you're forbearing towards us your patient And when we look at the history of Israel, and we look at our own history, we recognize that too often we don't listen.

But I again, just are thankful for your patience and your graciousness towards us.

And I just pray that somehow or another, you would open our eyes and our ears to hear all and to see all that you have for us to see and hear.

And that we would recognize how much you love us and how much you desire life, and not just life, but abundant life for us.

And not only for us, but so that we can share this, the beauty of your character with everyone and anyone that'll listen.

Okay, so, I want to try to avoid doing too much reviewing.

What I want to encourage you to do is, like I shared the Ideal Soil book, now philosophically it's not exactly everything I wish it would be, but it is a very good representation of the correct model.

Now it's talking about the chemistry part of it.

And remember I had the circle up there, and I should probably draw it up there again.

There's more to the model than just the chemistry.

And so that's what we need to get to now.

We need to get to the physics, or the physical part of it, and the biology part of it.

Let me draw that back up there again just so you see it.

This is just the larger picture like I shared before.

The larger picture of the model and then each 1 of those aspects has to really be looked at in a little bit closer detail.

And so we're going to fly, we've looked at 1.

This, doing this usually takes about 5 days.

So trying to narrow it down and make sure that you're getting a good picture of it is a little bit challenging.

But what we're trying to achieve now the chemistry we're going to jump to the physics and I'm going to organic matter I'm going to touch on with the environmental influences just a little bit you know at the tail end of it and rep it talk about that then.

Well let me just talk a little bit about that right now.

In Isaiah, the Bible says, God says, to the law and to the testimony, if they speak not according to these things, there's what?

When I talk about different schools of thought in agriculture, I'm not picking on individual people or anything, but what I'm trying to help you understand is that the devil is just not going to give you the whole truth.

And he's going to try to give you representations.

And there's a lot of sincere people trying to do everything that they know to do that's right.

But we have to compare these ways of thinking or practices with a biblical model, a complete model to see, is everything there?

Is it really providing us with everything that we need?

And the organic school of thought is that organic matter or compost will largely provide everything that the plant needs.

There is some mineralization that goes on in the use of natural rock powders, like rock phosphate or green sand or granite dust, and there's some other rock powders that are applied to that, but largely organic matter is the belief that it has everything in it, so the plant needs.

Do you believe that your life experience is complete and balanced?

Organic matter is everything that was once living that is now dead in the soil.

Well it's actually everything that is living or once living in the soil.

So it includes living roots and biology and stuff in the soil.

But if you're depending on organic matter, which would be testimony, would be life experience, if you're depending on that to provide everything, would you have a high degree of confidence you're getting everything based on your own experience or the experience of things you see around you, the experiences of others around you, the reality is that none of us really have a very complete and balanced experience.

And so to assume that organic matter has that is a very dangerous assumption.

I would like to but it can because we have, if you go to Revelation, what does God call us to?

He calls us to keep the commandments of God and have the faith of Jesus.

His testimony was complete and it was balanced.

And so there is a testimony that we can be nourished by.

Now when organic matter breaks down in the soil, it turns into humus.

You've heard those 2 terms, organic matter and humus, and sometimes people use them interchangeably.

But humus is what organic matter breaks down to in its most basic and stable form.

And the interesting thing about humus is if you were to take it into a lab and analyze it, it would come out identical to that ideal chemistry model.

Nature is trying to obey God and is trying to restore and heal and balance.

And so when it breaks down to that most stable form, nature has removed all the excesses and deficiencies and everything from it.

But that's not, and so when we, like say, we could read other people's experiences, and we're encouraged to do that.

We're encouraged to read the experiences of the pioneers and we study the lives of other people, we still have to have some complete model to digest that experience and digest it down to and distill it down to what is complete and balanced out of their lives.

So organic matter certainly is beneficial to the soil and so it's a key component of it.

In fact, if you'd had no organic matter in the soil, nothing would grow.

You could have perfect chemistry and You could have good air and water exchange, and if you didn't have any organic matter, any humus in the soil, nothing would grow.

You could have a fraction of a percent of humus in the soil and something would grow.

But if you completely remove it, nothing will grow.

And so you'll see a lot of cases where land turns to desert.

It's that tipping point where the humus content of the soil essentially goes to 0 and now it doesn't matter what else is there because there's no life there anymore.

There's no sparkle life, the continuation of life is there anymore.

So there's a lot more that could be said about organic matter as a key component.

Like 1 of the things I think I mentioned was that it has 30 times, 30 times the exchange capacity of clay.

The humus, Well, yeah, when the organic matter, as it breaks down into humus, the exchange capacity increases to as much as 30 to 35 times that of clay.

And so it's 1 way, say you have a soil, it's a sandy soil, somebody asked me, I don't remember who it was, said they had sand.

Lucia, she shared her, she was showing me her soil analysis and Her cation exchange is so poor.

I'm not saying that to discourage you, but her exchange capacity is so poor that she needs to stay close to Jesus.

You need to know, where am I in relation to the Lord?

And so she, because it's a 3 point, when you get below 5.22, you can't maintain the minimum levels in the soil very well anymore.

And so God has a special set of rules for that.

Yeah, but the reality is that the model doesn't give up hope because people are in a very fragile situation.

There's hope for those people and those soils just like there are.

4- The Three Legged Stool Part 3, Biology

Father in heaven, again, life is a question to us, and sometimes there's a lot of things that we just don't understand, and I just pray that you would help our minds to be clear, and you would help us to understand your purposes, and that we would be willing to submit our lives to your purposes.

What I need to kind of finish up here, because we're really going to have to cover a lot of ground tomorrow morning.

I'm sorry, this is what usually happens when you get into this.

We'll try to get through all the material here.

We might have to abbreviate some of the physics part of it.

The biology part we can generalize a little bit more.

So I didn't put the numbers up there, but what you're shooting for is a 67% calcium, 10-20% magnesium.

It tells you what the characteristics of that soil are.

Is it where you're going to move that range in those.

Potassium 2-7%, sodium 1-3%, iron about 300 parts per million, manganese about 200 parts per million, copper 5 to 10 parts per million, I prefer 10.

I grow a lot of berries and so I see the difference when you get that copper level up there.

You're not dealing with the fungal issues that they deal with so much on berries.

Zinc, this will be a transition into the anions that we'll try to cover here in this session.

1 of the things is that all of these elements interact with each other.

And some interact as synergists, like iron and manganese interact with each other and they influence each other.

And you never want manganese to be higher than iron because when it goes into the plant, the manganese will oxidize the iron.

Actually, I won't deviate on this, but I'll drop this little blurb in here.

Mad cow disease is related to excessive manganese levels and deficiency in copper and zinc.

A lot of the things like the organophosphate, fertile pesticides, aggravate it.

And so that's why you'll see that problem related.

But it's more than just organophosphates.

It's a mineral imbalance and deficiency on it.

Copper and zinc interact with each other.

And so if you overload 1 in relation to the other, so we have about, in some cases people will say about half as much manganese as iron.

And copper, you generally want about half as much copper as you do zinc.

But now this is where it gets a little tricky because zinc interacts with phosphorus.

And so you have to figure out how much zinc you need based on how much phosphorus you have.

And as the phosphorus level goes up you need to change those ink levels.

The highest level, the minimum you would want is 6 parts per million.

The highest level that is ever recommended is 20.

I have soils that have 60 parts per million zinc in them.

Not me personally, but I have farms that have 60 parts per million zinc in them.

It's just that you're not getting the optimum benefit from those situations because you have something that's exaggerated or excessive.

So zinc, the rule of thumb that you'll see in the ideal soil is it should be, I think it's one-tenth of phosphorus.

And so, as far as quantity, So pounds compared to pounds, they're represented as parts per million on the test, but you just multiply it by 2 and you got the pounds or divide by 2 to get parts per million.

So let's say, you know, optimum levels of phosphorus are generally 5 to 750 pounds.

As P2O5, no, that's phosphate, not elemental phosphorus.

This is where stuff gets kind of tricky and people get confused is because somewhere along the line of fertilizer industry, The industry decided to represent phosphorus as phosphate.

So if you go and you get by fertilizing, you know there's 3 numbers on the bag, the N, P, and K.

Well, the P in the middle, which is phosphorus, is actually represented as phosphate, which is a compound.

If you want to know how much phosphorus there actually is, you have to multiply that by .44 because it's only 44% actual phosphorus.

And so if you're going to use the 1 to 10 relationship between zinc and phosphorus, you have to move it to actual phosphorus.

But most labs actually measure it as phosphate, and so they're going to represent it as phosphate.

And the numbers you want is about 500 to 750 pounds of phosphate on the soil analysis.

And if you have those numbers, you want to be at about 20 on zinc.

And there's a scale that goes down from there.

Let's look at what ASTRA represents in the 1 to 10 ratio.

Let's say you had 500 pounds and you did the 0.44, you'd have 220 pounds of actual phosphorus.

If it was represented on the analysis as 500, you'd have 220 pounds of actual phosphorus.

You're already over the maximum recommended limit of 20.

The problem here is when you use ratios like that, there is a threshold by which you've got to be really careful going above it on some of these things.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

6- Good Information, Good Decisions, Good Outcomes

1h

5- Environmental Influences, the Other Part of the Growing System

1h

4- The Three Legged Stool Part 3, Biology

43m

3- The Three Legged Stool Part 2, Physics

1h

2- The Three Legged Stool Part 1, Chemistry

54m

1- Many Voices and the Model Soil

58m

4. Proverbs: Divine Wisdom

29m

The Twenty-third Psalm

26m

Revenge of the Barbarians

30m

Rejoicing

34m

The Book That Couldn’t Be Silenced

29m

Delicious Grape Juice

36m

Sound Doctrine