Healthy soils produce healthy crops. right? Nope. Although it would seem the very definition of soil health, this popular thinking does not match what plant pathologists find (Janvier et al., 2007). It’s not true.
In my last post, we found that soil health was not a major factor for crop yield but is useful in fine-tuning crop nutrient supply. Here, we will look at soil health fine-tuning of soil water use
Farming requires a lot of knowledge and skill. You have limited time and resources. It pays to know where your efforts will return the most benefits, your ROI. What is the ROI for investing in soil health?
Most environments are limited by the lack of nitrogen. This explains why the world stays green and why it pays to follow the nitrogen. But why is this so?
There is a problem with how soil health indicators are being developed. We start with farmers using soil health practices, for instance, no-till, crop rotation, cover crops, and application of manure or compost. Then we look for…
“Follow the money” is a reliable tactic for figuring out people’s actions. Money is scarce, people want it, and do stuff with it. For plants, what works is “follow the nitrogen.” Nitrogen is scarce, plants and other organisms need it…
The world is green with plants. The world also has thousands of species of plant-eating insects and other organisms. Why don’t all those insects eat all the plants? Why does the world stay green? TCR White, an entomologist from New Zealand, asks this question in a book (White 2005) and a series of fascinating papers. White argues that the answer is not…
What do weeds and gamblers in Las Vegas have in common? They both manage the risk of unpredictable outcomes through a strategy called bet-hedging. Could farmers use this same strategy by planting cover crop mixtures?…
I once grew buckwheat in town between our sidewalk and the street. It got a lot of looks from passersby and one lady even knocked on my door to ask about it. I planted it with the naïve hope that…
I previously covered reasons why the results of many biodiversity studies do not apply to agriculture. Here, I want to emphasize a related issue: how ecological biodiversity research has distracted us from figuring out the actual causes of benefits in crop mixtures.
