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.
Crop rotation is a time-proven practice. Compared to monocropping—the continuous production of the same crop year after year—growing two, three, or even more crops can help with pest management. Research has also found that…
“Dependent on off-farm inputs…” Can it be otherwise? People inside and outside of science like to point to how nature needs no inputs, yet still produces. Then, as above, they wonder…
Ecologists, agroecologists, and regenerative agriculture advocates are promoting biodiversity to solve many of agriculture’s problems. They often base this on evidence of the benefits of plant biodiversity from ecological research…
Planting diverse cover crop mixtures will increase soil microbial diversity and achieve increased benefits over monocultures because of the synergistic interactions of the different plant species. The ideas in this statement can be found in…
Soil health management can be distilled to two principles: Maximize photosynthesis & minimize tillage. These are principles; they do not tell you what practices you should use but rather, what the practices you choose to implement should provide…
How much is enough soil organic matter? “The more, the better” is often the assumed answer, or at least as much as the native soil had before crops were grown. There are a few papers…
One of regenerative agriculture’s extraordinary claims is that it can drastically reduce or even eliminate nutrient inputs, fertilizers. How is this possible? The go-to explanation is often “soil biology” – revved up soil biology makes nutrients available that plants can’t normally access. As it often the case, there is a bit of truth here. Regenerative ag can reduce inputs, and soil biology is involved along with other natural processes, but the whole truth may be much more ordinary.
Soil health – the pursuit that launched a thousand soil tests. I have not actually counted them, but many people are working on many ways to evaluate soil health. Some are looking at indicators of soil biology status, others…
This Changes Everything. That is how everything is presented in today’s media. New cars, new policies, new science. An example of the latter are the recent advances in the field of soil microbiology, or…
