Organic or Conventional or Both?

One thing I refuse to do is discuss organic and conventional models in terms that provoke conflict.  No either/or, no one versus the other.  Conflict suggests that one is right and one is wrong.   In my experience, the decision is not so black and white.  To me, it isn’t so much that one method is somehow more intrinsically nourishing.  Being rigidly but unsystematically “Organic” has resulted in our making parts of our land every bit as toxic as using conventional inputs irresponsibly might have, as I shall explain.  If it’s only a matter of fossil fuel use and “sustainability,” even “organic” can come at a price to Sister Earth.

My leanings are entirely toward organic but with an emphasis on complete soil nutrition, which we were not able to achieve immediately on our marginal soil. We had made so many errors, trying to rely only on lime and manure, that we made a bigger mess than we started out with.  Many hay analyses that I have on file reveal that hay produced on nearby land that had only grazed cattle was so deficient of nutrition as to be virtually deadly to my stock. 

I would like to see my land one day become self-sustaining in a model where the nutrition extracted from the soil will be returned, and only those elements which are used by the crop or leached by rainfall will need to be replaced.  We have used some “conventional inputs” to bank the missing minerals in the soil, but we have been careful not to use those harsh inputs that would kill the soil biota, but rather feed it.  We are banking these elements to be used by the soil organisms to feed the plant.  When the soil is fully supplied, or even almost, I am confident it will generate its own energy and nutrition through natural means, which will in the end, complete our transition to organic.

We are not seeking organic certification because we are not trying to sell anything.  In other words, we are free to thumb our noses at the government’s version of organic and pursue nutrition on our own terms. 

Here are some thoughts on producing “pure” stands of horse-safe forage.  Clover is on the hit list for many horse owners.  If I don’t want clover in my horse hay because “it’s bad” then I must rely on an outside source of nitrogen for my grass plants.  If I want to use organic inputs, I still have an environmental price to pay.  What if I want to use blood meal?  What if I abhor factory farming and don’t want to support the factory farming industry that is probably the main source of blood?  And what amount of fossil fuel is required to convert blood into blood meal?  How many antibiotics, if any, are riding along in the blood to kill off my soil biota? What if I want to use feather meal?  Maybe I don’t want to support the factory farming of eggs and chickens from whence the feathers come.  And what amount of fossil fuel is required to convert chicken feathers in to fertilizer?  Chicken feathers are “hydrolyzed” I think.  What does that mean, and how much energy does it consume? How much arsenic might be present in the feathers?  Maybe none!  But I have to ask the question anyway!  If I want to use alfalfa meal, well, I don’t know what alchemy turns alfalfa into fertilizer, but how did it get processed and bagged, palletized, shrink-wrapped and trucked to the fertilizer company?    How about chicken manure, the waste product of factory farming?  It’s a “toxic byproduct” of the poultry industry until some farmer trucks it off for his crops?  (Wait a minute!  How did “toxic waste” suddenly become “plant food?” Read on.)  How about high levels of potassium and other hitch hikers?  Chilean nitrate?  Mined in Chile by children and transported a bazillion miles to Oregon.  Seabird and bat guano?  Harvested at heavy cost to the environment. Those questions don’t make me feel too good if I decide to use them without really understanding the full impact of the decision I am about to make.

Please note I am not presenting “facts”, I am just asking questions myself!

My objective is to use only organic materials on my pastures.  And with a little knowledge and some guidance, it’s a goal I can meet.  As with horse training, you never start with the goal.  You break the process of training down into small bits, ever building a foundation to eventually achieve your goal.  Our road to self-sustaining fertility began on a foundation of complete ignorance, way too many pat formulas for soil health, and grossly imbalanced, sorely depleted soil. 

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The first evidence on the records of this fragment farm being occupied by white pilgrims is from the early 1900s.  So we have roughly a hundred years of people living here and millennia of leaching rainfall.  It’s at the foot of an extinct volcanic vent, perched on a ledge about 300 feet above the Abernethy Creek headwaters.  It is surrounded by Douglas fir forest and other smallholdings.  Few people raise food crops in this area, even gardens.  There is the odd steer, lots of horses eating junk hay (what I would call junk), some ornamental nurseries, lingering turf grass seed farms and Christmas trees.  Filbert orchards (wood) used to abound as did cane berries (sugar).  The practicality of farming in this foothill area is really dying out.  That should have been my first clue.  But we weren’t exactly looking to “farm” when we bought this place 30 years ago.  We had horses, and other agrarian practices were incidental.  Our first experience with raising cattle here was having a lovely registered Angus cow abort her calf.

The effort to remineralize such deficient soil has been financially painful.  We hope that within another two years (2011), our goal of self-sustaining fertility can be met, because the current expense of banking the missing minerals is not sustainable for a couple of retired geezers.  The moral is, if you are looking for land to raise your horses, hay and food on, start with good ground.  The soil here was not right for growing nutritious animal feed to begin with, and our ignorant stewardship of the land made it worse.  What we do seem to have though, is a soil that can be made fertile, through the painstaking process of remineralization.

The first year we consulted Kinsey Agricultural Services we sent only a pasture soil sample.  The recommendations came back in terms of “conventional” inputs.  It was time to grapple with my goal and my reality.  When I called and spoke to a consultant, the bad news was that the soil was so whupped, there was really no direct route to organic.  It seems that most organic inputs for one type of deficiency might well carry another element with them that would disrupt balance in another area.  In the first place we had dumped so much calcium carbonate on the land that we were looking at years of effectively tying up many elements that were already under threat of disappearance.  For instance, our phosphorus level was very low, but adding soft rock phosphate would have exacerbated the calcium problem.  Kinsey’s priority was to first help us undo the damage we had done by applying the excessive calcium, then start banking the missing minerals, and trying to overcome the excessive ones. 

This was about the time when I realized that judicious use of conventional inputs had its place.  We all want to be “organic” but for the grower, it’s just not always as simple as that.  And “organic hay” is not going to automatically guarantee an analysis that is well balanced and healthy for your horse.  Let me illuminate.

This year, having whipped myself into a frenzy over all this, I HAD to send in a sample from my languishing garden.  We have over the years put many organic inputs on the garden.  Some lime, much manure and compost, winter cover crops, fava beans plowed down, and many, many crops of buckwheat plowed under for biomass and the curious ability of buckwheat to scavenge phosphorus and convert it into plant-available form for other crops.

I also sent in a sample from an acre of ground that has been a “sacrifice area” for horses and sheep.  Thirty years of deliberate neglect.

The first stunning revelation was that the garden humus level, 5.2% was identical to the un-screwed-with soil in the old horse yard.  I can probably lay the lack of humus building to too much tillage in the garden, but it was just the first shakeup I got from the analysis of garden soil.  Please note the humus level is quite high for both, it’s just that the garden is not actually building any more humus through our additions than the old paddock.

The garden contains 995 pounds per acre phosphorus.  Now, I’ve had other soil tests done on the garden before and got a graphic back, with no explanation.  The graph might say “very high” phosphorus.  And of course an uninformed person like me might say, “Oh goody, my soil has lots of phosphorus!  I’m doing everything right!”

Here’s what Mr. Kinsey has to say about phosphorus in his book, “Hands On Agronomy:”

 “I like to see phosphate levels in the 500 to 750 range.  At 500 pounds per acre, the P level is considered excellent, but at more than 750 pounds, problems are coming down the pike on the other side…Above 1,000 per acre problems come in platoons.  I have seen trees in citrus orchards die because phosphate levels were above 1,000 pounds per acre on the test we use.  The conventional wisdom says nobody ever gets there.  There are many growers who use too much manure or compost and get there.”

There’s enough phosphorus in my garden to assassinate a citrus orchard.  I hang my head with The Albatross of Good Intentions dangling from my neck.

We’ve also got a fairly plant-toxic level of potassium and “platoons” of other problems in the garden soil.  For all the “goodness” I’ve put into the garden over the years, I can scarcely coax a crop of anything off it anymore.  We definitely need a soil doctor.

The salient point is that “organic” doesn’t automatically confer the blessing of good health on a hay crop.  I bought some frozen organic beef patties the other day because our local Safeway doesn’t carry a decent branded beef.  I gave my serving to the dog last night.  It was inedible.  What a billboard for organic anything…how could organic producers package that garbage and present it as food when they go to so much effort to earn their certification?  We tried some organic applesauce one time and it tasted like watery pulp.  Yet the lamb we grow on our emerging grass farm is startlingly delicious and growing better with each improvement in the soil, despite using a few evil conventional inputs. The minerals in the soil put minerals in the grass, which puts minerals into the meat, and the minerals in the meat put WOW in the flavor.  Flavor was invented to tell our tongue, sentinel of our digestive system, what is food and what is corruption.  When you get the taste of high fructose corn syrup out of your mouth, your tongue suddenly starts functioning normally again.  And remember, your tongue is an organ of your body.  It responds to good nutrition like every other organ.

Which by the way leads me to another point.  There is much controversy over whether an animal can differentiate between different minerals in boxes, versus just a simple trace mineral salt.  Many scoff at the idea.  Well, duh.  Why should a cow know how much copper or sulphur to eat?  She’s not designed to be a geologist.  She’s designed to know which plants she’s supposed to eat!  She’ll tell you where the nutrition is every time.  So don’t go blaming a cow for being as dumb as a box of rocks when it comes to her own nutrition.  Her nose and her tongue are organs designed perfectly to distinguish nutrition, not differentiate between boxes of ground rocks.

Let’s look at conventional fertilizer inputs.  For the purpose of this epistle, I will regard “conventional” hay to be more or less defined as a product of N-P-K fertility or over-fertility.  Most hay from around here already contains a whopping load of potassium.  I will be looking at whether that has partly to do with timing of cutting (potassium moving up into the plant for seed production) but I can’t say anything about that with any authority just yet.  Triple 16, which means 16 pounds nitrogen, 16 pounds phosphorus, 16 pounds potash per hundred pounds of fertilizer material, is usually the soup du jour for grass hay production around here.  Or just straight, guesstimated applications of urea.  The emerging favorite is biosolids, sewage sludge.  Ugh.  I don’t even WANT to know what the analysis is.  The hay it produces stinks and is a wicked gray green color.  Fooey. (Note – found the analysis on line, 4% nitrogen, a little phosphorus and about 25-ppm arsenic.)

This is husbandry with the blinders on.  It may produce tonnage, but it doesn’t guarantee nutrition.  Producers don’t as a rule focus on nutrition because they’re bottom line depends on production.  Most hay is not graded and sold according to its nutritional content.  It’s sold on its pedigree (alfalfa, timothy, orchard grass, etc.) and on its appearance.  Renegade N-P-K farming is a prescription for dying soil and too much nitrogen in hay, but a great way to sell bigger tractors because it takes more horse power to pull the plow through the concrete that used to be soil.  Reckless application of this type of chemical fertilizer is probably the reason why conventional inputs are universally condemned by organic adherents.  For me this would have been throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  I’d have had to give up this mad pursuit of imagined self-sufficiency, move the horses to a boarding stable and pay my mounting vet bills.  To me it’s a little like the mentality that drives the “cows are the source of global warming” sentiment, when cows pastured on functional grasslands are actually part of the solution to global warming. There’s a whole lot that most people don’t know about the potential of holistic management of cattle on living grasslands for bagging up all that CO2 and sending it to perdition.  It’s the management of the material or animal, not always the material or animal itself that makes it a bane or a boon.

The cow in a factory farm or feedlot and the well-managed grassfed cow on a pasture both produce manure.  One produces a toxic waste product and the other is a vital link in a self-sustaining grass agriculture or eco-system.  It’s the human management that determines the difference, at least most of the time.  You’ll never catch me speaking in absolutes.  There aren’t any villains or good guys in the Organic/Conventional controversy for me anymore, just intelligent, well informed choices.

Except perhaps when it comes to fertilizers that are derived from industrial waste.

A source of sobering truth about this subject can be studied in the book “Fateful Harvest” by Duff Wilson.  As a result of his investigative reporting, Washington State created a website that lists every fertility product for sale in the state which includes an analysis of its heavy metal content and whether it was derived from industrial waste.  That website is http://agr.wa.gov/PestFert/Fertilizers/FertDB/Product1.asp .  Oregon now has a similar database, http://www.aapfco.org/metals.htm

Organic inputs do not automatically guarantee against hitch hiking heavy metals.  Soft rock phosphate, coming right straight out of the earth, carries a load of heavy metals with it.

The grassfed industry has done a lot of research on creating high-energy pastures for ruminants, so that they can meet the needs of pregnant/lactating/finishing animals without the dreaded grain inputs.  Out of their research come some important perspectives.  One of them is that earthworms and other soil biota can survive applications of no more than 40 pounds per acre of actual nitrogen.  And common sense says that nitrogen should never be applied in amounts higher than the crop will use in a season.  If it doesn’t volatilize and go to heaven, it’s going to run off into the streams and lakes and oceans.

The organic route to adequate nitrogen for a hungry crop of grass is not without its environmental costs, as I’ve tried to illuminate.  Metabolic horse owners are told to stay away from clover.  If you forbid your producer or yourself from using clover in a self-sustaining stand of grass, you confine him or yourself to the above list of organic nitrogen choices.  If you are now a little less comfortable about any of the organic nitrogen options I’ve suggested, what do you think about a little-and-often applied source of commercial nitrogen that the Washington database says is free of heavy metals or industrial waste?  Say, just enough to pop the crop but not enough to harm the earthworms?  Not enough to run into the river, just enough for one season’s production, and not enough to end up as non-nutritive nitrogen in the plants, but real, actual amino acids…does it seem so awful now?    I am not selling commercial fertilizer.  I’m just trying to take the holistic view.  Agriculture at best is a collection of least-bad-impact decisions.  The only way we can avoid them is to go back to being a hunter/gatherer society and try not to kill off all the game.

Not much can be said, really about the Organic/Commercial status of basic inputs like ground limestone and dolomite.  They come from the earth (correction, I discovered after the fact that the dolomite we applied this year was from a cement kiln…fortunately, pretty clean.  The above websites are good for checking such things before buying).  But they aren’t sustainable for a lot of regions, like ours.  I think our aglime comes from British Columbia.  I can’t hop over to a natural lime deposit on the farm and shovel up a load for pasture application.  It expends fossil fuel to mine, bag, palletize, shrink-wrap it and transport it and for me to apply it, but fundamentally, it’s “organic.”  The same goes for dolomite and gypsum.  The trace elements we apply may or may not have been “commercialized” in some way, I don’t know, but there is no point in putting them on if the plant can’t use them in an unavailable form.  Case in point:  We live in “Redland” home of red clay soil, chockablock full of iron oxide.  Why on earth would I add another 400 pounds of “ferrous sulphate” to my soil for heaven’s sake!  I don’t know what happens to iron to make it “ferrous sulphate” or “ferric sulphate” or “ferrous oxide” and it’s not necessary for me to know the science behind that manipulation (which no doubt involves fossil fuel somewhere).  All I need to know is that plants can’t USE iron oxide.  So is ferrous sulphate “organic” if it’s been manipulated in a commercial fertilizer factory?  I’d have to specifically ask a certifying agency.  What would that get me?  Somebody has it on a list somewhere of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” materials.  Acceptable to whom, the government or the plants? That’s just not good enough anymore.  If I don’t use the ferrous sulphate to overcome my manganese excess, my grass plants will suffer a metabolic arrest somewhere and deliver grass to the animals with too much unmetabolized iron in it, contributing the plant’s screwed up metabolism to the horse’s screwed up metabolism.  Bottom line, the plant and the horse both have a screwed up metabolism for the same reason.  It started in the soil.  You can take the horse out of the grass, but you can’t take the grass out of the horse.

And you thought hay with too much iron in it was just a function of growing in dirt with too much iron in it…

I’ve waffled on long enough. I just wanted to recount my experience of learning not to take anything at face value, but to take the holistic approach; try to determine the best course of action, and then assume that any decision I have made may be wrong.  It keeps the mind open to explore all known possibilities when it becomes clear that things aren’t working they way I thought they should.

 

Comments

[freelance writer]

great blog it is :) i'm so amazed!

[Barb Lee]

Hi Judy, did I get caught? :o) Sorry I haven't been checking in on the blog too frequently lately, as I'm busy getting my symtom-free Morgans driving together as a pair right now, and not much time for composing! :o) I have some good articles that I wrote for publication, but will be putting them up on the blog instead, thank you for reminding me! Also, I will be collecting a fresh forage sample around April 25th for analysis and will surely post the results, with details relevant to animal health. Following that, some relevant information about liver analysis of some butcher lambs...we've had a history of low calcium in the animals for no apparent reason other than excessive levels of potassium. This year we fertilized with Redmond Salt, and did not add potassium. The Then In June we will analyze our hay crop to see how our fertility program relates to the nutritional properties of the hay. Mother nature always plays a major role, but there will be much to talk about in the upcoming months!

Thank you for posting!

Barb

[Judy]

I'm delighted to find your blog, as it pertains to much more than horses in a area of thought I'm just beginning to explore.
You said, "You’ll never catch me speaking in absolutes." Hmmmmm-isn't never a pretty absolute term?
Blessings to you.