Grass Roots of Healthy Horse Hay - Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Armchair Agronomy

 

“Trace element deficiencies or other shortages in a complete nutrition, and consequently the invasion by microbes as an early step in the impending disposition of a prospective cadaver, is a bit of thinking apparently too morbid to make us more proficient in keeping animals as healthy when we feed them as they are in the wild or when they feed themselves.”

                                                                                                     -William A. Albrecht, Ph.D

 

Now That We Have the “Why”…

Soil minerals, and a few non-mineral elements, should mean a little more to you than just “dirt” by now.  That list of twenty or so inorganic elements is used by grass to complete the transition of simple carbohydrates into complex nutrition for highly evolved mammals.  This is the whole bottom line. Our habit of putting on a few of the elements, such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, produces loads of high carbohydrate plant material, which we can no longer regard as food.  This applies across the board to human food as well as animal forage.  That is enough of a take-home concept to suggest that learning more about balanced soil fertility would be a good idea.  As we reel off through the minerals and their individual jobs in making nutrition happen, the concept will become very clear. 

 

We Need the “Who”…

The “who” behind the concept of “Soil Fertility and Animal Health” is Dr. William A. Albrecht, Ph.D.  The quoted phrase, in fact, is the title of one of his books.

By the time Albrecht arrived on the scene back in the early part of the 20^th century, agriculture, animal and human health were already on a serious downhill slide.  His prodigious writings, translating the results of relentless research into language that can be understood by anyone with an interest in the subjects, are preserved by and republished through Acres, USA, P.O. Box 91299, Austin, TX 78709 USA, www.acresusa.com.

William A. Albrecht, Ph.D served as professor of Soils and Chairman of the Department of Soils at the University of Missouri, College of Agriculture, where he joined the staff in 1916.  He was to continue his studies throughout his life, through the University, and later through Brookside Laboratories, into the early 1970s.    

It is the work of Dr. Albrecht in the study of balanced soil fertility, upon which much of this book is founded.  The best source of information about Albrecht and his career is found in the pages of The Albrecht Papers as penned by his friend Charles Walters, and published by Acres USA in four volumes.

And the “How”!

It took me years of brief encounters with the name Albrecht, and such terms as “Base Saturation” to finally understand what any of it meant.  I hope to save you that trouble.  I would send a soil sample to a lab, and a beautiful graphic would come back, with no explanation of what any of it meant, or what I should be doing about it, if anything.  If the graphic said I had “High” potassium, I thought, “Oh goody, look at all the nice potassium in my soil.  It must be very fertile!”  If the graphic said I had very low sodium, I thought, “Who cares?”

If the graphic said I had “acid” soil, I would dump on a bag of limestone. 

The “base saturation” contained an assortment of mystical percentages.  I thought that the word “base” meant some sort of “baseline.”  It must have meant something to the lab, but it was lost on Little Old Gardener Me.  I continued to dump boxcar loads of horse manure on my garden “for the organic matter.”  I got some sheep and did some rotational grazing, believing one author that was telling me, “if you graze, the nutrients will start cycling.” 

The trouble was, the sheep all started scouring pea-soup manure, turning into little walking skeletons and having to be destroyed.  This happened over and over and over again.  In the meantime, the weedy pasture never improved. One vet after another claimed some sort of parasite infestation, despite a lack of supporting evidence.  Finally, it was written off as “stress diarrhea.”   The breed of sheep I had chosen to raise was considered “junk” sheep, with no ability to thrive. This was when I realized that I was all alone with all this animal death.  Nobody could help me but myself.  Since there was no readily apparent causative agent, the only answer seemed to be their feed.  What was “in” the feed that was killing them?  After lots of tears, lots of lost sheep, lots of reading, I finally realized that it was what was NOT in their feed that was killing them.  They were dying of a sort of starvation, even as I penciled out balanced rations for them according to NRC requirements, bought in ridiculously expensive commodity feeds for them and administered five times the label amount of wormer, according to the vet’s instructions.

While all this was going on and we were tearing our hair out, trying to understand the sheep problem, the horses were quietly descending into “Equine Metabolic Syndrome,” a sort of horsey-equivalent to Type II Diabetes.  This went on unnoticed, until one of the horses, Gizmo, began having little immune problems and colics.  He sprouted sarcoids, eye infections and hoof abcesses.  He had big slabs of fat on his trim little body.  He didn’t feel well.  I don’t know how close he came to laminitis, but I was so hyper-sensitized to animal disease by now, that I understood his pleas for help perfectly.  He was sick and he was getting close to going under.

By the time Gizmo began to display these unnerving signs of immune system collapse, I had the sheep problem under control.  I had nailed their problem down to a copper deficiency – you read that right, DEFICIENCY, not TOXICITY – and I was in full swing, unearthing the staggering poverty of the soil we were trying to farm. 

Gizmo’s problem hit me like a ton of bricks.  I thought back over the 30 years we’d lived here, to the mysterious founders, the late shedding hair coats, and the vague symptoms displayed by all the other horses who had lived here.  Then I began to connect Gizmo’s problem with the regional disposition to produce equine metabolic syndrome with alarming regularity.

Once I read Albrecht, the whole concept of soil fertility as the foundation of animal health came crashing in. It became a leap of faith to invest in the remineralization of our depleted soil.  Otherwise, we may as well give up our animals and let the pasture go back to fir trees and blackberries.

It worked.  It is working.  Just as Albrecht promised, the hay and the green forage that we began producing, once the soil had sprung to life under the influence of balanced mineral fertility, became sufficiently nutritious to force Gizmo’s EMS into remission, and allowed us to produce small crops of 100% grassfed lambs, along with LARGE crops of extra hay.  No more drugs, no more chemical props or purchased feeds.  We spend our drug and feed money every year banking minerals into the soil, to replace what our high rainfall washes out, and what the crop takes away every year.  We still have issues to resolve with certain “stubborn” deficiencies, but even as I write this book, we are discovering ways to encourage the grass to create nutritionally dense forage for the sake of our animals.

It is impossible to not be excited about the results.  It is impossible for me to not share the results with others who might benefit from our experience.

Unfortunately, if you hope for similar results, you will have to hunker down and learn a few of the basics of soil fertility.  This book is not a technical reference. You will no doubt have to engage an Albrecht-based consultant to help you balance your soil, but trust me – TRUST me – if you do not know WHY your soil consultant tells you to use a mineral in your fertility program, you will be tempted to simply bypass the expense, by putting the minerals in the feed box.

I hope to be able to de-mystify some of the terms that you will be running into, so that you will be able to sit down with an analysis of your soil, and actually UNDERSTAND it.

After that we’ll work on understanding a hay analysis.

So, without further delay, let’s hop into it! We’ll start by getting more comfortable with some of the terms found on a typical soil analysis.

Clay and Organic Matter

The soil’s ability to BE or to BECOME fertile rests primarily in two substances contained within the soil.  The first substance is CLAY.  The second substance is ORGANIC MATTER.  A little understanding about how these two substances work together to hold minerals within reach of plant roots, and to EXCHANGE these minerals with plant roots, is necessary before any conversation about the minerals themselves can take place.

If you only know clay for its usefulness in making flowerpots, or its aggravating tendency to suck your boots off when it’s wet and rainy out, now is the time to learn what we might say is clay’s “real” reason for being, as it relates to growing nutritious hay for our animals.

Fill a glass jar about ¼ full of soil.  Pick all the dead grass etc. off before you put it in the jar.  Now fill the jar with water and put on the cap.  Shake it good and hard until all the soil is awash in the water and no clumps remain.  Set the jar aside for a couple of days.

When you return to look at the jar, you will discover that the soil has separated into layers.  If there are rocks or pebbles in the soil, of course these will go to the bottom first because they are the heaviest. The next layer to form will be smaller, lighter particles.  Let’s say this layer is sand.  The next layer will be silt, a fine-grained material which is intermediate between sand and clay.  The very finest particles will be on top, and may even still cloud the water because they are so tiny and light, it takes forever for them to settle out.  This layer is clay.  The clay layer is what we are concerned with in soil fertility.  It is the clay, not the rocks and sand, or even the silt, that is the first measure of the soil's ability to hold nutrients within reach of plant roots.

What you are looking at in your jar is the evolution of basic soil.  Soil begins as rock.  Through the actions of weathering, rain, glacial grinding, plant acids, freezing and thawing, natural forces in general, rock is broken down into ever smaller fragments, from stones to pebbles to sand to silt to clay.  Everything below the clay in the jar is still evolving, or may have “over-evolved” and become worn out.

If there is very little clay in the soil, but only sand or rock, the soil is either “under construction” or “destruction” from being subjected to too little, or too much influence by the forces of nature in general.  This of course, is merely a conceptualization and by no means a depiction of the true dynamics of soil construction and destruction. 

The clay component of the soil predicts to a large degree, whether that soil is capable of either being fertile, or of becoming fertile.

 

Going Shopping

We’ve learned that grass requires some 20 inorganic elements to biosynthesize nutrients from the sugar/starch compounds created during photosynthesis.  If “clay” is so important, is it one of those minerals?  No.  If soil is the supermarket of plant food, and inorganic minerals are the plant food, then clay is the shopping basket.  Let’s do another little exercise to help us visualize how this works.

Think of a magnet.  The happy-face magnet on the refrigerator door sticks to the door because it is “attracted” to the metal in the door (as long as it’s not stainless steel, aluminum or plastic!).  Most everyone is familiar with this attraction, and we know that it has something to do with positive and negative charges attracting one another.

This is what happens between the clay in the soil and the inorganic minerals so necessary to plant and animal health. The clay in your jar and in the soil is negatively charged.  Many of the essential minerals have a positive charge.  The clay attracts and holds these positively charged minerals, because “opposites attract”.

You don’t see this going on in your jar, i.e. you don’t see clumps of calcium or magnesium in there, because it goes on at a microscopic level.

Clay exists in ever smaller particles, until the particles are microscopic.  The smallest clay particles are called “colloids” and they appear under the microscope as plate-like structures, stacked on top of one another.  Each of these particles has a number of “exchange sites” – parking spaces, if you will – which, being negatively charged, can attract and hold positively charged minerals.  Some clays have more of these exchange sites than others because of a stronger negative charge, and thus will be more able to hold and supply minerals to plant roots.

 

 

ORGANIC MATTER

Organic matter is anything in the soil that was once alive.  Dead plant material, dead microbes, dead animals all contribute to soil organic matter.  In a robust soil, this raw organic matter will be digested into humus, which will be further and further reduced in particle size, until it too, becomes microscopic particles called colloids. 

As with clay, humus has a negative charge which is capable of attracting and holding positively charged minerals.

In addition to its mineral holding ability, humus has water holding capacity.  Humus is food for the microbes that work relentlessly to assist plants in the uptake of soil nutrients.  It improves the structure of the soil, so that air and water can reach plant roots.  It seems to have the ability to make soil more “forgiving” of the mistakes we make in managing fertility. Humus has many functions in living soil.  Several books listed in the bibliography describe humus and its virtues in much more detail.

Cation Exchange Capacity

The content of clay and humus together form the basis of a given soil’s ability to hold the minerals so vital to nutrition within reach of plant roots.  These two soil components form what soil consultants call the “Cation Exchange Capacity” or CEC.  On a scale of 0 to 100, the soil analyst determines how much of any given mineral that soil can hold.  A CEC of 0 would be pure sand.  A CEC of 100 would be pure humus.  Most soils are somewhere in-between.  Our good, working soil now maintains a CEC of around 16.  This is by no means excellent, but it is good enough to grow decent hay.

“Cation Exchange Capacity” – What’s in a Name?

Why didn’t they just call this fertility index the “Fertility Index”? 

That is because, as you have read, the CEC is based on the soil’s ability to attract and hold POSITIVELY charged minerals.  Positively charged minerals are called cations.  (Pronounced CAT-ions.)

Just about the time you start getting comfortable with a thing, here comes another curveball.  Not all minerals involved in plant nutrition are positively charged.  Some of the really important ones (they’re ALL really important!) have a negative charge, just like the clay and the humus!

These negatively charged minerals are called anions. (Pronounced AN-ions).  Because they have a negative charge, they do not stick to the negatively charged clay and humus.  You have no doubt heard of minerals “leaching” from the soil.  It is the anions that are most capable of leaching, because they have nothing to “stick to” in the root zone. 

“Leaching” means that these minerals are washed out of the root zone, down into the subsoil.  From there they may travel into the ground water and eventually out to sea.

Soil consultants will first be concerned with banking the soil up with the major cations.  These positively charged minerals are Calcium, Magnesium, Potassium, Sodium, Hydrogen and a few of the minor, or trace, elements, such as boron and copper.

Elements with a positive charge, such as those listed above, are also called “base” elements. In chemistry, a “base” is “a substance which forms a salt when it reacts with an acid.”

Base Saturation

Here come the mysterious bar graphs and percentages on a soil report.

During the course of his research, Dr. Albrecht made pounds and pounds of colloidal clay.  He spun clay in a centrifuge until all that was left was a Vaseline-like substance.  This colloidal clay he treated to assure that no cations remained attached to it.

Then he added back the bases, or cations, to the clay in balanced measures to determine the “optimal” “base saturation” of the clay for growing healthy crops.

The result of this research is a road map for us to follow when supplying these critical minerals to the soil. Optimal plant nutrition is obtained when these base minerals are maintained in the soil at certain percentages of this base saturation.

So, going back to the shopping cart analogy.  If we use the Cation Exchange Capacity, or CEC, to describe the shopping cart, then we can use the Base Saturation to describe the capacity of the shopping cart.  The cart can only hold so much.  If you have a zero CEC beach sand, the nutrients will leak out the bottom of the cart.  If you have a CEC 16 or so shopping cart, you can begin to fill ‘er up, without most of the goodies leaking out the sides or flowing over the top.

Now that you have the shopping cart and know how much the cart can hold, you can think about filling up the cart with groceries.  If you are nutritionally oriented, you will want to have a certain amount of protein, carbohydrate and fat.  Perhaps you’ve sourced your daily requirements on an internet fitness website, and you want to fill the cart with foods that will balance your diet.  Bingo.  You have the fundamentals of base saturation.  Grass plants need the minerals in the same kind of balance that animal bodies need proteins, carbs and fats.  So we fill our Base Saturation cart with minerals that will form a balanced diet for the grass.

In general, to balance the plants’ diet of minerals, you will want to load up the CEC shopping cart with 60-70% calcium, 10-20% magnesium, 2-5% potassium, 1-3% sodium, 10-15% hydrogen, and fill your pockets with about 5% of positively charged trace elements.   You’re now well on your way to balanced plant nutrition.

Cations – The Positively Charged Minerals

The positively charged minerals that are held to the outside of the clay, or “adsorbed” are  again, called “cations.” The major cations which form the backbone of plant and animal nutrition are calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium.  (Plants do not need sodium as animals do, but sodium can be useful in a fertility program as shall be explained in a later chapter.) Hydrogen is also a major cation held to the clay.  Though it is non-nutritive, it serves an important role in the exchange of minerals from the soil to the plant roots. A small percentage of cations clinging to the clay are trace minerals, or “minor elements” such as boron and copper.

In a complex process involving soil microbes and chemistry, the plant roots give a little hydrogen and a few carbohydrates to the clay and the soil microbes in exchange for the cations held onto the clay colloid.  If we don’t replace the cations, the clay “shopping cart” is gradually exhausted of these cations as they are taken up by the crops and shipped off the farm. The “shopping basket” eventually contains nothing more than hydrogen.

Rainfall, irrigation and the action of NEGATIVELY charged minerals, called anions, further exhaust the supply of cations held in the clay shopping cart. The cations that are thus leached are also replaced on the clay colloid by hydrogen.

When few cations remain on the clay colloid and only hydrogen remains, the soil becomes “acid.”  Therefore soil “acidity” is not something that is “in” the soil, but rather a measure of what is missing – the essential nutritive cationic minerals.  This is the reason why so many plants do not grow well in “acid” soil.  It is not because the acidity is killing the plants.  It is because there is nothing in the soil for the plants to eat.  They simply starve to death.

Anions - The Negatively Charged Nutritive Minerals

There are several nutritive anionic minerals, those which have a NEGATIVE charge, and these minerals are much harder to keep within reach of the roots because of their tendency to wash away. Unlike the positively charged cations, the anion’s negative charge repels it from the clay and allows it to move easily into the subsoil with the soil water. High rainfall and irrigation carry them off and perhaps eventually out to sea. 

The nutritive anions include phosphorus and sulphur, among others, two extremely essential minerals to grass and animal health.

On their way down into the subsoil, the negative charge of anionic minerals may be powerful enough to pull some of the cations away from the clay and wash them out of the root zone as well. 

So on top of the practice of extracting soil minerals through crop production and shipping them off the farm with the crop, high rainfall and irrigation will be enough to wash away much of what remains of essential fertility. What part of the continent the grass is growing on, owing to a lack or an overabundance of rain, has a tremendous impact on soil’s ability to maintain fertility because of this leachability of minerals.

An Actual Shopping List

Figure 2-1 is an actual soil analysis performed on our pasture.  You will find the CEC listed at the top of the page under the name “Total Exchange Capacity”.  This lab includes hydrogen in the report, which some labs do not.  Therefore, they use the term Total to indicate that this critical value is being reported.  This was our first Albrecht-based soil analysis.  You can see that the TEC is 14.44.  Pretty low.

Below that, the consultant has listed the desired ratio between calcium and magnesium for this particular soil.  His ideal is 68% calcium to 12% magnesium of the base saturation.  Obviously this ratio is of considerable importance if it has its own entry!

The pH of the soil is next reported as 6.2%.  Generally speaking, the soil is happiest at about 6.5%.  When the “base saturation” is optimal, generally, pH takes care of itself.

Next on our report is the Humus content, which is 6.2%.  This is a very healthy humus content.  Some labs will only report “Organic Matter”.  It is humus that is of most concern to us, not simply organic matter, because humus forms a part of the CEC.  Just like sand is not yet clay, raw organic matter is not yet humus, and we are dealing at the colloidal, or microscropic level.

Next, why there it is!  The Base Saturation Percent!  We know all about that now!

At the top of the list, we find calcium.  In parenthesis we see a desirable range of 60-70% of base saturation.  We noted above that the consultant feels 68% is what this soil wants according to its Cation Exchange Capacity.  We discover that the calcium level is at 65.24%. 

Next is Magnesium.  The desirable range is 10-20% of base saturation. 

What is that 80% number between Calcium and Magnesium?  The consultant wants calcium and magnesium to add up to 80% of base saturation! 

Next is Potassium.  The desirable range is 2 to 5% of base saturation. 

Next is Sodium.  The range is 0.5 to 3% of base saturation.

“Other Bases” includes the “minor” trace elements.  They are only called “minor” because they are required in such minute quantities.  Together, their presence on this report equals 5.19% of the base saturation.

Lastly, we have hydrogen, which needs to be present in the soil at 10-15% of base saturation, to make sure that all the marvelous “exchanges” that the Cation Exchange Capacity represents, can take place.

Below the Base Saturation Percent, there is a block of information labeled “Anions.”  These are the negatively charged minerals that leach readily. 

Nitrogen is reported as ENR value, which stands for Estimated Nitrogen Release.  This has to do with the amount of  soil nitrogen (primarily held in the humus) which will become available to the crop during the growing season.

Sulphur, phosphorus and trace mineral levels are supplied to the soil according to their interaction with the cations, and one another.  supplied to the soil according to their interaction with the cations, and one another.  Michael Astera’s book, The Ideal Soil describes this balance in depth.  This is a great book to learn how to balance the minerals for oneself.  For me, it is much easier to hand a bag of soil over to a capable consultant and receive his recommendations.

Hopefully, this unravels some of the mysteries of the soil report.  Now we can go on to look at the individual minerals and how each one is responsible for the actual production of nutrition in the grass.

 Download 2008 Kinsey Soil Test

 

Fig. 2-1

 

SUMMARY

• Incomplete mineral fertility results in lots of bulk and lots of carbs
• Principles of balanced soil fertility were developed by William A. Albrecht, Ph.D
• The clay and humus content of a given soil determine its ability to attract and hold positively charged nutrients in the root zone.  This is called “Cation Exchange Capacity” or CEC
• Clay and organic matter/humus have a negative charge.
• “Cations” are positively charged elements
• “Anions” are negatively charged elements.
• The negative charge of clay and organic matter attract and hold cations, while anions are free to leach into the subsoil.
• “Cation Exchange Capacity” is a measure of the soil’s ability to attract and hold cations, and is established on the basis of clay and humus content in the soil.
• “Base Saturation” is a list of the major cations and the percentages at which they work best to provide optimum nutrition to plants.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Barb]

Hi Mary! That must have been Pat Coleby. Great books! I continue to learn - painful lessons sometimes - but stuff that tempers the evangelism for something that I don't fully understand. Congratulations on the lambs!

[Mary D. Schrantz]

Barb,

Thanks for the new post. Great to hear about Gizmo. I just posted a link to your blog on GulfCoastSheep@yahoogroups.com. They were discussing a book written by an Aussie about soil and sheep, and, well, I thought of you.
I am continuing to soil sample and amend and continue to improve. We got 7 lambs from 7 ewes for our first year, so somethings working right.
Keep bloggin' girl.

Mary in Louisiana

[Barb]

Oh! Gosh, thanks Gary! I worked very hard getting a start on this book over the winter, but got side tracked when spring rolled around. It was a lot harder work than I anticipated. Thought I'd just put the writing out there for now. In the meantime I've been blogging away on my horsedrawn carriage restoration project, which has my (almost)undivided attention at the moment.

[Gary in Olympia]

Barb,

Welcome back! It's great to see you back posting!