I've decided that there is little likelihood of me ever finishing a book on "Soil Fertility and Animal Health," so I may as well upload all my hard work, so far, to my blog.
INTRODUCTION
Many horse owners never get any closer to “dirt” than what they brush out of their horses’ coats or scrape off their boots after a trip to the stable. To these readers, this book may seem unnecessarily pedantic and irrelevant to their private war against metabolic disease in their horses.
But many horse owners, urban and rural alike, are desperately seeking to understand WHY their horses are getting sick from eating grass. They want to know how to stop this descent into virtual extinction of our beloved horses through metabolic disease. This book is not just for farmers and others who have control over their feed sources. It also seeks to help the horse owner understand what has happened to turn the grass against us and our animals. With this understanding, even horse owners who own no land will be empowered to effect changes in our agricultural policies, reversing the trend toward ever more nutritionally deficient feeds and foods.
Raising Horses in the Rain Forest
Humans grow crops where Nature decreed otherwise all the time. This is probably the single most underrated health issue facing our horses and livestock – and our human health – today. It is probably also the least understood. We take our animals with us wherever we go. We do not follow them to fertile soil, where good grass grows naturally. We tend to believe that just because grass grows almost everywhere, it follows that animals eating that grass should also thrive almost everywhere.
Nature has all sorts of uses for grass. Not all of them include feeding domestic livestock. Grass seems to be a simple plant when compared to a fir tree, which seems so much mightier and emotionally attractive. This frequently leads to the grass growing under the tree being greatly underappreciated. However the grass that feeds the grazing animal must be a powerhouse of nutrient production. A fir tree mostly just grows indigestible wood. A grass plant must have access to a high plane of nutrition to produce food for highly evolved mammals. The fir tree produces mostly cellulose, which is only fit food for a termite or a bark beetle.
Nature likes to cloak her bare ground with some sort of protective greenery. If the earth is rich and the climate favorable, nutritious grasses will grow to support the thundering herds. If the ground is poor, weeds, woody shrubs and silent forests will shield the bare earth. It is not difficult to distinguish which environment favors our relentless pursuit of agriculture. If the ground is unfavorable to agriculture, we push on blindly into these areas anyway, thinking that if the soil will not support row crops, we’ll just grow grass. All along, we fail to understand why our animals do not thrive.
Through painful experience we’ve learned that the soil which grows stately fir trees was never decreed by nature to grow nutrient-dense grass. And yet, we have managed to face down and reverse Equine Metabolic Syndrome, as well as mineral deficiencies deadly to sheep, by creating grassland soil in the midst of temperate rainforest. This success is what emboldens me to share what we have learned about soil fertility with others who might benefit from our experience. This book is about describing the difference between soil that is capable of producing nutrient-dense, balanced nutrition for livestock, and soil that favors only sugar and starch or cellulose production. It also hopes to illuminate a path toward creating grassland soil communities that will support and sustain animal (and human) health where such health has been difficult to achieve, much less maintain.
The Reluctant Steward
Feeding the soil to feed the plant which nourishes the cow or horse may be lyrically labeled stewardship. People who maintain healthy soil, and grow healthy food and animals without strip mining soil fertility are called good stewards of the land. Stewardship is no longer the responsibility of the farmer alone. We were ALL farmers a few hundred years ago. Abdicating that vocation did not absolve us of our role as stewards of the land, it merely postponed it. Whether uncomfortable or not, to the farmer, the “exurb” who has moved to the country to keep a pony for the kids, or the urban dweller who boards horses at a distant stable, good stewardship of the land remains the responsibility of everyone who consumes farm products, including hay. This will only be acknowledged when farmers and non-farmers alike understand how to resume stewardship and then begin to demand it from ourselves, and from those who grow our foods and feeds. Welcome back to your rightful place in nature.
It is perhaps overly optimistic to suggest that truly, overly abused land can be brought back to balanced fertility which will support the growth of proteinaceous grasses. But it is not nearly optimistic enough to say that much depleted land can in fact be made fertile again. You take the minerals out, you put them back. How hard can it be? Impossible if you don’t know how. Ridiculous if you don’t know why. For much of the rest of this book, the aim will be to go down the essential mineral list, one by one, and show you the “why”. The “How” of soil mineralization must be pursued through further study of more technical books, and perhaps the advice of a soil consultant who values nutrition over yield.
“You put this mineral in the soil, you get this nutrient out of the crop.” This is a very difficult connection to make, but it is the one I plan to use to try and make soil fertility graphically imaginable, and to show that soil mineralization is not just an expensive way of packaging up ground rocks in blades of grass for delivery of relatively unchanged ground rocks to the animal. If this was all that nutrition is about, we could feed our animals bone meal and wood shavings and call it a balanced diet.
Soil Depletion – The Sky is Falling! Or is it?
Over and over we are told that the soil is being depleted. Without fail, no solution is ever offered for this situation, nor are we ever made truly aware of the real consequences of such depletion, other than stating the obvious: We aren’t getting our minerals. We are kept vaguely desperate, wondering when the next cow will fall from milk fever, or the next horse will go lame from laminitis. So we take, and we feed, supplements. Billions of dollars worth of supplements. But they don’t usually achieve the desired result of disease prevention, if disease prevention is our definition of health. That is because, unknowingly, we have short-circuited the mechanisms by which plants use inorganic minerals to turn the products of photosynthesis – sugars and starches – into countless nutrients that the mammalian body cannot make for itself. Mammals are not mineral eaters. Plants are. Our practice of supplementing minerals to our livestock (and ourselves) to make up for the nutritional deficiencies in forage and food in no way supplies the other nutrients which only plants can create ONLY in the presence of ALL the essential inorganic soil minerals.
The aim of this book is to make sure that the reader is left with absolutely no doubt about the difference between plant derived minerals and “ground rocks” fed as mineral supplements.
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