I once wrote a series of articles entitled “The seven bank accounts of a farmer” for a farm paper. These seven included soil, seed, knowledge, the team, neighbours, politics and money.
If a farmer looks after the first six accounts then eventually the seventh will increase. If a farmer begins with importance placed only on the last one he may be very successful but not as a farmer.
Soil was the first one that I wrote about because everything relates back to a healthy soil. A typical soil is composed of 45 per cent mineral, 25 per cent air, 25 per cent water and five per cent organic matter. All the life in the soil is included in that five per cent.

One quarter of a teaspoon of soil can contain 50 nematodes, 62,000 algae, 72,000 amoebae, 292,0000 actinomycetes and 25,280,000 bacteria. This life in the soil works day and night breaking down leaves, straw and other organic matter into a form that can be used by the plants as fertilizer.
An acre of soil can contain as many as a million earthworms. One earthworm can digest as much as thirty-six tons of soil in one year, leaving worm castings behind which are a source of nutrients to plants.
When I attended Agricultural College in the 1960s, most attention in soil class was given to the mineral, air and water content of the soil. We had an entomologist who taught biology, but most “the bug man” and neither the students nor the college realized the importance of maintaining a healthy life in the soil.
In the 1960s we were taught that soil just kept the plant from falling over and all nutrients could be supplied by chemical fertilizer. We were also taught that most unwanted weeds could be killed with chemical sprays.
Some time was given to reducing soil compaction because it reduced the air in the soil and hence reduced plant growth and made the soil hard and difficult to till.
One professor even told us that it would be cheaper to dump the manure over the hill and buy all chemical fertilizer. We were taught that if hard pan got too hard to plow or affected crop growth, just use a deep ripper to break up the hard pan. There were a host of companies starting to sell products like pan buster or clod buster which could be sprayed on the soil to soften the hard pan and help break up clay balls. I later discovered that these products were only made up of a surfactant to relieve the surface tension on water droplets and shampoo. Both these products made it easier for water to penetrate hard pan and hard chunks of clay, making hard soil easier to break up.
An application of enlivened rock powder would also help soften the soil. It was also discovered that the correct balance of calcium and magnesium would reduce or even eliminate hard pan and at the same time make other necessary minerals more available and greatly increase crop yields.
Most farmers and home owners use sprays to reduce or eliminate unwanted weeds instead of weeding by hand or using a cultivator for between the row weeding. This is much faster and uses less expensive fuel and elbow grease but use of the cultivator helped restore that critical air to water balance in the soil.
Some sprays are registered as antiseptics or bactericide and not only kill weeds but also much of the life in the soil. Some sprays also chelate some necessary elements in the soil like manganese which is necessary to maintain pregnancy; or copper which is necessary to get the most efficient use of nitrogen or boron which is necessary to efficient growth of soybeans or alfalfa. Chelate means to bind tightly making these elements unavailable to anything including plants even though these elements may show as adequate on soil tests.
In crop farming it is necessary to look after the life in the soil because all those little lives work day and night to provide nutrients for plants at little or no cost. We are what we eat is an old saying. When feeding animals, including humans, we must pay attention to the health of the bacteria in digestive systems to assure efficient production in animals.
Some bacteria play an important role in keeping our own gut healthy and we must not ingest something that interferes with their health as well. In a high producing dairy cow about half of the cows nutrient needs can be provided by healthy well fed gut bacteria. To prevent most post calving problems in animals, the animal must be fed an anionic diet for several weeks before parturition. Immediately after giving birth it is important to switch to a cationic diet to supply enough of certain elements to the animal.
Since the crops grown on a field will reflect how that field was fertilized, it is important to know which elements were high or low in the soil before deciding to save the crop for feeding animals a few weeks before delivering or for feeding animals after they give birth. If roughage and grain in the diet is high in cations, (eg. high in potash) it is impossible to correct that diet with a mineral or any other additive.
If you have attended a funeral, you will remember that phrase spoken by the minister that brings us all back to reality, “We all return to the dust.” Let’s look after that dust. Everything that we eat or have in life came from the dust.

Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations. gladcrest@gmail.com