Enhancing Natural Systems

Enhancing natural systems

6th July 2011

Peter Burton
 
A genuine question by a dairy farmer client was recently asked.  “ If hundreds of kilograms of nitrogen per hectare are required to grow our pasture each year and we are only applying 20kg/ha as fertiliser where does the rest come from?”
 
The following diagram from Fertilisers and Soils in New Zealand Farming by C During printed in 1984 helps answer that question.


 
Soil is as much a living breathing organism as is a plant, animal and person.  To maximise its potential requires as much careful nurturing as is required to grow and sustain a healthy plant, animal, or person.
 
It could be argued that soils should be the first priority as the health of plants animals and people are dependant on the health of our soil.
 
Dr Graham Sparling in his 2004 lecture Broader Shoulders, Smaller Feet, delivered to a packed out audience (as reported by Philippa Stevenson) made a number of points.
 
Soil is only soil if it has biological activity otherwise it’s dead like moon dust, and despite the way we use, abuse and take it for granted, most terrestrial life depends on a thin, 10cm to 20cm surface skin.
 
He also said that he found it depressing that we have trodden a well-worn path.  Like a brother we have raced to catch up in the degradation stakes with our older American and European siblings.  In just 150 years of intensive agriculture New Zealand has done a good job of matching the problems being reaped from thousands of years of Northern Hemisphere settlement.
 
“It’s been more rapid and acute here and we’ve carried on when 30 years ago the consequences were obvious in America and Europe.  We’ve not learned the lessons.”
 
Has the reason that we have followed the high fertiliser nitrogen input path been based on the false premise that more fertiliser nitrogen grows more pasture?
 
In any short term experiment there will nearly always be a growth response to applied nitrogen however the long term affect can be quite the opposite.  The long-term consequence of excessive fertiliser nitrogen use is increasingly degraded soils with lower growth potential.
 
Why? Because fertiliser nitrogen used as a driver of growth destroys humus, and as humus levels decline so too does production and health.
 
The Eco-Logic Soil Improvement nutrient programmes based on the use of the soil improvers DoloZest and CalciZest provide the benefits of increased growth with markedly higher energy levels available almost immediately after application.  When the health of any organism is improved, performance lifts.
 
For more information call 0800 843 809