building soil – Literal Road Farm

Using our cows for rotational grazing is one crucial step toward farming for a future. Planting cover crop is another. But…planting a cover crop was a bigger undertaking than you might think.

And we did it! Yes, the newbies got a fall cover crop planted in part of the old hayfield!

It took the help of another neighbor to borrow a big enough tractor, the generosity of our local conservation district to have a seed drill to rent for cheap, and a seed mix shipped across the country (to get what we wanted)…plus cooperative weather.

And it all came together. The week we had the seed drill reserved was perfect weather wise, and it hadn’t rained so the ground was dry. (That meant we didn’t have to worry about tearing up the field with the big tractor.)

neighbor shows Bob controls on borrowed tractor — *Our neighbor Bob shows our Bob the controls on the borrowed tractor.*

The fall cover crop seed mix is wheat, barley, sorghum sudangrass, radish, winterpea and forage turnip. It’s designed to help build soil but also feed our cows.

This mix will put nitrogen into the ground, help to break up the hard clay, and provide our cows with healthy forage next year…if it makes it through the winter.

*Bob puts the seed mix into the bay of the seed drill.*

That’s the big unknown. Our weather can be unpredictable in our valley because we get either warmer or colder than the surrounding area. This seed mix is meant to overwinter. Fingers crossed it will.

*Seed drill in action! The grooves are where the seed drill has carved out a groove plus dropped seed.*

We did make one mistake: We cranked up the density too high. We didn’t see enough signs of seed in/on the ground, and it didn’t seem like we were using as much seed as we wanted to.

Turns out we were wrong about that, because once the seeds sprouted, we could see just how close together they were planted. Oops! Here’s hoping they don’t crowd each other out as they grow.

That also meant we didn’t cover as much ground as we could have, but we planted about three acres of the 10-acre field, and we were happy with that. It was our first time, after all, and three acres was our plan.

After our luck held with getting the seeds in the ground, we were blessed again a few days later with just enough rain to cause the seeds to sprout. In the picture above, you can see a radish and grass-like seedlings growing. YES!

Now that we’ve done it once, we plan on doing this every year, even if it means we have to buy a bigger tractor rather than count on borrowing one. Our goal is to be planting cover crops on every field in a rotation, because some pastures will need to be grazed, meaning we can’t plant the whole farm at the same time.

OK, so you might be wondering, “Why didn’t you simply plow up the field and replant it?” Well, that gets into the whole no till approach, which will have to wait for another post.

We were like kids on Christmas morning on this September day. This is a huge step forward for us and our goal to be farming for a future. It was something we had learned about and longed to do, and what a treat to make it happen!

And that’s enough for now. 🙂

Gabe Brown’s book Dirt to Soil was an epiphany, so much so, it helped get us going in the right direction with our 22 acres.

In it, Brown talks about the difference between dead dirt and living soil. He explains how we’ve created dead dirt with tilling and chemical fertilizers and mono-cropping (growing just one kind of crop year after year, like corn).

And he explains how he accidentally learned how to build soil…then set out on a journey to learn more and teach others. As the subtitle says, it’s about “one family’s journey into regenerative agriculture.”

Inspired by his book, we are changing our hayfield into a field for rotational grazing and we are planting cover crop for the first time (with the plan to do it annually from now on). And that’s only one of the changes in mindset Gabe Brown has brought about at Literal Road Farm.

If you have a farm or just acreage, please read this book. If you don’t have either, consider reading it anyway. It will change how you look at industrial agriculture and how we’re raising food in this country over the past half century, and why that needs to change.

It might seem like a boring topic, but Brown is a good storyteller and it’s an easy read.

Tag: building soil

Seed Drill Success!

Soil Is Alive. Dirt Is Dead.