The Feed Crop, Grain, Forage and Soil Health Thread

[Southside]

I will ask him

[Old Greenhorn]

Mike, maybe something like this would give the flow you need?


 

It moves a lot of water/fluid if you want. I generally run the gas pump on idle when spraying, but you could probably set it to just gravity feed once it starts flowing. It is supplied by 2 55 gallon barrels in the back and a 20GPM gas pump.


 

If I crank it up, it can dig little trenches in the ground as I drive, but I will run through all the fluid in just a couple of minutes. Sprays about 8' wide if I have the bars set level. The pumping is set up so I can back up to a pond and draft water to fill the barrels, then swatch the valves over to spray it back out through the front.

[mike_belben]

I could buy a lot of finished produce at the earthiest crunchiest of stores for what thatd cost in after covid dollars!  Nice work, you werent playing around with that thing. Problem is itd blow away my seed and bare soil.

Im pretty happy with what ive got and only about $8 or so for a 4 pack of jets.  Will try a few sizes up next trip to town

[Nebraska]

How about drilling a tiny hole between the jets to fill in the gaps. Can always dribble a little weld to seal if they don't work.

[mike_belben]

itd be like a leaky pressure regulator in hydraulics, causing bypass.  all the flow would go out the holes instead of through the tiny spray nozzles because there is a lower resistance option.  a short circuit in electrons. it takes a good ten seconds of pump running for them to purge air and begin to get the pressure rise for spraying. 


i can live with a little gap just fine, im not doing anything critical.  i got the tank, pump and wand at rural king for $60 last year.  for $325 you can get the one with the super flimsy fold out spray boom with fixed height and jets every 18 inches or so.  mine are at 12 with height adjust so what ive got sure aint bad compared to whats out there for sale.  plus ive still got my wand, they have wand or bar but not both. 

id like to see what bigger nozzles will do to the fan width and consumption rate anyway just for SNGs.  help me know how to estimate product volume if i ever do a job with it. 

[mike_belben]

Any of you guys good at soil sample interpretation?

[Southside]

What do you want to grow?  Your soil is quite alkali which makes me think either the organic matter is not fully decomposed ie - it's a peat type of soil, it's a limestone based soil, or you limed the tar out of it.  The potassium is a bit odd too without knowing the history of the dirt.  

[newoodguy78]

I like the organic matter content , shooting for that or higher here. I'm curious about the ph level 

[wisconsitom]

Yes, that's a very high organic component.  pH is a bit above neutral, so yes, on the alkaline or "basic" side.

I wonder if a lot of material burned on this ground previously.  How else to account for super-high potash?

Soils have something called "buffering capacity".  Without going all technical, what this means as a practical consideration is that attempts to modify soil pH can be frustrating.  For your example, soil sulfur is called for, to gradually lower that pH, but this and other materials used for the purpose only can go so far.  In time, the surrounding soil "buffers" back to pretty close to what it was originally.

You can repeat-apply sulfur without much concern for screwing anything up.  The material comes in prills, is slowly worked over by soil bacteria, and the end result is sulfuric acid.  But as I say, the cations (calcium, magnesium, potassium) in the soil immediately fight back at this adjustment.

I've only ever found soil sulfur at farmer's co-ops.

[mike_belben]

i kinda didnt tell the backstory on that on purpose and im glad you guys picked it out, good eye tom.  fire was a big part.  im still learning how to comprehend all the components of a sample report.  


i had it in my mind a year or so ago to try ammending the wild blueberries and see if i could get a real fruit on them.  theyre here and established, they spread on their own in the regen understory once the brush is about chest high.  theyre hardy, the flavor is superb.. but the fruit is puny.  i figured i will find a way to bump it up a notch, and started trying to blend up a soil improver from the various stuff on site.  lots of fill dirt has come here from a variety of sources, plus tree service grindings and chipped trees and so on.  i never stop composting.

well, one component that i took a half dozen loads of as a favor for the guy who hauls me all the fill, was charcoal plant cleanouts.  and its got everything in it. gasifier char, wood chip, bark, sand, gravely stuff, glassy frothy wierd stuff that kinda looks like coral, im sure its just a variety of dirt, rock and sand that hits a char furnace and turns into something new and unknown.  and plenty of gloves glasses and earplugs, naturally.  i was spreading it over the clay slope anywhere i didnt want gravel but didnt have grass, to create a mud barrier for my shoes or tires, and keep the rain from washing it out.  that whole corner is a very good producer of wild lettuces, white aster, ragweed, yellow sweet clover, barnyard grass etc etc now.  it gets 3-6ft high.  

well i have about 5 triaxles of this mystery charcoal plant woody mix i pushed up in a hill for the someday when i need it, and it hot composted over the last 2 year i guess?  when i break the crust and screen out the rocks and chips, the fines are like volcanic beach sand.  its fine soft black dirt like coffee grounds with sandy gravelly flek.. you cant make it clump at all and its excellent at breaking up the clay clod natural dirt here.


i dont remember the exact ingredients as its been maybe 2 years but i know i mixed up some finished hot compost (grass, leaves, sawdust and food scraps) with that charcoal dirt blend and probably a few shovels of garden dirt, maybe even some triple 10, and decided..yeah its pleasing to the eye and should have a lot of OM, but i better find out what this stuff is before i go killing all the wild blueberries, so i had a sample done at the co-op but they never got it back to me and i forgot all about it until i tracked down the report last year, looked at it, had no idea what i was looking at and forgot about it again.  


fast forward to present, my understanding of the soil microbiome is evolving to understand that weeds and microbes are natures way of reaching deep to find what the top soil is lacking, and mineralize it into plant available surface layer that shallow rooted crops can take up in soluble form.  okay, well i know that all that variety in charcoal mountain has got to be minerals, and its great at improving the clay clod structure for increase pore space and permeability..  hey wait i got that sample somewhere in my downloads folder..  oh wow, it is rich in a lot of ways.  and here we are.  

so i just called the co-op soils lady and the whole cadillac test with everything on it is only $15.  id really like to see the micronutrients, and i expected the cost to be more.  i guess if im gonna continue to do all this soil work, a few baselines would be a good investment.  ive got the sprayer built, ive got the compost tea brewer built, and i wanna be able to verify that things go in the positive direction the soilfoodweb crowd says it will.  

co-op lady says cropland here runs 2-4% organic matter and most nutrients will fall in the medium scale.

[btulloh]

What was your process for obtaining the sample?

[mike_belben]

i had hand mixed a tub of different ingredients until homogenous that i planned to just dress around the wild blueberry stems, when i decided to get a sample.  just put a scoop in a coffee can or something and went to the co-op.  it went in a bag they provided for sample.  

[mike_belben]

parking some links i dont wanna lose if the computer croaks

home made seed drill
FARM SHOW Magazine - The BEST stories about Made-It-Myself Shop Inventions, Farming and Gardening Tips, Time-saving Tricks & the Best Farm Shop Hacks, DIY Farm Projects, Tips on Boosting your farm income, time-saving farming advice, farming tractors and Agriculture equipment reviews

bill spurlocks photo gallery showing the construction is at the bottom here.
--Photos MUST be in the Forestry Forum gallery!!!!!--.--Photos MUST be in the Forestry Forum gallery!!!!!--[/url]

exceptional cover crop guide
https://www.sare.org/wp-content/uploads/Managing-Cover-Crops-Profitably.pdf

carbon is king. plus the nature of aerobic vs anaerobic manure and bacterial:fungal ratios for plant types 
Biology and Benefits


fungal dominated compost reactor
Dr. David Johnson's Research on Fungal-Dominated Compost and Carbon Sequestration ? Center for Regenerative Agriculture and Resilient Systems ? CSU, Chico

i like this guy, gabe brown.  hes got a real similar story to joel salatin and greg judy.  real farmers who went broke conventionally.  ended up going without the synthetic inputs because they ran out of money to buy them and were gonna lose it all.  with synthetics removed, things got better.

Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health - YouTube

[btulloh]

Ah.  It would be useful to check with them about depth and distribution of subsamples. They probably have a recommendation for obtaining an average over an area. If not, there are plenty of references to this out there or i can post a link. Sampling a single spot on or near the surface can provide misleading results. 

[mike_belben]

i dont think any of them are adapted to the concept of what im sampling.  stuff that was loaded by wheel loader, piled 8 feet high, then dug through and screened then mixed in a bin.  im not even bringing them soil.   there is no top or bottom piece of laundry in the dryer, if you get what i mean. no topsoil or subsoil here.  its a big homogenous heap of ingredients.  whats in one inch is in all of them. 

[Southside]

Sounds more like a soil ammendment.  Chemically there are different ways to accurately measure peat type soils (not the technical name) vs mineral soils as the extrememly high organic matter in peat type of soils skews the test results.  The question is what rate to apply it to your soil for maximum effictiveness and utilization without waste.  Also, top dress or knife in?  A represenative sample of the growing soil would help to know where you are starting off.  

Spent scrubber lime from natural gas fired boilers is a very economical way to get calicum and sulfur at the same time too.

[wisconsitom]

Mike, check this out;  https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fhgic.clemson.edu%2Ffactsheet%2Ffertilizing-vegetables%2F&psig=AOvVaw2YwvP9aDRCWH2x-Wwq3p-V&ust=1635509416568000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAsQjRxqFwoTCMD7rsCJ7fMCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD

If that link works, and you have any questions, please feel free to get back to me on this whole soil pH/nutrient availability thang.

[mike_belben]

thank you sir.  the link did work, but it advocates the conventionals that i have come to reject.  

[wisconsitom]

I didn't read the text, but was hoping to show the chart of pH's effect on nutrient availability.  In most basic terms-pun intended-a neutral or near-neutral pH satisfies the vast majority of plant species.  It is only when one wishes to grow varieties with pronounced higher or lower pH needs that one can get in trouble.

BTW, blueberries are way on the list of acid-lovers.  They're most definitely NOT going to like all that ash.  Now that's the wild, lowbush type I speak of, but pretty sure all blueberries are alike in that sense.

Soils have a property called buffering capacity.  Simply put, a given soil will tend to revert to its original pH range even though one may set out to adjust it.  Doesn't mean one can't make adjustments, but just be aware, repeat applications of say, soil sulfur may be required.  I've only ever found soil sulfur at farm co-ops.

[newoodguy78]

Mike have you tried growing anything in it directly?

[mike_belben]

i havent tried to, but my kid stuck some corn sprouts in one of the piles and they got to knee high.  barnyard grass on top of it came in naturally probably from birds sitting there, it got full sized and some kinda viney thing across the steep southern slope face has grown in fine over that entire face.  there are things equipped to grow directly in the ammendment but not most things, is how i am looking at it.  its a good improver for poor soil, but a poor soil in itself.  


thank you for the information tom. i have been getting quite the education in this stuff lately (trying to trouble shoot a health issue) and the picture emerging for me is that it isnt blueberry or rhodadedron or mountain laurel so much love acid soil, its that they take a high ratio of fungi to bacteria to thrive, and bacteria are dramatically reduced in variety and quantity by acidic soils. so the bacteria/fungi ratio comes more into line with what a blueberry needs when the PH is killing bacteria but not fungi.  grasses and garden veggies want a 1:1ish ratio and old growth forests are like 1 bacteria for 1k fungi.  

up above i left a link to a pair of ken hamilton vids which are the best ive found, explaining how soil miicrobes (which colonize and feed on the root exudates of living plants) eat other soil microbes that generate excess nitrogens they cannot contain, which are farted out to the plants in a symbiosis.

here's the study that found the PH effect on bacteria but not on fungi.
Soil bacterial and fungal communities across a pH gradient in an arable soil | The ISME Journal

there is a growing choir of people who have left the co-op behind because they went broken buying chemicals, who have joined this bacterial/fungal crowd and found that when they finally get soil biology dialed in through best practices... PH changes, fertilization, pesticide and herbicide are no longer needed. whats needed is a change in mindset to stop thinking we need to kill everything that isnt a corn or soy plant.  that convention brings about non stop pests and problems.  it certainly did for me the first few years. once i got the soil black and thriving, i had the same pests all over the place and i didnt do anything about it, but they didnt harm anything. 

everyone told me id need tons of lime to grow anything in my woods. i got rye grass to my belt without any by growing it in a broad mix of legumes and brassicas. i didnt not know that at the time, just planted a foodplot blend, but i can look back now and say my result supports this choir and goes against the co-op agronomists.  

[mike_belben]

i dont say any of this to be argumentative or be a know it all.  i just wanna help people.  i was really really frustrated with a 30 row garden that produced zero, a whole 8 or 9 months of hard work wasted. buying chemicals never put food in the fridge for me, and i wanna see food in peoples fridges. its only a matter of time before the next covid lie "interrupts" the food supply chains. 

[newoodguy78]

Interesting thing about the fertilizer use, mentioned in a different thread felt as though we were using an exorbitant amount and shared the quantity. Member @btulloh suggested getting a soil analysis done at 40-50 days out to actually see what was left for the plant when needed an excellent idea that I followed up on. Had an intern from Umass doing biweekly crop checks, took soil samples when I knew she was coming and asked her what I'd like to do had written down exactly what had been applied when and in what manner it was incorporated in the soil. Felt I was being pretty thorough and going to ask intelligent questions for once in my life. She was absolutely dumbfounded and could not figure out why I would want to do that if the crop was doing well, kept pushing her so she called her superior. Got the same results from talking to her. She recommended doing soil samples this fall to recommend rates for next year and was happy to hear how much was being used and commended us for it. The only thing both of them were concerned about was the cost of the soil test and how it is "expensive" the cost...25 bucks. Fertilizer bill this year is probably over 20 grand. I'm not too smart but I'll drop a little bit of change to pick up dollars any day of the week.

The best part is I stuck my neck out on a piece of ground and used my own practices of cover crops,composted horse manure and literally cut the fertilizer in half. The results...best crop the boss has ever seen in 30 years. Was some glad it worked out didn't want to explain to her why I thought that field and crops wasn't yielding like it should. Granted the crops were ones that don't require as much inputs but feel it's all relative.

The time to figure out how to grow crops with inputs other than fertilizer is here and now. The rising cost of fertilizer and decreased chemical production by foreign countries will surely take a large chunk out of already very small margins.

[mike_belben]

 8)  nice work! 


Real similar phone call for me when i asked soil test lady a week or so back about that one i shared on the woodchip pile.  Note it does not have any nitrogen measurement in it.  So i asked the price on the caddilac test with all the blanks filled in, $15..  Okay, thats well worth it.. And that will have nitrogen on it too? 

"No, we dont measure nitrogen.  We will just tell you how much to add based on the crop."


:
I decided that was the last time i was gonna ask a pro at the sales desk what to do. How can you make a recommendation on how much more nitrogen i need if you dont measure how much i have?  Yeah, urea and anhydrous ammonia are exactly what i want leaching out into the bedroom window all summer. 

I have been my wifes most astute observer for longer than all her doctors combined and my observation over the years about their behavior is this.  if they discover a medical thing they will mail a letter and schedule a visit in a month or more, we have waited 4 months on many occasions for an appointment.  But If there is a billing error they will pick up the phone, call her in and make time to resolve that on an emergency walk in basis.   

Shes a walking medicine cabinet guinea pig who is getting worse from it, not better. Ive had enough of chemicals in our lives. 

[mike_belben]

My friend that lost the cow pasture to army worms this year is a fertilizer and pesticide spraying fellow.. Hes always busy doing something like that.  He only buys sorghum sudan grass and went i looked at his place the only thing in it is goosegrass, not sudan.  The army worms tore it up and his dirt looks like brillo.


I had found plenty of these army worms here at my place without knowing what they were yet, and fed them to chickens. but i never saw any signs of damage from them because there is too much variety to tell.  Ive identified about 20..
 25 species and theres atleast that many more i havent.  I couldnt keep this place mowed if i tried.   The evidence suggests that plant species arent such bitter rival competitors the way we think, but rather theyre symbiotic partners.  I definitely see this in the woods, certain species affiliations.  


That gabe brown fellow i linked above started off with 3 species in his cover crop mix and has 20some years of data.  He is up to 19 species now.  People say weed your corn, nothing but corn can be there. he says interplant it with cow pea or other legume.  I will try this summer.