All you need to do

All you need to do is…  use compost teas to rebuild soil biology and developed balanced fungal and bacterial populations. There is no need to remineralize soils, the soil’s base geology already contains far more nutrients than your crops need. Biology can release all of the crop’s nutritional requirements.

All you need to do is… grow cover crops, and keep the soil covered with green growing plants all year long. Always present and growing plants provide a food source for biology, and they will provide all the nutrients the crop requires.

All you need to do is… remineralize your soils, add rock powders, and supply the trace minerals and macronutrients that are missing from your soil’s geological profile.

The list could continue. Add microbial inoculants, foliar sprays, livestock, stop tilling the soil.

First, there is no such thing as ‘all you need to do…’. Living systems are nuanced, and there are often a dozen or more things that could be done to produce a positive shift in soil and plant health.

Secondly, the interactions between soil geology, biochemistry, microbiology and plant physiology are an intricate system, where the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Each ecosystem is unique, and the set of tools and practices that are optimum in one ecosystem are the wrong recommendation in a different ecosystem.

Each of these tools and practices can produce remarkable responses in some contexts because they are what is most needed in that ecosystem at that moment. In a different context, they may be almost completely ineffective.

Each tool is useful, even necessary in some contexts. Very few tools are useful in every context.

The tools which are useful in every context are the naturally designed ones, principally green growing plants and living roots.

All you need to do is develop the management practices and tools that fit your farm as part of a complete systems approach.