The 6 Principles of Soil Health
This article first appeared in our March 21st, 2023, newsletter, and is adapted in blog form here.
In the previous blog, we introduced the concept of the 6:3:4™ of regenerative ag - the 6 principles of soil health (which we'll cover now), the 3 rules of adaptive stewardship, and the 4 ecosystem processes. If you haven't read that one yet, do so if you desire to look at the overall concept of the 6:3:4™.
Let's describe the 6 principles of soil health.
Context – This is the most important principle and as such warrants a clear description. This is the context one will be farming in – and it encompasses many areas – financial goals and objectives, history of the land in which one will be farming, one’s own values/ethics, time constraints if any, resource availability, etc. For us, our context is that our land covers over 100 acres of planted pine, with less-than-ideal soil (often bare spots), gullies, and some rocky and steep terrain. We have minimal (actually, NO) equipment. We have some time but have limited funds. We aren’t living on the property yet, but are actively trying to reach that step (massive step taken last week - see at the end of newsletter!). Our land is raw and our dream is vast. But we love the challenge our context presents to us. And we look forward to applying regenerative ag to our landscape given our context (see pic below).
Part of our context is land with hard, clay soil, with rocks, much bare soil, and very early successional plant species, like broomsedge (tufted bunchgrasses you see in pic).
2. Minimize Disturbance – Anything that may disturb the soil, apart from animal impact (see #6 below), should be kept to a minimum. This includes tillage, chemical applications, etc. Any disturbance disrupts or even destroys soil structure, reduces carbon and water infiltration, and increases weed pressure. Prior to any disturbance, a plan must be in place to minimize the negative impacts.
Over time, tilled soil, without giving back a surplus of biology in return, will look like this. While we on our farm aren’t anti-tillage exclusively, we feel the vast majority of tillage operations could be avoided in favor of more regenerative methods, and will result in a healthier soil.
3. Armor on the soil – Armor is basically any type of organic material covering the soil. It is imperative that soil be covered at all times. Otherwise, bare soil, like bare skin, will have a tendency to bake in the hot sun, or freeze in sub-freezing conditions. This will destroy the soil microbial life, which is necessary for the regenerative process.
4. Diversity – It is now known that biodiversity enhances the health of the system as a whole. The more variety of plants one has in their pastures, food plots, and gardens, the better the soil will react as well as the ecosystem and microclimate of that area. Biodiversity builds resiliency, and is more important today than ever before as floods, droughts, and other climatic conditions affect our planet.
5. Living Roots Year-Round – Related to keeping the ground covered at all times with some degree of organic material, this will automatically “cover” this 5th principle of soil health. Living roots in the soil will increase water infiltration and help build organic matter. A lack thereof, will only yield negative cascading effects.
6. Livestock Integration – This is the one principle we are most excited about. What the folks at Understanding Ag, as well as the world-renowned ecologist Allan Nation and many others, have taught me is the incredible, albeit down-right near magical, impact livestock have on a given piece of land when the farmer/rancher learns how to manage them well. What was once barren soil, virtually devoid of life, becomes an oasis of healthy soil with wonderful vegetation to cover it to boot, thanks to the careful adaptive grazing of livestock. You see impacts such as these in mid America in the prairie states… wonderful grasslands built by thousands of years of wild bison mob grazing an area and then moving to a new area to then graze that stretch of land. We see the same impact with the wildebeests on the African Savannah. We can mimic what the bison have done in our context by using livestock as a tool to stimulate soil biology, which then produces a series of positive compounding effects.
Above - The bison of North America and the wildebeest of Africa have definitely made a massive positive impact on the land. We desire to emulate this impact in our context with livestock.
Dairy cattle grazing a diverse pasture behind an electric fence.
These 6 principles will guide us well on how we plan to heal our soil and our land at House In The Hill Farm.