Cover crop seed from left to right are annual rye, annual nude oats, perennial buffalo grass and annual Tillage Sunn.
You can’t begin to save the planet without first saving the soil outside your back door. Commodity agriculture is hell bent on raising crops using hydroponics – lots of water, lots of fertilizer, lots of pesticides and any soil-like matrix to hold the plants down will do. Who needs soil??!
Sustainability literally has its roots in the soil. Everything we depend on, the structures we live in, the cars we drive and of course the food we eat is grown in the soil or excavated from it. If we remove everything possible from the soil, including the billions of organisms in each spoonful of dirt, we impoverish ourselves and our environment at the same time.
The Dust Bowl of the 1930’s was an example of destroying soil and people. A downward spiral of falling wheat prices and plowing more prairie to grow more wheat to offset the ever lowering prices occurred. This process continued until wheat was worth almost nothing, the soil was gone and the people left, broken and bankrupt.
Some people this spring because of cool raining weather might not get all their garden or bare soil planted like they normally do. If you find yourself in this situation you can plant an easy to grow cover crop. A cover crop can be an annual that will die off after frost or a permanent plant. The advantage to cover crops for the small property owner are they provide erosion control, moisture retention, organic material to the soil, help to compete with weeds and can even produce something for you or wildlife to eat. There are dozens of annual, perennial and even woody cover crops that you can plant on your property.
This year we will try a couple cover crops including nude oats. Anything nude has to be good doesn’t it? Nude or bare oats are varieties that claim to be hull-less, but are really just easier to remove the hull than other varieties. We’ll show in the fall a method to thrash (remove the hulls) and winnowing (separating the grain from the chafe).
Personal health and environmental health cannot be separated. It is one and the same. Healthy soils equals a healthy planet-now we can go save the whales!