Last fall, we put down 260 tons of lime on the farm to get the pH up from about 5.5 closer to 7.  This is the first step towards growing grass – soil nutrients just aren’t available to the plants below 6 or so.  Luckily, lime is a good organic solution, with no negative environmental negatives to it’s application to the land other than the energy costs of its extraction and application (which are still significant).

The next key aspect to growing good grass is keeping a good balance of N-P-K, that is nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium.  They are each limiting – if one is low, it keeps the availability of the others low as well.  Measuring Nitrogen is a fleeting and imprecise thing – the standard soil tests don’t even measure it anymore, but it’s easy to assume that it’s very low at CRF.  Generally speaking, Floyd soils are rich in potassium, low in phosphorous, and my soil samples tested last fall confirmed that.  But since the nitrogen and phosphorous were low, the potassium is not much available to the plants.

Nitrogen can be supplied simply by planting inoculated clover.  Our fine biological woodsmen from Healing Harvest have volunteered to help with this, and have located a seed drill.  We’ve got about 130 acres to plant, so it won’t be a trivial task.

Getting the phosphorous up is much trickier.  There are only a few organic sources of phosphorous – generally bone meal, greensand and rock phosphate.  These cost about $4 per pound of available phosphorous, let’s see I need 100 lbs per acre, times 130 acres, equals……YIKES!  You can do this on your garden, but certainly not on hay fields!

Another organic option is manure.  I would need about 250 tons of manure.  Unfortunately, due to the high cost of fertilizer these days, other farmers around here are spreading any available manure they have on their own fields.

So that leaves chemical fertilizers.  Much as I hate to do it, I’ll be spreading some chemical phosphate on the fields shortly.  Phosphate is critical to the establishment of new plantings, and fear that my new clover crop just won’t take without it.  Clover, besides creating nitrogen, also makes the phosphates that are in the soil more available to the grasses.  So I’m hoping this is a one-time application, and moving forward I can just use pure organic management practices to maintain soil fertility.

On our current farm, Snipe Hill Farm, we applied phosphate *once* several years ago and it made a huge difference in the quality of the pasture, which it has maintained ever since.  Our friend and neighbor (and soil scientist) Jeff Walker convinced me to do this “to get a good stand established”.  So far seems to have worked.