Section16cattleco’s Blog

Something I have always had a hard time getting a good answer on is why corn looks so good along tree groves? It is always the first corn to come up, has a very deep green color even when the rest of the field may be yellow due to N deficiency and seems to always tassel before the rest of the field.

In my years of working in Retail Ag the most common answer for this is that the grove serves as protection there for making it out perform the rest of the field. I have trouble with this every time I hear someone say it but until recently have had no other better ideas for why this happens so I kind of just go along with it. I do agree that later in the summer when it’s hot and dry, the shade and protection of the grove might provide some protection but this has never explained the quicker emergence and deeper color.

Now I don’t want anyone to start thinking I am some agronomy genius or something because I came across my scientific reasoning on this issue by complete accident!!! Well not a 100% percent accident but somewhat anyhow. I have held out on getting a satellite dish since moving to the farm, (see my post about children) as a result I have spent most nights reading. I read a lot on the Internet but I also read a lot in books.

My Grandpa was a very avid reader and has many books in the house ranging over many topics. Out of severe boredom and lack of interesting materiel on the internet for a stretch I started looking through his collection and found many books I was interested in. My two favorites are Feeds and Feeding which was published in like 1923 and a huge green book called Encyclopedia to Organic Gardening.

Now don’t freak out that I am reading in a book with Organic in the title because when this book was written there had been no such thing as weed killing chemicals or commercial fertilizer invented making everything more or less organic. For those of you wondering, I am not a believer in 100% organic practices. I believe it is a huge waste of land by not producing the maximum amount of calories the land is capable of. I will talk more about the organic deal some other day but just wanted to clear the air that I am not one of these organic wierdo’s that believe pesticides, even applied responsibly, will kill man kid.

So back to the big green book I found of my Grandpas. It is an awesome book and a reminder to me that we have not gotten smarter but only gotten dumber when it comes to raising food and animals in the last century. I have spent hours reading this book and re-evaluating my agronomy theories on topics like organic matter, mulch, organic and inorganic fertilizers, microbial activity in the soil, how plant matter breaks down and releases nutrients back to the soil, crop rotations, manure, crop removals, soil tilth, soil building and many many more.

Basically I have spent 10 years of my retail ag career working with commercial fertilizer, pesticides, seed and custom application. I learned a lot about how crops grow, why they grow and what they need to grow over this period. Over this time I was constantly running into things that did not make sense though and know one had answers for me that made sense.

One example might be that how can we raise a huge crop of corn some years when we know we didn’t put enough nitrogen on the crop based on 1.1 lb of N/bu of corn. Then the next year we might raise significantly less corn on a higher amount of N. I have now filled in the blanks on most topics and answered most of my questions coming full circle in my agronomy knowledge by reading books from the turn of the century.

The funny thing is, is that when I start talking about it and put it together for people in a way I believe should make sense, they look at me like I am an alien!!! It has accrued to me that our ag community has become a knowledge recessed people on how to raise crops. I have many opinions on why this has happened based mostly on why I hadn’t gained this knowledge in my first ten years in the agronomy field. I will address these ideas in later posts.

Back to the good corn along groves and why I believe this happens. Something I noticed while I was blazing trails through my grove for a path to my kids tree fort, I noticed that the dirt I was pushing up was the nicest, best dirt I had ever seen in my life!!! I started taking the buckets of dirt I was grubbing up and dumping them in my compost pile, realizing this stuff would raise a hell of a garden.

I got real interested in this dirt from the grove because the tree grove I was working in is on a hillside that leads to a creek. On the other side of the creek there are very few trees and has been used as a pasture for as long as I can remember. The dirt on that side is junk and produces very little grass. I would assume that at one time the dirt on both sides of the creek was relatively the same. I started digging a little deeper in the grove with my skid loader and studied the wonderful layers of top soil in the tree grove. It appeared to me that the top 6-8 inches of dirt was new dirt. Like maybe placed there over the past 40-50 years (For dirt that’s really young). I could tell this by the depth of the volunteer saplings that have grown over the years. 

Most of you know where I am going with this but just hang with me for a minute. I had read a chapter about mulch in my Big Green Book a few days before so I was pretty sure about what was going on here but was amazed by the scale of it. See, over the years the original trees my grandpa planted had pulled nutrients from deep in the soil and turned them into leaves and branches. In the fall the leaves, twigs, some branches, etc fall on to the ground and began the decomposition process, eventually turning into fine topsoil.

This has happened over and over for 40-50 years with no crop removal and disturbance from tillage making a whole new, extremely high quality layer of topsoil. This process is the same process that built our nice deep top soils of the corn belt, when every acre was in undisturbed tall grass prairie. For those not familiar with native tall grass prairie plants, they are very deep rooted, unlike tame grasses, and most of them produce a lot of above ground growth. The growth, death and decay of these plants over many hundreds of thousands of years are the same cycle as my tree grove.

Over all, this is mother nature’s way of replenishing the soil, protecting the soil and assuring that soil remains productive for many many years. After you except and understand this process it is very easy to understand why crops generally look and do better along tree groves. 

Every year the deep rooted trees pull nutrients from deep in the soil, turn them into leaves and branches then shed them to the soil adjacent to the grove making that soil overall better dirt than the rest of the field that does not get the shed from the tree grove. Make sense? I hope so because I will write many more posts around this topic and how serious it is, how it will and has effected today’s ag and how we may be able to use this process in modern rotations to capture its benefits.

For more on tall grass prairie ecosystem, check out this website http://www.lostlandscapefilm.com/lostland/. I recommend buying this DVD. It is a very good resource plus the scenery is wonderful.   

Erik