FARMING SUCCESS IS ABOUT RESPECTING COMPLEXITY, NOT JUST SOIL CARBON
“When we become members of the system--instead of colonizers--the system explodes, because it is in harmony and resonance with itself.” --Daniel Griffith
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From a conversation with farmer and ecologist Daniel Griffith of Timshel Wildlands in Central Virginia. For the entire conversation, please click on the link to the YouTube video.
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DANIEL GRIFFITH: In the regenerative movement, we tend to reduce this idea of health down into stable soil organic matter, or the amount of soil carbon or the number of perennial grasses you have. Those are really important things. Stable soil organic matter is unparalleled in its ability to create and nurture and sustain the rest of the system. It’s a foundational building block.
But Dr. Suzanne Simard wrote a book called “Finding the Mother Tree,” where she did these university studies. They planted an alder tree next to a cedar tree. They covered the cedar tree with a 100% shade cloth so it couldn’t get any light.
So the cedar tree could not photosynthesize. It can’t get any energy from the sun. But it’s still growing. They measured the cedar’s growth over the next couple of years and it didn’t die.
So there’s complexity here. We must stop and ask what’s going on. The alder was feeding the cedar tree carbon nutrients underneath the soil via the mycorrhizae fungi communication network.
Plants, in community, are able to co-create and self-organize and co-evolve nutrients out of nowhere. We call this emergence.
We’re so focused on getting the soil in check. Yes, we have to balance the soil from a macro-nutrient and micro-nutrient perspective. We have to get carbon cycling through the system.
The carbon cycle is of vital importance. Yes, all of this is painfully and bloody true. But plants in community are just as needed. And it might be even more needed, according to what Fred Provenza is finding in his research, and what we’re finding here at Timshel.
For example, pigweed--spiny amaranth--fixes phosphorus. So if you have a soil that is deficient in phosphorus, you need spiny amaranth. And a plant that needs phosphorus but does not fix phosphorus, and is not growing in phosphorus balanced soils is going to be healthier if it grows near spiny amaranth.
So the dynamics of the systems community is of vital importance to the health of the community, the resilience of the community, but also the nutrient richness coming out of that community.
If you take a more longstanding native plant, like yellow Indian grass, it’s ridiculous to think that in every viable meadow in Virginia today that yellow Indian grass isn’t there in the soil seed bank, waiting to grow. Is bird’s foot trefoil there? I don’t know. But is yellow Indian grass? Yes. Absolutely, unequivocally yes. Is eastern gamagrass just waiting to explode? Yes.
When we first moved onto Timshel seven years ago, we did a full ecological study and identified no gamagrass. Not one blade. Today, we have pastures that are dominated by gamagrass. And they are dominated by yellow Indian grass, and by this unbelievable lush mix of autumn wildflowers. They are so dominant that we wrote a whole book about it, “Wild Like Flowers.”
You cannot in the spring or in the autumn come for a tour or a class at Timshel and not think, yes, this is what it means to be wild like flowers.
Biodiversity explodes, and the environment’s resilience explodes, when we step back and we lose the credit. I’m not saying credit is a bad thing. I’m saying when we become a member of the system, we lose our ability to control and colonize it. We cannot control and colonize something that we also inhabit.
When we become members of the system as much as they are, the system explodes, because it is in harmony and resonance with itself.
That’s the hope. We don’t need to manufacture abundance.