A new tool!

A few months ago, we applied for funding from the Healthy Soils Competitive Fund, run by the Maryland Department of Agriculture. According to their website, "this program provides financial assistance to eligible farmers and organizations to adopt conservation practices that benefit the climate, soil, and water." Designed to run over the course of 3 years, this program and the money that farmers receive is designed to support enhanced soil health practices.

The new tool in all her (teal and yellow) glory!

What are soil health practices? Great question! Sometimes we can so caught up in our agriculture world that we forget that these terms and ideas aren't as widely known as they may seem to us farmers.

Some examples include:

• Implementation of cover crops

  • Cover crops are plants grown to cover the soil (to reduce erosion) and to benefit the soil nutrient-wise. Usually these crops are not harvested for any monetary gain, but instead either incorporated back into the soil as green matter or mowed down at the end of the season. Here at One Acre Farm we incorporate cover crops regularly into our seasonal planting plans. Fields are cyclically rotated between growing vegetable crops and growing cover crops. Cover

• Increase organic matter

  • As mentioned above, finished cover crops can be chopped up and added back to the soil for increased nutrients. Other common ways to increase organic matter in the soil is to add manure and/or compost when preparing fields. We add compost to our fields each season!

• Crop rotation

  • Some plant diseases can reside in the soil and when a particular crop, or family of plants, are grown in the same place year after year, these diseases can run rampant. Additionally, different plants require and therefore pull different nutrients from the soil. Therefore, it is important to rotate crops around your farm so different fields have different plants each season to give the soil a break and help it build back any nutrients that were depleted. This also means giving a field a break by planting cover crops, as mentioned above.

• Reduce tillage

  • By reducing the amount of tilling we do in a field, we can reduce nutrient leaching as well as erosion by rain and wind. Optimal soil structure and organic matter are both better maintained with low-till methods.

While we already do many of these things, we can always do them better and incorporated better techniques. One way we found to help us in this goal was to purchase a new tractor implement called a stone burier. And we were lucky enough to receive funding! There are many models available, but what makes ours special and uniquely suited to the goals of this grant, is that it does many things at once.

Unloading the *very* large implement from the truck

Once again, you may be asking, what does that mean? I'll do my best to explain! When we are preparing a field for the season, there multiple steps to accomplish before actually putting the seeds or transplants into the ground. The soil needs to be (minimally) tilled, fertilizer applied, and the beds shaped and often covered with plastic. Up until now, to complete these tasks we would need to make 3 passes over the same field because we had 3 different tractor implements, one for each task.

Now, with our new tool, we can do everything at one time! It's truly an incredible machine. The added bonus, as you may have guessed from its name, is that can smooth out the soil texture by burying rocks, stones, and other larger items like clumps of weeds. By some mechanism that I honestly don't understand, the machine can move rocks and the like lower down in the soil so that they don't interfere with our seeding and planting.

Our new shed housing our new stone burier.

And you may not know this, but One Acre Farm has some very rocky fields! Each one is different, but we know that if we're going to be planting in Field A, we better get ready for rocks! With a high rock population, newly transplanted seedlings can have a hard time establishing roots. If we need to direct seed anything, like carrots, radishes, or beets, the walk-behind tool we use to sow those seeds will get tripped up and knocked off course by every single rock! And then our germination rate goes down because the seeds were sown unevenly, or not at all if a rock was in the way.

We will be monitoring and keeping data on how this tools works for us and how our soil health changes (hopefully improves) over the three years. For now, wish us luck as we learn about this complicated and magnificent machine! Especially as it comes with limited instructions!