Going GREEN on our farm everyday!

How do you "Go Green" for Saint Patrick's Day?  There are many different traditions for this festive holiday.  I want to use the theme of going green to talk about how we celebrate going green on our farm everyday.

What a difference a couple of weeks make in Middle TN!  Just a few days ago we had night time lows at ZERO degrees and single digits high temperatures.  When the snow melted the wheat started growing and hasn't looked back.  The kids have enjoyed these warmer days running in the wheat field.  Brittany said the kids looked like Easter eggs in the wheat field with their colorful shirts.  

Immediately when I snapped this picture of my boys playing with their cousins in our wheat field the image below came to mind.  There is a stark contrast in the two pictures.  The Dust Bowl era picture depicts a farmer with his children suffering through a dust storm fighting to merely exist.  Not only were the farm families suffering but the soil and environment were suffering greatly as well.  Agriculturalist have taken heed to the past and today we are implementing technology to keep us from going back to this terrible example of environmental catastrophe.  Our field in the first picture shows the benefits of no-till wheat planted directly into standing corn stalks.  The equipment technology we have to  plant no-till and herbicides to control weeds allow us to keep the soil in place when it rains or the wind blows.      

It is only fitting in my mind that St. Patrick's Day is followed this year by Ag Day.  Keeping with the them of going green for St. Patrick's Day, farmers go green everyday!   The pictures below illustrate structure in the soil provided by cover crops planted after soybeans and no-tilled crops in general to hold the soil in place over the winter and early spring while our corn crop gets established.  

These pictures illustrate a healthy soil environment.  Our soil is so much more than dirt.  It is teaming with life.  You can see the earthworms and the pores they have created in the soil profile.  These pores help the soil absorb water during rain storms instead of running off.  The roots from the cover crops and all no-tilled crops add structure to the soil that help the soil hold on to the moisture stored in the soil longer.  For each one percent increase in organic matter in the soil it can hold one more inch of  absorbed water.

  In the top picture I am pointing to a nodule on the root of winter peas in our cover crop mix.  Other legume cash crops like soybeans perform this same job in the soil.  This nodule stores fixed nitrogen left in the soil from previous crops or fixed from the air while it grows.
All of these components of the soil are working together to conserve nutrients, water and atmospheric carbon, greatly benefiting the environment and keeping us GREEN everyday.

While some high profile talking heads (who have never farmed or had their hands in the dirt) promoting global warming and environmental sensationalism/activism burn thousands of gallons of fuel flying around the world releasing their agenda and carbon into the air, we are trapping their carbon and sequestering it in the soil by using the very technologies they preach against.  But what does a farmer with dirt under his fingernails know about science?  I digress...        

We like to play in the dirt.  The dirt is where we our living comes from.  That is why it is so important to implement all the modern technology we can to care for our soils and build them up instead of breaking them down.  If some groups had their way they would take all these tools away from farmers like us and cause us to have to farm the way my great grandfather did.  The picture from the dust bowl at the beginning or the post would become the norm once again.  I don't know about you, but I feel like that is unacceptable.  I would much rather have our fields no-tilled green than plowed and blown or washed away.

These charts give us a good look at the nature of soil and how conservation practices on farms like ours benefit the soil and environment in general.  Through the practices on the right below we are preventing the loss of soil by the ways listed on the left.  Remember farmers GO GREEN everyday!