By Amanda Hutson
Sixteen years ago, at the very northern tip of the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, Tom Manley stepped onto his new farm, Mean Acres, in Spring Valley. It was desolate; the land had been in corn the previous year and likely years before, resulting in a field of stubble and bare, exposed row-crop soil.
This isn’t an uncommon sight for farmers. Soil health is declining in areas across the U.S., like the Midwest, where farms have lost an average of two millimeters of soil per year. This is double the rate of erosion considered “sustainable” by the USDA, and fields in commodity production have seen even worse. The rate of soil degradation far outpaces that of regeneration. And yet, the soil on Tom’s farm had a memory.
“The seed bank [in the soil] determined what was there and what was going to flourish,” he says. It began to regenerate without any input from Tom. It remembered the abundance of its past, the grasses and fungi and birds and insects it had once been a home to. “In less than a year, we had bluegrass, we had brome, we had orchard grass, we had clovers, and weeds, lots of weeds.” Over time, Tom managed this growth, both by clipping weeds and grazing cattle, to encourage the kind of pasture he wanted. He worked in tandem with natural processes.
“I'm still shocked at how desperately it wanted to turn back into grassland,” says Tom. Tom is the climate and conservation director at Marbleseed, a Midwest-based farmer-led nonprofit supporting farmers in their transition to more sustainable farming systems.
Source : uvm.edu