Wayne, et. al., How to Grow Corn as a Soil Improvement Crop
Corn makes a lot of organic matter. It sucks in a lot of carbon dioxide and turns it into sugars, starches, cellulose, etc. Ideally corn feeds the soil microbes profusely from the breakdown of its cotyledon even before its leaf sworl breaks the surface. It seems to do this better when the soil is dryer at planting than if it is wet. Ideally one should plant several days after a rain rather than before a rain. Ever see where three, four or more corn seeds sprout close together? Usually the middle one or ones will be the most robust, even though it might seem they ought to be competing for nutrients and the middle one(s) should be short changed. But check it out. This is not the case because the soil food web is what really feeds the corn best and it will be cooking best in the middle of the cluster where the concentration of root exudates is highest. Which suggests it is a good idea to plant corn at a density of three to four seeds per foot rather than further apart if you want the corn to really get off to a killer start. Corn is set for how much it will make by about the time the sixth leaf node develops. That's still pretty small, probably under a foot high for almost all corns. So corn really has to get off to a good start if it is to make well. For sure it doesn't need any weed competition when it is just emerging, so again it does better in dryer plantings than where the moisture gets the weeds really going. But what can happen, and has happened frequently (not always) for me is the corn starts feeding the azotobacters (Pfeiffer isolated 54 strains in a sample he studied of horn manure) before it ever breaks the surface. The key is all those root exudates. If you sprout corn you have to rinse it about 5 times a day to keep it from souring. But in good soil the root exudates feed the soil food web, and right away nitrogen gets fixed and feeds amino acids to all the other microorganisms in the soil. This actually works best when soluble nitrogen levels are low in the soil, so if you expect this to work you sure don't want raw manure or tankage and you don't even want much if any compost. Azotobacters depend on adequate calcium levels, to say nothing of molybdenum and some of the other trace metals. And the soil should have good structure so it gets air but also has enough cation exchange capacity (mainly provided by clay and humus) to supply the necessary minerals for nitrogen fixation to occur robustly. If your soil isn't there yet you may have to grow a legume like soybeans first. In fact, I normally plant soybeans in the offsets between corn rows as insurance for poorer areas. As long as the corn plant keeps making sugars and translocating them to the soil (the role of boron and aluminum in clay) and shedding these carbonaceous root exudates into the soil food web feasting at its roots it will get a large proportion of its nitrogen requirement as amino acids excreted by the protozoans feasting on the nitrogen fixers and their kin. Because these excreta are right there along the roots and easily absorbed the plant has a strong tendency to take them up before they can oxidize to nitrates. Then the corn's protoplasm is rich and turgid instead of salty and watery, and the corn plant grows more robustly than it would be able to if was fed nitrogen fertilizers. And the corn quality is superb. The corn plant assembles this rich diet of amino acids directly into protein in its growing parts and builds its peptides, duplicates its DNA, grows like gangbusters and makes the soil rich without the application of fertilizers. I've estimated a robust, high population, open-pollenated corn/soybean planting of 12 feet height can add as much as half a percent organic matter to the soil in a single season. Of course, you want to have rich organizational patterns of energy in both the soil and atmosphere if you want this to work like gangbusters. (See my website, www.unionag.org for pictures.) In particular using the horn clay patterns in my broadcasters seems to have been the missing ingredient for this situation to occur. Since I started using horn clay the soil patterns of horn manure and the atmosphere patterns of horn silica have joined together to really turn corn into a high octane grower like a dragster running on aviation fuel. Great stuff. I'd sure like to see others duplicate my success with this. Horn clay seems to have made my bamboo stand go nuts and double its size and growth rate too. It may do something similar for grapes and various other crops. Like I say, it can be a bit finicky getting corn off to a bang of a start in wetter soils where weeds may give it early competition and the nutrients the soil food web generates at the corn roots disperse more widely. I've had my best yields in drought years. But since I first started farming just seeing how the corn seedlings in the middle of a cluster consistantly were the most robust made me really wonder what was going on. The rules for growing corn turned out to not be what commonly was thought and taught--that corn was a soil robber. Under the right conditions the converse has proven true. Best, Hugh Lovel >Hugh Lovel wrote: > >> Here I've been growing corn as a soil improvement crop >> without fertilizers and getting killer yields. I'm not sure everyone is in >> a position to do this, but I've proved it possible. >> > >Hugh, could you share with us what makes supports the corn crop (besides the >FB) and how the corn crop is being used to build the soil? > >Thanks! > >Wayne > > >-- >*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* > >Sharon and Wayne McEachern > >http://www.LightExpression.com > >[EMAIL PROTECTED] > >"A Divine Program for Healing and Transformation" > >and > >Expressing the Light > >"A Ministry Dedicated to the Divine Process" > >*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
