Merla Barberie wrote:
Your nemesis, Randy, seem to exemplify many good, as well as misguided, qualities. His land is in his family and farming is in his blood. He is open enough to share with you what he is doing and he really believes in it, works hard, makes it pay, pays his bills thereby, etc. He uses a spider and cover crops, for crying out loud.The organically grown trees will be happier and know how to compete with other species for precious nutrients and therefore better able to resist disease and decay in the long term.
I was surprised at how much I liked his place, but it bothered me, I guess because it wasn't a small farm growing vegetables organically, but rather just large fields of beautiful perfect trees, exactly spaced...little monocultures of various tree species planted and harvested in different years. It might be valuable to compare an organic tree farm with Randy's farm.
My husband tells me he heard Randy bragging about how he and some other farmers sneaked onto an organic neighbor's land who wouldn't take care of his weeds and sprayed it with herbicide...I guess it's his personality, not necessarily his farm.A year ago I visited a one thousand acre property in the southern highlands of NSW whose owner was allowing it to revert to bush and naturally regenerate. He was helping it along the way with tree plantings of friendly native species, had planted several hundred. The farm had a lot of serrated tussock, Oz's number one 'noxious' weed (noxious to stock, of course) which is under permanent sentence of death by the authorities. The owner lived in town, no one lived at the farm. About half the property was accessible by vehicle (4-wheel drive), the remainder by mountain goat.
Access was through another and much bigger farm. The grazier (I use the term loosely, he was in fact a shearer) ran Merino sheep and little else. He used toxic chemical weedkillers and superphosphates like they were going out of fashion. Every time a 'weed' (ie, anything other than grass) poked its head up, it and the area around got hit by a toxic blast. The average grass height was about an inch and colour a vivid, sickly green.
On a particular day two months before my visit, a fire broke out at the inner farm. It destroyed every living plant in the 'accessible' area - serrated tussock, native grasses and trees, others - and most of the straw mulch (actually chopped tussock). Miraculously, the only buildings (a shearing shed and a ruined cottage) were untouched although the fires came within metres of them all around.
I make no charges but I have the photographs that show the fire-blackened areas meticulously following fencelines without breaking through them, and the wheel tracks of a large vehicle where there should be none.
ST seed can lie dormant for half a century and still be viable; mature plants on average drop about 100,000 seeds a year.The heat of burning serrated tussock (dry) triggers germination of viable seed in the seed bed. The result on this property is a five-fold increase in growth generating pressure for more destruction by toxic chemicals. One of the boundaries of this inner farm is a major river feeding into the water supply of Sydney, 300 km away, and some of the burned land slopes down to it. I'm sure I need not spell out the consequences.
Is there some reason he keeps it bare? Does he know that in other places such plantations all grow grass? Has he been observant of what happens to his soil and the living organisms that support it when it spends several years bare?I assume he meant the spray had affected the growth. Trees are living plants - I don't think dormancy cuts off natural life-support systems, there would still be some sap flowing. Escort, Task Force and Roundup used in any way (other than as a spot-spray and even then I wouldn't be too sure) will be taken up by roots and carried to plant tissue with resultant ill effects.
He did explain why he keeps it bare. He pointed to some trees on his next door neighbor's land which hadn't been kept bare, but had had lots of tansy that Randy finally sprayed Escort for him when the trees were dormant. He commented that it had affected the growth of the bottom branches and they didn't look good.
However, tansy indicates soil compaction and poor drainage which could also be a cause.
He did have hard fescue on interior roads between large beds on another piece of land that he bought later. He expected it to fill in completely and keep out weeds.This fescue is high in iron, I don't think it will do what he wants. However, it would be better if he put in plants which would put nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus into the soil. Or just allowed them to grow - the soil knows what it needs better than we do. Hence the tansy - if he improved the drainage the tansy wouldn't grow there.
Since he had that large sawdust/urea compost pile, he may be using that as a mulch. He would never plant clover. It would have to be grass to stand the herbicide spraying. He really believed that the trees grew better on bare soil.Then for him perhaps they will - the working of belief systems is a facet of human dynamics which is well and truly beyond our understanding.
There was insect damage which means that his chemical fertilizer isn't giving some varieties of trees, especially the native ones, what they want. I will probably ask him about that. He could decide to approach the native trees organically with soil and organisms just like untouched native soil, but how would he get fast growth? Maybe it's not possible to treat native species like the blue spruces he raises from seed from blue trees with a long history of being grown on a tree farm.Trees are plants - we often forget that. Chemical fertilisers are salts; the nutrients they contain are artificial, are not readily absorbable by plants. The salts are taken up by plants because there is no choice (eat salt yourself and you instantly need a drink; if the only drink available is salty, and always salty, that is what you will drink). The salts inhibit if not destroy outright the symbiotic relationship between plant and soil.
Only if the person being asked has the inclination - or the time and resources - to go looking for the answers if they're not already know. We live in the age of information. The internet is a success primarily because it assists or enables the carriage of information. This mailing list - even though at times it drives me to distraction (and likewise I'm sure some of my contributions cause similar feelings in others) is a success because it carries a vast amount of information.It is always better to ask questions than to give information.
Roger
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Today, do not worry
Today, do not anger
Honour your parents, teachers and elders
Earn your living honestly
Show gratitude to all living things
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Earthcare Environmental Solutions
PO Box 2057 Queanbeyan NSW 2620
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