 Soils are the basis of our industry
By: Rob Banks
March 15, 2010
Understanding soil is a bit like understanding spaghetti! Soil is a complex and changeable beast that with a wide range of properties, all of which impact on our production systems. Soil forms the basis of our production systems world wide. With modern thinking, a lot of government approach to the rural landscape is focused on water and vegetation management which many seem to think includes soil management. This is not necessarily the case.
A lot of people in rural enterprise do not place enough emphasis on their main resource, their soils. A lot of people on the land concentrate on the products that come out of their enterprise, such as meat, wool, grains or fruit and the quality of their produce, and rightly so because this is the end product of hard work and what pays their way in life. Many managers are halfway to better soil management, by concentrating on aspects of their soil fertility, or erosion and groundcover management in cropping systems, however, many of these activities can tend to treat the soil as a static growth medium, a hydroponic system which just happens to be in the ground. Many of them don’t maintain the soil resource or build the soil into something better.
An old and very experienced soil conservationist once said to me:
If you stuff your stock, you can sell them and start again. If you stuff the vegetation, you can re-sow/re-plant, etc. If you stuff up your soft and cuddlies, you can import them in from some where else [providing that they are not already extinct]. If you stuff your water, you can clean it up, filter it or etc. But if you stuff up your soil, it is stuffed for a long, long time: and you have probably stuffed up every thing else as well.
This saying has stuck in my mind ever since. Australian soils have mostly taken hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of years to form and with few exceptions are either not forming any more, or are forming so slowly, that it is hard to grasp. Our soil, more than anything underpins our existence in the northwest, as with everywhere else.
Through the next few articles, we will have a look at some aspects of soils and their management in northern NSW and consider how things can be done better. We will examine the traps and pitfalls of different approaches to land management and how we can improve our soil management by matching our management to the soil in such a way as to improve productivity as well as improving our soil. I have been fortunate enough to visit many of the places in our region where best practice soil management is happening with extraordinary results. There are lessons we can all learn from the best managers and apply, in our own way and according to our resources in our own soil and management systems.
Rob Banks speaking at a LPLM Field Day about the processes that make our landscape work
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