LNJ - Experts say it starts with soil
Loving food means nurturing the ground it grows from, local farmers and gardeners are saying.
"We're just now seeing dung beetles," Jerica Cadman said, describing one of this year's accomplishments on the certified natural growth farm and ranch she and her husband operate.
LeTourneau University graduates Matt and Jerica Cadman are taking an ancient route to modern agri-business. They're turning the land they lease from friend and mentor Pat Stevens into a small business and feeding a budding locavore movement. Locavores dedicate themselves to finding and eating only locally produced foods, like the milk and grass-fed beef the Cadmans produce.
Jerica, a welding/materials joining degree holder, chiefly works two gardens while mechanical engineer Matt oversees 50 cattle and nine pastured pigs. The wife milks the couple's dairy cows each morning and also helps herd the livestock from pasture to pasture in a practice called management intensive grazing. The pasture management method develops topsoil, they said.
"It's also called mob grazing," Matt said. "What we're trying to do is model what the buffalo used to do. You'd have a herd of thousands of buffalo come through a place, with prairie grass that was 5 feet tall, shoulder to shoulder, and they would graze that area of the ground."
Rather than allowing livestock to graze great swaths of landscape, where they inevitably devour and trample lush areas, the Cadmans graze their cattle less than two acres at a time.
That way, the animals eat weeds they otherwise would pick around in a larger pasture. Root matter dies as the cattle trample the tight area, and grass eventually takes over the pasture.
"And (the soil) is just teeming with microbes and life," Matt added.
Ranchers often will lure cattle to a new pasture by rattling a bucket of feed, sometimes called shaking the cake, but the Cadmans don't let their cattle eat cake. They don't have a problem moving their herd without that incentive, though.
"Oh, no," Matt said. "In fact, it's an incredible process to watch. We've got about 50 cattle, and basically we go out and moo at them. And they moo back, all in unison, and you open the gate and they go right at it."
Fertilizer kills helpful organisms in grazing fields, so halting its use encourages the return of dung beetles that eat those organisms. Jerica described the insects like ecological elevator operators, carrying nutrient-rich dung into the ground and bringing dirt back up to the surface.
Ducks and geese keep the bug population down in Jerica's gardens. Poultry eat fly larvae, and orange oil repulses ants from poison-free gardens, she said.
A friend of the Cadmans, Carole Ramke, has advice for novices who want to give their garden a topsoil advantage.
"The first thing I would tell you is, if you're going to garden in your yard, you need to get a soil test," she said. "Find out what nutrients are available for the plant. You send off a cup or two of soil to a testing lab."
Soil sample kits are available from local county extension agents. The kit is free but there is a fee, usually $10, for getting a soil analysis.
She has more dirty advice.
"Don't ever buy topsoil," the retired law office manager said. "The topsoil you get will have weed seeds, and it's no better than what you already have in there. What you want to do is add compost and the recommended organic (ingredients) to improve the soil that you already do have."
She said it's OK to turn the dirt over by tilling the first year only, after which it's critical to let the earthworms and natural microbes do their thing.
"It's a soil-food web," she said. "The (microbial) life in the soil feeds the plants minerals and nutrients in exchange for the sugars that the plant develops through photosynthesis. It's a symbiotic relationship. ... Everything eats something else it's a soil-food web that's interdependent. So, if you put in anything with 'cide' on it herbicide, fungicide you're killing the problems, but you're also killing all of your helpers down there."