How Regenerative Farming Practices Improve Soil Health
Imagine a plate sitting on the table in front of you. On that plate is your favorite meal. The main course is mouth-watering, but the side dishes look just as good. You’re excited to enjoy it, but don’t fill up too much because afterward, you’ll be enjoying a hearty helping of your favorite dessert.
What foods came to mind? Perhaps you imagined a juicy steak and a baked potato, with ice cream for dessert. Or maybe meat isn’t your thing, or you’re simply in the mood for something lighter: how about a blueberry salad with some candied pecans and a yogurt parfait afterward? Or maybe you’re a breakfast person, and you simply imagined a stack of pancakes slathered in delicious maple syrup along with a side of crispy hashbrowns. Getting hungry yet?
Regardless of what foods you envisioned, all our favorites have one thing in common: they are completely dependent on healthy soil in order to grow their basic ingredients. Despite this, soil health throughout the world has been on the decline in recent years. That’s why enhancing soil vitality through the innovative practice of regenerative farming has now become critical for agriculture all across the United States.
In this post, we’ll discuss the cutting-edge methods used to maximize the health of the soil in which potatoes and all our other favorite foods grow.
What Makes Soil Healthy?
Many people tend to use the words “soil” and “dirt” interchangeably, but soil is a great deal more complex than that. Far more than just a medium for plants to anchor their roots in, soil provides agricultural crops with nutrients and retains the water and carbon that they depend on to survive and thrive.
Soil is considered “healthy” if it can provide crops with everything they need. Fruits and vegetables get the vitamins and minerals they provide to us directly from the soil. Over time, however, soil can become depleted, in turn, causing the foods they produce to become less nutritious.
All plant life, including those we use as crops, depends heavily on access to carbon to grow. Carbon is a key element of organic matter, which is a critical part of the makeup of any soil. Plants also require the presence of nitrogen in the form of nitrates: all healthy soils must have some, although too much nitrogen can be harmful.
Soil must also have a good soil structure, meaning that its solid components are arranged in such a way as to support water retention and root growth. Soil structure can be degraded by erosion or by repeated tilling, which breaks down the solid materials over time.
What Is Regenerative Farming?
For the reasons we’ve mentioned, soil health will decline over time. This is an inevitable result of growing the same crops in the same soil over and over. Eventually, new generations of crops won’t be able to match their predecessors in terms of health and strength. Ultimately, soil will lose its fertility and thus its ability to sustain crops at all.
That’s why, for hundreds of years, one of the primary focuses of agriculture has been to maintain and sustain soil health.
However, this only works for so long: eventually, even the most well-maintained soil system will begin to become less and less viable.
That’s why farmers have begun to spend more time and resources investing in regenerative farming. Regenerative farming refers to any number of techniques that have the goal of not just maintaining soil health but also actively restoring it so that formerly depleted soils can begin to sustain crops once again.
What Techniques Are Used?
Regenerative farming is an umbrella term that refers to any technique employed with the goal of restoring soil health. Such techniques are being developed all the time, but some of the most widely used are listed below:
Crop Rotation
Different crops have vastly different effects on the health of the soil. Some add certain nutrients to the soil while removing others. That’s why planting the same crop season after season can cause soil to become depleted, while occasionally changing what crops are grown in an area can restore its health.
Cover Cropping
This is the technique of planting a cover of plant life over exposed areas of soil. This reduces erosion and also helps to provide organic material to the soil that is used for staple crops like potatoes.
Reduced Tillage
As we mentioned above, excessive tilling of soil can eventually damage its soil structure. This will increase erosion and make it more difficult for the soil to retain the water necessary for maximum crop yield. Reduced tillage methods, such as planting directly on top of the topsoil, eliminate the need to agitate the soil excessively. In turn, this allows it to retain air and water far more effectively than soil that has become damaged due to excessive farming.
The Benefits of Regenerative Farming for Potatoes
Soil depends on a wide variety of microorganisms to effectively sustain crops like potatoes. Regenerative farming practices improve the biodiversity of soils by improving their conditions for the critical life forms that serve as decomposers for the organic matter in the soil.
The use of these practices also increases the overall sustainability of farming methods. By improving the efficiency of the potato farming process, regenerative agriculture techniques can allow more crops to be grown with less material costs. In turn, this allows existing resources to be stretched further.
For more information on this topic, follow Washington Potatoes. Our blog discusses everything from the most innovative farming practices to the best potato recipes. Our goal is to promote sustainability all over the world, not just for potatoes, but for all of the crops we depend on to make our favorite foods.
