Dave Brandt was so much more than a meme. He partnered with universities to experiment with and expand soil conservation and cover crop techniques, worked to educate other farmers through worldwide conventions and direct mentorship, founded the Soil Health Academy, and was called the "Obi-Wan Kenobi of soil health" by the chief of the USDA's conservation department.
There is no healthy planet without healthy ag practices, and this guy was a legend.
The A-horizon on his farm was 4 feet deep
You do not understand
Most modern Ag operations don’t even have a proper A-Horizon. They’re too busy turning the earth every time they replant. The A-horizon is the Black Gold that makes Soil Soil. It’s a structurally complex soil horizon that must be built in place by the interactions of Plants and Fungi and Insects. It is The Thing that soaks up rain and holds onto it for plants. The A-Horizon is The Thing that builds up when you let a field sit fallow. The act of tilling creates fecundity by breaking up the A-horizon. On a really good Organic no-till farm you might find an A-horizon between 3-6 inches.
His A-horizon was 4 feet deep. 50 inches.
I-
I have no context. His farm was covered in a living skin thick enough for a child to stand in.
Gives me hope for what we could accomplish if we got our collective heads on straight, you know? Like. This was one guy. A brilliant man, who knew what he was up to, but. The thing about brilliant ideas is they can be shared.
50 inches. The mind reels.
This is so much more impressive than I can understand and comprehend and I would love to know more about A horizon
Do you love the color of the Soil?
Humus, or Humic Compounds, are a cryptic and poorly understood set of organic substances. As the final metabolic result of once-living things being digested first by macroscopic organisms, and then by microorganisms, they resist most forms of analysis, and have cryptic structures. A few that we have managed to isolate and study are the Humic & Fulvic Acids.
Humus has a number of remarkable tendencies. It is capable of retaining water far better than any raw mineral clay; it also retains electrically charged clay granules, which themselves retain mineral ions, all of which is essential to make a soil a high-quality resource for Plants to grow in.
A composter is a box that contains an environment that is conducive to the production of Humus, but the best way to produce it is in-place, by laying layers of organic material down over an unbroken earth and growing things out of that. The interaction of the plants rooting, the fungus weaving itself through everything, the bacteria and archaea metabolizing as they do, and inorganic weathering forces all combine to gradually build up the microscopic equivalent of a complex megastructure capable of retaining far more water, and containing far more nutrients, than any inorganic substrate.
This stuff is black gold. This is the stuff that determines whether or not a plot of land is going to be “productive.” The knowledge of how to make it, how to care for it, is an essential piece of wisdom that our civilization needs to remember.
Fortunately, folks seem to have the right response:
Farmers are more important to the continuity of civilization than administrators, no matter what the elitists say. This knowledge is important.
Exactly
This work is so important and underappreciated AND if you're interested in the lives of the women as wives and secretaries who did research and publication "with" their husbands in history, you should know that this kind of work in sustainable agriculture right now also has a LOT of invisible women doing critical scientific work in soil development, seed saving and starting, etc, often without formal training or recognition.
May his memory be for a blessing, and may all those continuing his work be blessed.
