Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

The Living Soil Handbook: The No-Till Grower's Guide to Ecological Market Gardening
The Living Soil Handbook: The No-Till Grower's Guide to Ecological Market Gardening
The Living Soil Handbook: The No-Till Grower's Guide to Ecological Market Gardening
Ebook479 pages6 hours

The Living Soil Handbook: The No-Till Grower's Guide to Ecological Market Gardening

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

5/5

()

Read preview
  • Soil Fertility Restoration

  • Soil Fertility Reclamation

  • Soil Fertility Revival

  • Soil Fertility Reestablishment

  • Soil Fertility Rejuvenation

  • Benefits of Diversity

  • Power of Nature

  • Community

  • Farm Life

  • Beauty of Simplicity

  • Interconnectedness

  • Joy of Learning

  • Nature's Bounty

  • Learning From Failure

  • Sustainable Living

  • Soil Fertility Resurgence

  • Soil Fertility Recovery

  • Soil Fertility Rehabilitation

  • Soil Fertility Regeneration

  • Soil Fertility Revitalization

About this ebook

Principles and farm-tested practices for no-till market gardening--for healthier, more productive soil!

From the host of the popular The No-Till Market Garden Podcast—heard around the world with nearly one million downloads!

Discovering how to meet the soil’s needs is the key task for every market gardener. In this comprehensive guide, Farmer Jesse Frost shares all he has learned through experience and experimentation with no-till practices on his home farm in Kentucky and from interviews and visits with highly successful market gardeners in his role as host of The No-Till Market Garden Podcast

The Living Soil Handbook is centered around the three basic principles of no-till market gardening:

  • Disturb the soil as little as possible
  • Keep it covered as much as possible
  • Keep it planted as much as possible.

Farmer Jesse then guides readers in applying those principles to their own garden environment, with their own materials, to meet their own goals.

Beginning with an exploration of the importance of photosynthesis to living soil, Jesse provides in-depth information on:

  • Turning over beds
  • Using compost and mulch
  • Path management
  • Incorporating biology, maintaining fertility
  • Cover cropping
  • Diversifying plantings through intercropping
  • Production methods for seven major crops

Throughout, the book emphasizes practical information on all the best tools and practices for growers who want to build their livelihood around maximizing the health of their soil.

Farmer Jesse reminds growers that “as possible” is the mantra for protecting the living soil: disturb the soil as little as you possibly can in your context. He does not believe that growers should anguish over what does and does not qualify as “no-till.” If you are using a tool to promote soil life and biology, that’s the goal. Jesse’s goal with The Living Soil Handbook is to provide a comprehensive set of options, materials, and field-tested practices to inspire growers to design a soil-nurturing no-till system in their unique garden or farm ecosystem.

"[A] practical, informative debut. . . .Gardeners interested in sustainable agriculture will find this a great place to start."—Publishers Weekly

"Frost offers a comprehensive, science-based, sympathetic, wholly practical guide to soil building, that most critical factor in vegetable gardening for market growers and home gardeners alike. A gift to any vegetable plot that will keep on giving."—Booklist (starred review)

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 20, 2021
ISBN9781645020271
The Living Soil Handbook: The No-Till Grower's Guide to Ecological Market Gardening
Author

Jesse Frost

Jesse Frost, aka Farmer Jesse, is a certified organic market gardener, freelance journalist, and the host of The No-Till Market Garden Podcast. He is also a cofounder of notillgrowers.com, where he helps collect the best and latest no-till insights from growers in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Europe. He and his wife, Hannah Crabtree, practice no-till farming at Rough Draft Farmstead in central Kentucky.

Related to The Living Soil Handbook

Related ebooks

Agriculture For You

View More

Related articles

Related categories

Reviews for The Living Soil Handbook

Rating: 4.818181818181818 out of 5 stars
5/5

11 ratings3 reviews

What our readers think

Readers find this title to be full of useful information, well written, and easy to understand. It covers the basics and provides specific details. The book is recommended for gardeners looking to improve their knowledge and skills. There are no negative reviews about the book."

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Dobra knjiga pravo, strasna knjiga, ludilo knjiga, plasim se evo, brrrr
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Really specific during the end but covers most of the basics.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Although just an average gardener not planning to enter the field professionally found this book to be full of useful information. Plan to re-read it to make sure the info is retained for growing season, so much of it made sense and I want to incorporate the knowledge towards improving the established garden. Totally well written and easy to understand

Book preview

The Living Soil Handbook - Jesse Frost

INTRODUCTION

Confession: I have never actually grown anything in my life.

I have never constructed a leaf or imbued a flower with an appealing fragrance to draw in pollinators. I have never sewed roots through soil or traded carbon cocktails with soil microbes in exchange for nutrients. I am just not that cool.

In the 11 years I have been farming, all I can claim credit for is making the conditions right (and sometimes, admittedly, very wrong) for food and flowers to grow. If a customer thanks me for growing the food they purchase, I feel like a fraud. I feel as though I couldn’t possibly take that credit. My job—indeed, the job of any grower—is not to grow food but rather to facilitate that growth. Something else entirely does the growing.

That something is a complex community of living organisms—both macro and micro—that work in conjunction with air, water, sunlight, carbon, and nutrients to grow plants. Humans aren’t the creators here. I repeat: We simply make the conditions right for crops to grow and make food—this is the literal definition of cultivation.

Three Principles to Farm By

In this book I blend my experience stewarding living soil with the realities of making a living as a professional grower. The very short version of that knowledge is this: Getting what you need from the soil comes down to first asking the soil what it needs. And it is true no matter where you live. What the soil needs to thrive in humid Florida is largely the same as what it needs in dry Montana. It comes down to three basic principles:

1.Disturb the soil as little as possible.

2.Keep the soil covered as much as possible.

3.Keep the soil planted as much as possible.

I first came across these three principles several years ago as a beginning farmer reading about conservation agriculture and soil health. My wife, Hannah, and I were suffering through some crop failures and I sought guidance on what we were doing wrong. The books and articles told me that, although we could apply sprays and try a variety of techniques to protect crops, the best way to fight plant disease and pest pressure was to nurture soil health. And the best way to do that? Follow those three principles.

Unfortunately, the books and articles weren’t overflowing with guidance on how to follow those three principles. The texts used terms such as interplanting and no-till or cover cropping but did not offer much technical detail on how to execute those practices. Somewhat frustrated, we began experimenting on our farm with eliminating mechanical tillage, trialing different mulches, and interplanting multiple crops together in the same bed to see what liked growing together. In 2018, I started The No-Till Market Garden Podcast, and my motive was to help others and myself by having conversations with farmers who were experimenting with low- or no-tillage methods to discover, and then share, what they’d learned. Farmer Jackson Rolett and I started No-Till Growers (www.notillgrowers.com) to aggregate (and create) videos, talks, podcasts, and articles. Later we employed grower Josh Sattin to make detailed technical videos and host a bimonthly live show on YouTube called Growers Live. On that show, Sattin interviewed growers, and anyone could log on and ask those growers specific questions.

The goal of all these ventures has been, and is, the same—to answer the question what does the soil need to thrive? Ultimately, through these experiences and many conversations with agronomists, growers, and scientists, I’ve learned about a range of widely applicable technical solutions for keeping the soil as undisturbed, as well covered, and as fully planted as possible. In this book I work to flesh out the details of how to employ those principles not just on a farm like mine, but on any farm. My hope is that anyone, anywhere will be able to use this book as a guide to designing the right system for their context and soil—that is, to put those three principles into practice.

That system might wind up looking similar to the shallow compost mulch system Hannah and I use at Rough Draft Farmstead in central Kentucky (USDA Hardiness Zone 6b) as described in chapter two and throughout this book. Or you may find that some or all of our methods won’t work for you. For example, you may not have access to the rich and plentiful compost that we enjoy here in horse country. Furthermore, you might not have the abundant rainfall we do, or the relatively generous number of frost-free days. Environmentally, you might be opposed to the use of plastic silage tarps—and not without reason. To account for that, I’ve set up this book as a choose-your-own-adventure of sorts. And no doubt, an adventure it will be.

Before I wrap up these introductory thoughts, however, I want to have an obligatory pause and reflect on two crucial words that show up in each of the three guiding principles: as possible.

Figure 0.1. All of our practices at Rough Draft Farmstead, from mulching to cover cropping to interplanting, are part of our goal to protect and nurture the soil.

Marry. Those. Words.

When the practice of no-till is a grower’s primary tool for stewarding the soil, as possible must be their mantra. These words are beautifully, even pristinely, the essence of no-till agriculture. They encourage the grower to be reasonable. Yes, those words remind us, "pulling carrots disturbs the soil. Raking disturbs soil. Animals disturb soil. It’s okay. Just disturb the soil as little as you possibly can in your context."

Though avoiding soil disturbance as much as possible is important, the enterprise of creating and protecting living soil isn’t beholden to the goal of no disturbance ever. Indeed, I believe each farmer will discover that their path to stewarding living soil evolves as much through dedication to no dogma as it does to no disturbance. As long as you use a given tool to promote soil life and biology, you are advancing toward the goal. This means keeping an open mind about soil practices that can create temporary soil damage, because those practices may ultimately create a more friable soil. Sometimes promoting soil life involves using a disc or tiller to work in composts and amendments, especially when starting a new garden. Other times it includes broadforking a bed to break up compaction, which allows for better water infiltration and soil respiration that in turn promotes photosynthesis—a central goal for growers, as I explain in chapter one. The genius of the broadfork is that, although it causes some significant disturbance in the moment of use, its action can actually enhance soil conditions. And when a broadfork is used in harmony with the guiding principles of caring for living soil, it’s a tool that eventually renders itself obsolete.

There are other good reasons to abstain from dogma, too. For one thing, soil science is ever-evolving, and future discoveries could change our understanding of what helps the soil and what hinders it. For another, some practices that shouldn’t succeed sometimes do, while practices that should succeed sometimes don’t. One example of this dichotomy is interplanting with carrots, which are not a very competitive crop. Most of the time, sowing carrots around other crops doesn’t turn out well for the carrots, and yet, some growers end up with excellent results. Soil biology is profoundly complex and dynamic, and it will take some time to dial in your growing systems and build up your soil’s health. At first, you may have to undertake more disturbance than you’d like or more than you see other growers doing. Don’t worry about all that—focus on what your soil needs in your context and it will thrive.

Figure 0.2. Living pathways between beds of okra: keeping the soil covered and planted as much as possible.

Make good decisions for your farm business, as well. Run trials. Start small. Test a couple of different methods in a few beds rather than remaking the entire farm with a no-till system you’ve never tried before. Ultimately, if you’re doing things right—keeping the soil planted, covered, and managed with low disturbance—your production and sales will reflect it.

The Original Stewards

Vastly underrepresented both in this book and in conversations about regenerative agriculture are the contributions of indigenous populations—the people who employed the stewardship model of soil management for thousands of years before being dispossessed of their lands or shipped across the ocean and enslaved. Like many Americans, I am descended from colonizers and slave owners. And I firmly believe we owe it to the indigenous and Black populations to avoid claiming their style of agriculture as our invention. No individual alive today is the originator of concepts and practices such as land stewardship, living soil, permaculture, conservation agriculture, or mulching. Being conscious of that can help to repudiate the hubris that led European settlers to violently force indigenous people from their lands and force African slaves to do the work of tending the soil and harvesting the crops. We are simply discovering what indigenous populations knew intuitively for thousands of years: that our role is not to force anything in Nature, but to listen to it, to steward it. In that way, agriculture that focuses on living soil is not an innovation, it’s an apologetic response to the many wrongs forced upon the land and for the attendant harm and loss suffered by many people.

At its core, The Living Soil Handbook is a book about making that apology to the soil. It’s about leaving behind the forceful-agriculture mindset and enabling the soil to do what it naturally wants by once again engaging in regeneration. It’s about rebuilding that relationship with the land, studying it, and constantly working to understand it. As in all relationships, you will make mistakes—and as in all relationships, it is recognizing and owning those mistakes that will keep the bond alive.

I’ll conclude with this thought: The dusty land deeds and rusty barbed wire fences that define the physical boundaries of farms cannot contain the environmental harms of forceful agriculture. Our waterways are full of eroded soils and leached-out chemicals that originated on farms located miles away. Bird and insect populations are declining all over North America and in many other places around the world. The health of communities is diminishing, and one reason for that is the lack of nutrients in, and the abundance of pesticide residues on, food grown through conventional agriculture—agricultural practices that attempt to force the soil into doing what the farmer wants. The remnants of pharmaceuticals consumed by our sickened communities join the waste stream and, along with nitrates and phosphates from synthetic fertilizer, end up in our lakes and oceans and drinking water.

Chemically farmed soil does not heed borders, but living soil is not fully containable, either. Healthy, vibrant soils clean our water and bring back life. The effects of farms rich with living soil spill out into the communities, too; but instead of sterilizing or poisoning the environment, these farms enliven their surroundings. The populations of birds and bugs that are attracted to a healthy farm environment also enrich the larger ecosystem well beyond the gardens where they reside. Moreover, living soil provides for the grower, economically and emotionally. That’s what living soil and no-till are all about: care for the soil and the soil will care for you and your community.

And if you do it right, you’ll never grow anything again.

CHAPTER ONE

THE BASIC SCIENCE OF LIVING SOIL

The science of what goes on in the living soil is fascinating stuff, but it often gets buried in heaps of jargon that make it unnecessarily confusing. Nonetheless, I believe that every little bit of plant and soil science you’re willing to learn can greatly improve your skills as a grower. In particular, diving deeper into the process of photosynthesis and its relationship to the underground ecology will enhance your experience of growing food and can make you a wiser steward of the soil. This is because, trapped inside the scientific gobbledygook surrounding plant and soil science, there exists loads of practical advice on how to manage soil properly. Break through that jargon, and you will find new ways to steward the biology in your soil and grow better and better food. So I’m going to walk you through it. And it all starts about 93 million miles away.

Photosynthesis is quite possibly the single most important chemical reaction on the planet. Full stop. Without photosynthesis, we would have nothing to eat, no air to breathe, no mechanism to cool the atmosphere. There would be no fruit, vegetables, nuts, butter, eggs, or meat. No crude oil, either. Although photosynthesis is a complex process at the molecular level, there are some easy ways to understand how photosynthesis works and why photosynthesis is particularly important to growers—no-till, pro-till, or otherwise. Without question, if you learn one thing from this book, my hope is that it’s a basic understanding of the photosynthetic process and its importance not only to plants but also to soil life and health.

Plants are not animals, but they are sitting ducks. In what is arguably one of the most impressive evolutionary outcomes in our planet’s history, plants chose to root themselves in place. Indeed, they chose to not run away from potential attackers nor hunt their own food. Instead, plants derive their protection and nutrition in other, more collaborative, ways. And it is photosynthesis that made that choice possible—the synthesis of light into energy. In effect, plants figured out that they could take sunlight, turn it into energy, and trade that energy for protection and nutrients.

Figure 1.1. Carbon is brought into the soil through the plants but expired back out in the form of carbon dioxide by soil microbes through respiration creating a looping cycle.

In simple terms, photosynthesis is a two-step process involving water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide (CO2). The first step begins when plants absorb water (H2O) through their roots. That water is transported into the leaves and specifically into industrious little cells called chloroplasts. Using the sun’s energy, the chloroplasts split the water molecules apart into their constituent atoms, which are hydrogen and oxygen. So the plant retains the two hydrogen atoms from the H2O and releases the one oxygen atom into the atmosphere. Indeed, the air we and other creatures breathe comes from plant cells using sunlight to split water atoms.

Through a complex series of interactions, this initial part of the photosynthetic process ultimately produces two energy-carrying molecules (NADPH and ATP). Next, carbon dioxide is absorbed into the plant through stomata, or tiny pores in the leaves. Inside the chloroplast—the cells where photosynthesis takes place—that carbon dioxide is combined with those aforementioned energy-carrying molecules that were created in the first part of the photosynthetic process. Combining the energy-carrying molecules with carbon dioxide results in various carbohydrates—little molecular bundles of energy—that the plant can use for its own construction. However, the plant doesn’t keep all of those bundles of energy for itself. It reserves as much as two-thirds of the carbohydrates it produces to use in a special belowground barter system. Indeed, photosynthesis isn’t miraculous simply because it allows plants to use the sun’s energy to make food. It’s also miraculous because it allows plants to make so much food that they can feed not only themselves but also a complex community of soil organisms. And that is the key to an amazing set of symbiotic relationships between plants and microbes. It is also why photosynthesis is critical for living soil, and why I have dedicated the first section of the book to this subject.

How Photosynthesis Feeds the Soil

Plants can’t survive solely on the carbohydrates that they create through photosynthesis. These carbohydrates are sort of the french fries of the plant world—delicious and packed with energy but incomplete nutritionally. Like humans and other complex organisms, plants need a variety of nutrients beyond just carbohydrates for their health and growth. It makes sense that most, if not all, of the 17 essential nutrients that plants need for healthy growth exist in the soil where they’ve chosen to grow. But plant roots largely lack the ability to harvest these minerals and nutrients on their own. Plants do have the amazing ability to absorb some types of bacteria into their root tips and extract nutrients from them (this is called the rhizophagy cycle).¹ Plants can also utilize some amino acids and other forms of organic nitrogen for this extraction.² However, unlike animals, plants can’t really eat as a way to gain nutrients. Luckily, soil microbes such as bacteria, fungi, and archaea are all equipped with special enzymes that extract nutrients and minerals from soil particles or organic matter. When those microbes die, or are consumed by predators such as amoebas, nematodes, earthworms, or the like, the nutrients that they gathered are left behind in a plant-available form—a form plants can absorb through their roots.

The excess molecular bundles of energy (carbohydrates) that form during photosynthesis are mixed with hormones, organic acids, fatty acids, amino acids, and other compounds, creating extraordinary sugary concoctions called root exudates that plants slowly secrete through their roots. These secretions help nourish the belowground microbial life, and they also can alter the pH and other elements of the environment around the roots. Root exudates can also attract specific microbes that specialize in extracting certain nutrients from the soil.³ Other exudates can repel the less-desired soil fauna, diseases, and the roots of other plants. Perhaps you have heard that a cereal rye cover crop can inhibit weed growth and seed germination? That effect is called allelopathy, and it comes about from chemicals contained in the exudates of cereal rye and other plants.⁴ Generally speaking, however, root exudates feed the soil life and the soil life feeds the plants.

This is what the term living soil encompasses—a soil that is filled with microbial diversity and living plant roots exchanging nutrients. This exchange of nutrients is also vital for plant health. Plants can use some of the nutrients they gain in this exchange to create phytochemicals, often referred to as phytonutrients. These complex compounds help plants protect themselves against harmful pathogens as well as oxidation from oxygen or damage from extreme sunlight. When we humans consume plants, we ingest these phytochemicals ourselves and our bodies are able to utilize them in much the same way plants do—as protection against diseases, as antioxidants, and more. Phytonutrients are also largely what give plants their amazing aromas and flavors. Generally speaking, the better a plant is able to access the nutrients it needs and create these compounds, the better it tastes and the more nutritious it will be as a food source. Of course, plants also provide a massive food source for the soil life in the form of carbohydrates. Thus, those microbes have a lot of incentive to defend their plant hosts. Various fungi and bacteria produce novel secondary metabolites that are highly potent chemicals capable of fending off various pathogens (penicillin is arguably the most well-known secondary fungal metabolite).⁵ Predatory microbes, including some fungi, consume harmful microbes.⁶ All this adds up to symbiosis at its finest, and it’s all driven by photosynthesis and the resulting root exudates.

One other highly consequential phenomenon that takes place among this alchemy and nutrient exchange is carbon sequestration. Carbon sequestration is the act of taking carbon out of the air and securing it in the soil. It is a term that comes up frequently in discussions of climate change as an approach to managing excessive levels of carbon dioxide—a potent greenhouse gas—in the atmosphere. However, carbon sequestration is complicated and sometimes misunderstood. Remember, during photosynthesis plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and mix it with energy-carrying molecules to create exudates. Thus, those exudates are loaded with carbon. That carbon is then injected into the soil through the roots. But the carbon doesn’t simply sit there in the soil. In healthy soil, microbes consume and then respire much of the carbon back out of the soil in the form of carbon dioxide. The plants then reabsorb that carbon dioxide again during photosynthesis and start the process over. This is the carbon cycle: In a healthy soil, much of the carbon that enters the soil goes right back out of it. So, is the carbon ever actually sequestered? The answer is a resounding . . . sort of.

Some of the carbon that enters the soil remains there—especially if the soil is not churned up by tillage, as I describe later in this chapter—but the carbon is likely to change forms. For instance, let’s say a bacterium eats some carbon-rich exudates seeping from plant roots. The bacterium then uses that energy to multiply itself. Some of the new bacterial cells are later consumed by a larger organism such as a protozoan. That protozoan is itself then eaten by an earthworm. So long as that earthworm isn’t plucked out of the ground by a bird or mole, it will live and die in the soil.

During this sequence of eating-and-being-eaten, much of the carbon pumped into the soil by plant roots ended up respired out again in the form of carbon dioxide. But a small part of what began as a carbonaceous snack for a bacterium ended up as part of an earthworm. And when that earthworm dies, some of the carbon in its body will become a more stable form of carbon that persists in the soil through the formation of soil aggregates. Soil aggregates arise when microbes glue particles of soil together. In the process, particles of carbon—such as a microscopic slice of an earthworm—can become trapped among those soil aggregates. This encloses the carbon and makes it less accessible for other microbes to consume.

Plant roots are another source of carbon in soil. Roots are highly carbonaceous structures, and when plants are harvested or die, roots left behind in the soil provide food and habitat for microbes for several months, thus storing that carbon. All of this activity added together results in accumulations of small amounts of carbon compounds, and we refer to this accumulation as soil organic matter.

Figure 1.2. This solarized cover crop will eventually add a huge boost of organic matter to the soil beneath.

Soil organic matter is crucial to soil life and plant health. First, soil organic matter is a major nutrient source. It is consumed by soil organisms, and this process eventually releases the nutrients that were trapped inside the organic matter so that plants can absorb them. For example, a good amount of nitrogen is made available to plants by microbes consuming nitrogen-rich organic matter—nitrogen being a macronutrient that can be difficult for plants to access. With more soil organic matter comes more soil aggregates, which act as microbial habitat. These soil aggregates are full of pores that act like tiny cups to retain water in dry times, but then act like a sophisticated sewer system during downpours, allowing excess water to flow through. (You can think of soil aggregates like a sieve—when you spritz a sieve with water, the water collects between the holes in the sieve, but when you pour water through, the water flows freely.) These aggregates that accompany the organic matter also keep the soil aerated so that carbon dioxide can exit the soil and nitrogen and oxygen can enter. Because it is so important to soil health, organic matter percentage is one of the key soil management metrics. This percentage can be determined by a soil test. I discuss the utility of soil testing and its pros and cons throughout this book, but learning the organic matter percentage of your soil is one clear benefit of having your soil tested. Observing how organic matter percentage changes over time is a simple way to evaluate the efficacy of your soil practices—is that number going up or at least staying stable year after year? If not, or especially if that number is decreasing, the soil may be respiring more carbon than it is accumulating. Under those degraded conditions the soil retains less water, it contains fewer vital nutrients, and it cannot support photosynthesis at a high level.

The Five Keys to Photosynthesis

And so we return to the beginning of this discussion: Without effective photosynthesis, we cannot grow healthy plants and healthy food, nor maintain healthy living soil. Let’s examine the practical steps growers can take to maximize the photosynthetic process in the market garden.

Five key factors determine a plant’s ability to photosynthesize: sunlight, carbon dioxide, water, soil organisms, and nutrients. The good news is that growers have some amount of control over each one. Though all of these factors work in concert, it’s important to keep each one individually in mind as you read the rest of this book.

Certainly all of these factors can be controlled to the nth degree in an automated greenhouse, and to a lesser extent under high tunnels or caterpillar tunnels. Indeed, this ability to control conditions is why more growers are incorporating protected culture into their farming systems—the plants perform well when they have optimum conditions for photosynthesis and are protected from extreme weather events. Even so, I’m not advocating for growing all of your crops in a completely controlled environment such as a greenhouse.

There are many ways to cater to a plant’s photosynthetic activity or protect it from weather extremes that don’t involve plastic or petroleum products, which may not be as environmentally friendly. One common way to mitigate excessive sunlight, for instance, is to shield plants using shade cloth or high-tunnel plastic. Growers can also strategically plant trees and shrubs to provide afternoon shade for growing areas, which additionally provides the benefits of more photosynthesis. The goal doesn’t have to be perfect control of the environment. Instead, focus on making conditions for photosynthetic activity as ideal as possible in your context. Keep that in mind as you read about the five key factors and consider what you can do to best cater to the needs of photosynthesis on your farm.

SUNLIGHT

In order for plants to photosynthesize, they need access to sunlight and they need that sunlight in the proper amounts. When plants receive either excessive or inadequate sunlight, photosynthetic activity slows down or ceases altogether.

An example of insufficient light is when young seedlings are germinated in low light conditions and stretch out in search of sunlight. This elongation—referred to as legginess—results in a weakly structured plant that may not be able to hold itself up. This can lead to problems such as foliar diseases, because drooping stems and leaves that touch the soil can be infected by soilborne pathogens. Of course, too little sunlight can also slow down the growth and production of maturing crops, making them weak, low yielding, and slow to mature. Growers can address low light levels by opening up tree canopies where needed or by providing supplemental lighting in greenhouses.

Plants can protect themselves from excessive sunlight, but there is a limit to their defenses. When exposed to excessive radiation from sunlight, plant tissues (including fruits) can incur physical damage in the form of sunburn,

Enjoying the preview?
Page 1 of 1