“All land-dwelling animals, including humans, are part of the soil community. Human societies disregard this fact at their own peril.”  ~ The Soul of Soil

Our farm is on a Sauquoit hillside overlooking the Mohawk Valley, where families have farmed, made camp, and hunted for thousands of years. This is unceded land of the Oneida Nation. Each spring I find a diverse set of flint tools from long generations of people of the Haudenosaunee — both hunting and gardening tools. I like to think back over the generations of abundance this hillside has provided: this was a named place, a special place to certain families, with a history, a struggle, and many unique, commemorated moments.

It’s impossible to say how many thousands of years of human settlement are embedded in this hillside. I have also turned up musket balls, horseshoes, and pottery lids that attest to 18th and 19th century Europeans. The 20th century occupants left rusting iron and steel, and sometimes more nefarious traces: compacted soils from running heavy tractors on wet ground, patches of severely nutrient-depleted ground.

I started farming here in 2015. One of my favorite poets, Gary Snyder, talks about how once you find what you want to do, you better hurry up and do it. He also talks about combining the best technology of pre-history with carefully selected technologies of the 21st century. In my farming, I try to keep an eye on all these frames — I am here on this hill to keep farming for as long as I’m able, and I work with both simple hand tools and with tractors and steel. And with everything I do on the farm, my eyes are on the soil, constantly devising ways to preserve, support, encourage, and honor the soil. We are very blessed in this area to have deeply tilled and mineralized soils, thanks to the work of glaciers 20,000 years ago. My goal is to constantly be improving that soil.

Most of the 12 acres is NOT in production at any given time; rather it is in “cover crop” rotations, where cereal grains like rye or oats combined with nitrogen-fixing legumes like peas or vetch are growing and feeding the soil. Their presence feeds soil microorganisms, and when they are mowed and turned under, they provide hundreds of pound of organic matter to the soil — a buffet feast for beneficial bacteria, fungi, and arthropods.

I also minimize tillage. The best-drained, most loamy soils on the farm have not been plowed in 3 years. I use permanent raised beds that are cultivated and tilled in just the top few inches of soil to maintain an abundant population of soil microbes and keep nutrients where they belong — in the root zone. This is not a fully “no-till” farm, because I do not currently think that a religious adherence to no-till is an appropriate approach to these soils. Parts of my farm include very heavy, poorly-drained, high-clay fields. To grow vegetables on these fields, there are real benefits from occasional deep tillage with appropriate low-impact tillage tools, such as the chisel plow, a deep ripper shank, and the Perfecta field cultivator.

Our outside fertility comes from strictly organic sources — pelleted fertilizer from organic egg farms, finished compost from vermicomposting operations, straw mulch, and minerals such as potassium, phosphorous, magnesium and sulfur from naturally occurring earth deposits.

I test this soil regularly, think about it constantly, and spend most of my reading time with my nose in books and periodicals focused on soil, new and creative farming techniques, and lessons from the past and future on how to farm and live sustainably.

“But if you do know what is taught by plants and weather, you are in on the gossip and can feel truly at home. The sum of a field's forces become what we call very loosely the 'spirit of the place.' To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made of parts, each of which is a whole. You start with the part you are whole in.” ~Gary Snyder