Last week, our newsletter focused on building soil carbon and its incredible impact on soil and crop health.
Interestingly enough, I saw an article dated May 31 in California Today titled “To Fight Climate Change, Heal the Ground.” The article goes on to say, “The climate change fight has focused largely on cutting emissions. But California is now considering another solution: dirt. Whereas an overabundance of carbon in the air has been disrupting our climate, plants are hungry for the stuff. The Central Valley’s farmlands essentially operate as a vast lung, breathing in carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and converting it into plant tissues. That results in less of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere. But the healthier the soil, the more carbon is stored in plants.”
A statewide program rolling out this summer will be the first of its kind in the country. Specifically, California’s Healthy Soils Initiative is a collaboration of state agencies and departments, led by the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), to promote the development of healthy soils on California’s farm and ranchlands. It will promote innovative farm and ranch management practices that contribute to building adequate soil organic matter, which in turn can increase carbon sequestration and reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions.
Kate Scow, a professor of soil science at the University of California, Davis, states, “If you don’t put carbon back in, you’re kind of mining the soil.”
Whether a grower is organic or still uses some chemical fertilizers and pesticides, farms that have adopted practices that focus on improving soil health are reporting improved harvests. Farmers who restored their soil use fewer inputs to produce higher yields, which translates into higher profits.
Andaman Ag offers a host of products that can have an immediate impact to improve soil health. Just of few of these products are:
- MetaGrow Compost Tea
- Agrostim and Supergrow Foliar Fertilizers
- Pacific Grow Fish Hydrolysate with Chitin
- FertiBOOST and FertiZONE Microbial Soil Amendments
I also want to mention that we have products that increase metabolic pathways in plants to fix carbon into sugar. This translates into an increase in photosynthesis, something that may prove useful this season given its weather challenges.