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Soil Health – Go Deeper

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Rachel Gilker helped Dr. Weil as the editor of this 15th edition. It just came out in April of 2016!
Rachel Gilker helped Dr. Weil as the editor of this 15th edition. It just came out in April of 2016!
Want to know everything about soil? Check out the 15th edition of the Nature and Properties of Soils, 15th edition!

Dr. Ray Weil has spent his whole life looking at and learning about soils and how they work to keep us all fed. In fact, he literally wrote the book on soils.

He has a message for farmers and ranchers concerned about how their soils affect forage growth and profitability: Think deeper. Think about more than the top 12 inches. There’s a lot going on down there, and in fact that could be where a lot of the moisture your forage needs is. In this first 3:48 minute video he takes you on a tour of a soil pit to show you what’s going on further down than we normally look.

Sometimes that moisture is trapped below a “plow pan” or a layer of compacted soil. But you don’t need a bigger tractor with a bigger plow to break that up. In this second video Ray says, “Let nature do it for you” with the simple addition of cover crops. Check it out!

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Kathy Voth
I am the founder, editor and publisher of On Pasture, now retired. My career spanned 40 years of finding creative solutions to problems, and sharing ideas with people that encouraged them to work together and try new things. From figuring out how to teach livestock to eat weeds, to teaching range management to high schoolers, outdoor ed graduation camping trips with fifty 6th graders at a time, building firebreaks with a 130-goat herd, developing the signs and interpretation for the Storm King Fourteen Memorial trail, receiving the Conservation Service Award for my work building the 150-mile mountain bike trail from Grand Junction, Colorado to Moab, Utah...well, the list is long so I'll stop with, I've had a great time and I'm very grateful.

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