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In addition to long daylight periods during the growing season, you're also using soil that hasn't been farmed continuously for hundreds of years like in the ma
by burnte 7y ago
In addition to long daylight periods during the growing season, you're also using soil that hasn't been farmed continuously for hundreds of years like in the mainland US, or even thousands of years like pretty much everywhere else on earth.
- wil421 7y agoYou don’t need native soil. Compost, manure, and off season ground cover crops that are mulched into native soil do just fine. Where I live in the South there’s lots of red clay but if you provide amendments you will do fine. Your county dump will probably provide compost for free. California provides food for a massive portion of the county but without us providing water it would be too arid for most corps.
- burnte 7y agoI didn't say anything about "native" soil, just that it's land that hasn't been used agriculturally. Yeah, we can put compost, manure, nitrogen, etc in the soil, but you can't artificially recreate the microbiome and micro-nutrient mixture that nature creates over eons.
- hoorayimhelping 7y agoI think modern farmers don't really have much of a problem re-introducing depleted nutrients into the soil. Modern fertilizers, composting, and amending soil are pretty well understood farming and gardening techniques. The fact that every year, literally thousands of tons of nutrients in the form of salmon from the ocean makes its way upstream, where it just deposits itself and stays there probably helps a lot. All the local plants are benefiting from this annual nutrient bomb.
- burnte 7y agoAs I said to another commenter, there's a difference between artificially enriching the soil and virgin land that's never been farmed.