The good soil

The Nelson Mail

What's happening below your grass? Anne Hardie talks with a retired farmer who says we've strayed too far from nature and it's affecting not only the grass and animals, but human health as well.

"Man in his educated wisdom knocks down most of the tools that nature gave us for free."

It's the message George Shuttleworth gives at the opening and summing up of his seminars throughout the country, or to anyone who's prepared to listen to his views on improving soil health and with it, farming and human health.

At 68, the former Eight-eight Valley farmer should be sitting back and enjoying retirement, but instead he has set off on another tangent in life that has ignited a passion for the microscopic microbes in the soil and how to restore nature's balance.

Now he spends about two weeks a month in Dunedin where he is part of Healthy Soils, a business he helped create which helps farmers improve the health of their soil, and therefore animals and people.

"It's sort of got a hold of me," he admits. "Fifteen years ago I was happy with the way we did things on the farm," Shuttleworth recalls.

"You did what your father did and what your grandfather did, but I thought there was a better way.

"There was a fellow here one day and we went out with a spade and found there was a thatch three inches deep."

It got him wondering, so he did a bit of research and "did away" with the soluble, acidic fertilisers he had used for decades.

He tried liquid fertilisers for a while before looking at micro minerals that he had chelated.

Then he tried fine lime on the pasture, reasoning that the finer particles had greater access to calcium and therefore got an immediate response.

It also, he explains patiently, activates the ATP (acidine triphosphate, a living enzyme) trigger that magnifies the effect of the lime.

After 18 months, most of the thatch had disappeared.

Within two years the soil had moved from almost no worms to a "colossal" figure of about 60 a spadeful.

"You can have the most perfectly mineral balanced soil in the world, but without microbes, nothing works.

"The microbes are the ones that process the minerals - they make it available for plants.

"And did you know," he says with an air of suspense, "plants have absolutely no ability to filter poisons.

"There is one tool put in by nature to deal with that and it's carbon.

"One of the reasons animals get sick is because plants have no ability to filter poison."

Similarly, people's health can be linked to the old adage "you are what you eat", says Shuttleworth, as nutrition is related to soil science.

Research in the United States convinces him that some of today's chronic illnesses can be attributed to the way society has tampered with nature and hence our food.

Back in the paddocks, most farms are deficient in micro organisms, so Shuttleworth, along with family members, set up a separate business to harvest microbes from compost that could then be sprayed on to the pasture.

Now, the fledgling business called Compost Tea is run by his son, Mark, and partner Bernadette, using large round vats to make the compost.

Air is forced through the vats, pushing the microbes out into a liquid feed of molasses, seaweed, a bit of lime and humic acid.

The idea of harvesting something the human eye can't even see is a bit mind boggling to say the least, but pretty straightforward to Shuttleworth's thinking.

"What actually happens is a gram of water will have a specific amount and by feeding, you can increase it thousands of times over a 24-hour period."

When sprayed on to the pasture, these tiny microbes start to harvest minerals in the soil and make them available to the plants.

"It's not quite as simple as that, but that's the basic theory of it."

The other thing microbes do for the soil is retain moisture, Shuttleworth says.

"We know from technology in the United States we can cut irrigation up to 70 percent because microbes hold the water.

"They glue it to the soil. They also shut heavy metals out of the system."

In nature, the soil stays healthy naturally because there is diversity, he says. However, our farming systems interfere with that diversity and alter the balance, which then makes it hard for the soil to keep the right ratio of elements.

Every element has its own synergy key that makes it available in the soil, he says. For example, the synergy key for phosphorus is silicon and in turn the synergy key for silicon is boron.

"You get the ratios right in your major elements and micro (trace) elements will balance themselves."

While soil tests often show what elements are present, they don't usually show if those elements are available to plants, says Shuttleworth.

This is why he always uses a total extractable test, which shows the kilograms a hectare of elements in the soil.

When farmers approach Healthy Soils, this mineral test is combined with what's called an Albriech test which covers the energy, pH and base saturation of calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium and hydrogen in the soil.

Added to that is a biological test for fungi, bacteria, organisms and what nutrients are being harvested by the microbes. All this becomes what Shuttleworth refers to as the farm's road test.

In most cases, remineralising the soil begins with calcium in the form of fine lime and agricultural lime, depending upon "what the farmer has to spend and how fast he wants to get there".

To the agricultural lime is added carbon in the form of humate, which Shuttleworth explains holds minerals to the root zone.

"Most things drop out of the root zone in a matter of weeks, but combined with humates, it stays."

Microbes are also sprayed on to the pasture along with food for them, including humic acid, fish and sugar because, as Shuttleworth says, "they've got to be fed also".

It takes between three and five years to build the minerals and microbe level up on most farms, he says.

But results on farms so far have stirred interest among farmers. In the Waitaki Valley the company is now working with 30 farms after starting with just three.

Once the soil is right and the pasture healthy, there's also benefits beyond the farm gate, such as the copious amounts of oxygen it then puts back in the air.

What began as a quest for healthy soils now stretches into the health sector and Shuttleworth says the more he learns, the more he realises how little we know.

It's something he likes to talk about and yes, he gets told he talks too much. Passion has that effect and he just wishes he had unearthed it much sooner.

Despite the inevitable debates he encounters, there's one thing he says can't be argued and that is that healthy soils lead to healthy plants and animals, and ultimately healthy people.