5 Tips for Supreme Soils
By Thomas Skernivitz, Senior Editor, American Fruit Grower
In the beginning, everyone interested in farmland asks about the soil. It is the agriculture version of “kicking the tires.”
Mike Omeg notices this all the time. The Director of Operations at Orchard View Inc. in The Dalles, OR, admits to having done it himself early in his cherry-growing career.
“I've always thought it interesting, when observing folks as they're looking at buying a new piece of ground, that they really focus on: How good is the soil? ‘Did you buy that place? Oh, is it good soil?’” Omeg says. “And then, after that, a lot of people have a tendency — me, in the past, included — to sort of forget about the soil and start growing their crops.”
That would be the first mistake. And maybe the biggest, according to Omeg.
“The outcome that you have as a grower, it's absolutely linked with soil health as the best indicator of what that soil’s potential is for generating a crop and revenue for you as a farmer,” he says.
With that in mind, Omeg, who leads an Orchard View team that farms 3,500 acres of cherries, offers his top five tips on maintaining ideal soil health in the tree fruit orchard.
Foremost, Omeg asks growers to think about their soil as much as they think about the plants growing in it.
“If you have sick plants, you're going to have sick soil. And if you have sick soil, you're going to have sick plants,” Omeg says. “Their fate is the same fate.”
Too frequently farmers focus only on what is going on above the ground because that is the one thing they can see, he says.
“People — we’re visual creatures. We like to focus on what we can see, and you can't see easily into the soil,” Omeg says. “You can walk up to a plant and just look at it from afar and see how healthy the plant is. When you're looking at soil, it's much more difficult.”
As simplistic as it might sound, healthy plants will make healthy soils, Omeg says. “It’s the truth,” he notes. “In my experience, it really is.”
For growers new to that view, Omeg admits they might think it sounds like a “wild, crazed idea.”
“It's really easy to say, ‘Healthy plants make healthy soils.’ Anybody can say that. You can write that down,” he says. “But to actually be able to do it and get it done in an economic way and make money and have results from it for your business, that's where I actually love the challenges that are involved with this.”
Credit for the recommendation goes to his mentor and friend, John Kempf, Omeg says. Kempf is the Founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture, a plant nutrition and biostimulants consulting company based in Middlefield, OH.
“Where I've been really fortunate is that I've had folks like John Kempf that have got me started in the right direction,” Omeg says. “But I have my own take on what other people got me started on. And where I apply my art and talents as a farmer is I figure out how to do it. I do very unique things.”
(For added context on this recommendation, stick around for Tip #4.)
Ground cover is a tree fruit issue that Omeg “fights all the time,” he says, because he needs weed-free strips of soil to successfully irrigate with sprinklers.
“The soil wants to be covered. Ground doesn’t like to be bare,” he says.
A common school of thought, according to Omeg, is that growers need to cover everything with plants.
So, who is going to cover it and how?
“Mother Nature will find a way to cover bare soil, and that's usually with weeds,” Omeg says. “I don't like weeds — and I truly say they ARE weeds because they interfere with my irrigation, and they oftentimes can out-compete my crop.”
“But I can't do that in a practical way and still get my irrigation done with current technology,” he says.
What Omeg instead turns to is placing a simple cover crop blend on the ground before replanting a block of cherry trees. He allows the soil to lie fallow for a few years to give it a “restart.” Once the new block is established, he maintains alleyways of the cover crop between the new trees.
“You can have Mother Nature choose, and then it's definitely a wild card with what's naturally going to cover the soil. Or I can choose,” Omeg says. “And, so, I choose.”
Omeg has experimented for several years to determine the ideal cover crops. “We're still doing work as to how can we cover the soil and our tree rows and still be able to irrigate with something that then stops Mother Nature from choosing what to put there,” he says.
It is certainly possible for growers to restart their systems to ensure the long-term goal of improved soil health, Omeg says.
With compaction in older orchards, growers frequently have soil biology that is not healthy or as healthy as it could be.
“Annual crops have definitely more opportunities to do this than perennial crops, like cherry trees,” he says. “But when we remove an orchard here, we really focus on how to get that soil structure established and how to reset the biology of the soil.”
Doing so can be difficult, Omeg says. Oftentimes the soil can skew toward disease-facilitating conditions. With compaction in older orchards, growers frequently have soil biology that is not healthy or as healthy as it could be.
“When we take our trees out and we replant the block, we put an effort into maintaining that ground while rotating cover crops for one or two full years before we replant,” Omeg says. “We take that opportunity to restart and invest in the soil for that field, so that it carries our crop for the next 25 years.”
This recommendation ties together with Tip #2 (healthy plants make healthy soils) and Tip #3 (choosing the plants that cover the soil).
“We choose plants that do very well in our area and really build the soil and skew the soil biology into a biological system or rhizosphere that favors tree fruits, which would be more fungally dominated soils,” Omeg says.
It all makes perfect sense now.
Omeg considers it imperative that growers take the time to observe the results of their actions and learn from them.
“If you're going to make your soils healthy, you can't just take a recipe that has been successful on cotton grown in Texas and say, ‘I'm going to do that here,’ and then blindly go forward thinking it worked, or blindly go forward, saying, ‘I looked at that field once, it didn't work, it's done,’” Omeg says.
Taking the time to follow through can be difficult, particularly for large-scale commercial operations, such as Orchard View.
“We're too busy running around dealing with the thousand other things that we have to do,” Omeg says. “I literally have over a thousand people in the field right now picking. And we don't take the time to walk our fields, to stick our fingers in the soil, to dig, to smell, to look at plants, to break plants open. We don't take the time to observe.
“We can't simply read something or watch something in a video or listen to something someone's doing, wing it, throw it out there, and expect to get good results. You, as the farmer, have to apply your experience and your knowledge and most importantly use that wealth of experience you have to see if something worked. And if it didn't work, figure out if it's a failed cause or if it needs modified; or if it did work, you have to see if it's going to work again and again and again. It has to be repeatable.”
