Linda Poole

NCAT Regenerative Grazing Specialist
Great sessions going on today at the NCAT Growing Hope conference:

Mark Schonbeck, Organic Farming Research Foundation
Emily Oakley and Mike Appel, Three Springs Farm
Dave Scott, Montana Highland Lamb


The use of synthetic fertilizer is one of the leading causes of greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture. In this session we’ll discuss how fertilizer reduction can be accomplished while maintaining productivity and profitability. Farmers and ranchers will share their stories of how they have achieved zero synthetic fertilizer use on their operations, and the benefits they have seen from opting out of the synthetic input system.

Mark Schonbeck's slidedeck and notes will help us digest his whirlwind presentation on how to kick the commercial fertilizer habit!
 
In today's session on fertility, a question was asked about the use of wool as a soil fertilizer. Great question! And what an exciting use for wool that otherwise would end up as waste!

I loved Mark Schonbeck's answer that wool is for wearing 😉 but not all wool makes great socks or sweaters! A 2022 paper reported on the use of wool as a fertilizer in organic farms and concluded:

Although the limited replication, the use of a short-season crop, and crop failure at one site likely limited the ability to detect the full range of differences attributable to the application of wool pellets as a fertilizer for vegetable crops; several findings suggest that wool is a promising alternative fertilizer for organic vegetable crops. There were no differences between the grower standard and the similar wool pellet treatment for the appropriately-replicated spinach trial, and this was supported in the less robust tomato experiment, which suggests that wool pellets may be an appropriate replacement for commercial formulated fertilizer blends on organic farms. A lack of differences among most soil quality parameters suggests that the nutrients contained in the wool are unlikely to accumulate to such levels that they become potential pollutants, although a longer-term and more detailed study is required to explore that hypothesis further.
A more important implication of this and similar research in related trials is the potential to develop improved land and farm management systems that better integrate grazing animals, which provide nutrient cycling and vegetation management functions, with specialty crop systems such as vegetables. If present systems in which animals such as sheep are considered for their ability to graze fields and convert forage to plant-available and carbon sequestering manure are poorly adopted because the economics of sheep production are insufficient to cover management costs, the consideration of a novel, ecological, and agronomic use for such animals may change incentives for farmers to develop closed-loop systems. This research highlights a potentially important and little-explored agroecological synergy between animal and plant agricultural systems that could improve nutrient cycling and land management on diversified farms by considering an animal product previously considered a cash crop, wool, as a locally-produced, sustainable plant fertilizer.

See the full article at:

Wool Pellets Are a Viable Alternative to Commercial Fertilizer for Organic Vegetable Production

by Terence Bradshaw and Kimberly Hagen
 

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