DECEMBER 2019
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Soil fitness – just do it!
Fourth-generation grower Kyle Horlings is questioning the way things have always been done. Since 2015, he’s taken about 10 acres of carrots and onions out of production every year for restorative cover plantings. His experiments near King, Ontario garnered him the Healthy Soil Award from the Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority in November. Photos by Glenn Lowson.
KAREN DAVIDSON Since the dirty ‘30s, dirt has never been the same. “Dirt is what is on your hands,” spits out Kyle Horlings, fourth-generation onion and carrot grower, as if he had grit in his mouth. “This is soil and what’s going on underground is what makes you profitable. It’s like a motor. There are a lot of components and you have to keep it tuned.” After decades of intensive farming in Ontario’s Holland Marsh, the Horlings family – Kyle and his dad Dave – are getting their soils back in shape. In 2007, they observed that not only were yields slipping, but quality was sliding too. Of
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their 150 acres near King, Ontario, they would encounter a patchy field where the carrots were short and stubby, even forked. All of these were symptoms of nematode damage and soil-borne diseases such as pythium, a root-loving pathogen. The effects of “tired” soil? Carrots were no longer marketable from some sections. What was a bad acre one year would become two acres of questionable harvest the next. The harvester was set to dump carrots back on the field, rather than set up a special wash line to sort the mixed quality. This practice was not sustainable. Despite trying fumigants one year, nothing worked. A graduate of the University of Guelph Ridgetown Campus, Kyle
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Horlings had been inspired by one of his lecturers who had extolled the benefits of cover cropping to improve soil health. So he set to researching the latest scientific literature. He came across the USDA publication: Growing cover crops profitably. Since 2015, Horlings has pulled almost 10 acres of carrots out of production every year to rejuvenate the soil with cover crops. The practice has continued, rotating out of a total of 150 acres of carrots and onions. The first year, he planted cereal rye after harvesting seed onions in late September. The following May, he plowed it under before seed heads developed. A week later, he planted sorghum sudan grass and sunn hemp. In late August, that crop was chopped down
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and tillage radishes were planted to cover the land for winter. The following spring, transplant onions were planted. “I call it a land rest cycle,” says Horlings. The next year, in a different field with either nematodes or pythium, the land was planted to mustard between the rows of rye that had been sprayed with a herbicide. The mustard was allowed to grow to about six feet in height, then chopped and incorporated for a biofumigation effect. A week later, sorghum sudan grass was planted, then chopped in late August. The field was planted to radishes for the winter. Transplant onions were planted in the rejuvenated field the next spring. Continued on page 2
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