Good evening, I am just getting to this email. I am not sure where you are in the world. But in my case. I presently live about 2 hours north of ECHO. And work at Hancock’s seed farm. Talked about in the chat.
All that said bigger grass means more biomass. The guinea grass is smaller than the mulatto grass. But I also use Mexican sunflower as a chop and drop. So that was my point. The bigger the grass or plant the more material you can put in the soil.
The iron and clay cowpeas is an aggressive grower also.
I’m not sure if the mulatto grow a seed head that will be viable. But the clumps keep spreading out.
I hope I have answered your question. I am willing to help if I can. For HIM, Kevin
Greetings Kevin,
Thanks for the info. I live in the mountains of Haiti at an elevation of about 1500 m. My understanding that Guinea grass has a lot of different cultivars that has very different sizes and biomass potential. Do you think the Mulatto 2 grass is a better biomass plant than the Mobassa cultivar mentioned here in this thread?
Joel
They have somewhat different purposes but that doesn’t mean they can’t be used interchangeably. We have grown Mulatto 2 and find it better for grazing and making hay whereas Mombassa is better for cut and carry. Because Mombassa grows much taller than Mulatto, we favor it for cut and carry…and for GM. Not sure but I think to get the same amount of biomass from Mulatto, it would need to be cut twice as often as Mombassa.
Afternoon, I am wondering if you are able to do what app calls? It would be easier to talk in person for me.
You may have grass adapted to your area that just needs some encouragement.
How often are you stateside?
Thanks Glen for that comparison of Mulatto 2 and Mombasa. Where I live hay and pasture are probably not going to be important to the average peasant farmer anytime soon so, like you, I put more value on cut and carry and biomass.
Joel
Greetings Kevin,
I don’t have WhatsApp but I can call US numbers no problem. I’m happy to talk some time. If you send me a personal message with your email or phone number, we can connect that way. I have been coming back through the US about 3-4 times per year (I work in Canada to support my family) but right now it is not clear if we will be able to continue to get out of Haiti as the gangs are taking over most of the major highways.
Joel
Joel, one more thing. Cows like to eat Mombasa, but cows love to eat Mulato 2. It appears to be more tender and succulent and I guess that’s why the cows favor it. One other thing is, I’m not sure, but I think it is less prone to become lignified than is Mombasa. So it would remain palatable longer… maybe but I’m not sure. Good question for Kevin. .
Good evening, I understand some of what is going on in Haiti. So where exactly are you in country? Since I’m not sure of your private email. Mine is fallforged@gmail.com.
Just so no one thinks I am totally against using seeds for GMCC, here are some picture from this morning. To help fund the school, we sell about 10,000 plantains a month and about 2000 lemons. These, like everything here at the school are raised organically.
The first picture is of canavalia growing with the plantains and lemons. We “prune” it when it begins to bloom so as to maximize the nitrogen because plantains are very heavy feeders of nitrogen.
The second picture is of comfrey. It is not a legume but the leaves are rich in protein which means it provides lots of nitrogen to the plantains. It is just one of the many perennials we are converting to. If you are not familiar with comfrey, it is the broadleaf in the center of the pic.
The third pic is of one of our tall grass fields in which we grow glicidria, leucaena and caleandrea all of which are legumous. We let them grow to firewood size and then cut as the begin to bloom to maximize the N production for the tall grass. We had recently cut the tall grass as a part of our daily harvest of about 600 lbs. of tall grass for the animals. All of our feeding is cut and carry.
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There are several issues here I would like to comment on:
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We use only legumes to fertilize the soil and overcome droughts. We use grasses (dwarf Napier being the best we know of, and seedlings of it are very easy to obtain in San Martin Jilotepeque municipio in Guatemala and Guinope in Honduras, among many others) for soil conservation (ie ending erosion and forming natural terraces on hillsides) We use only legumes for fertilizing the soil and overcoming the droughts, because they provide huge quantities of nitrogen and high-protein foods for eating. We prefer dwarf Napier grass for soil conservation reasons (it requires little labor once established, is wonderful feed for cattle–cut and carried–and can hold a barrier of up to 2 mts in height at the lower end of a terrace it has formed. It also does not rob nurients from the nearest row of maize, and invades the rest of the field very slowly–only needs to be cut back maybe once every six or eight years.
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For soil restoration we use perennials most of the time (lablab beans, pigeon peas, gliricidia trees, runner beans, perennial peanuts, etc.), because one only gets large amounts of nitrogen into the soil if the plants are cut down immediately before the following crop, not at the end of the wet season (except in very high rainfall area, such as the Caribbean coast of Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, where about 25,000 farmers now use a system first used in the 1920s, where mucuna is intercropped with the maize). This latter system works because the rainfall is so high that farmers plant their maize during the season of least rainfall, so the end of the rainiest season, when the mucuna matures, is precisely the time when farmers are planting their maize.
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Every single gm/cc we promote (of the 30 or so species) will produce plenty of seed in any given year to plant an area ten or twenty times the area originally planted. That is, a farmer can experiment with a new gm/cc on a 20 mt-by-20 mt plot, and the next year have produced enough seed for at least half a hectare the following year. We limit our work to these 30 species precisely because we don’t want farmers to become dependent on outside seed sources, which is totally unnecessary. Yes, it is difficult to get some of these seeds in some nations across the developing world, but should not be a problem in Guatemala or Honduras–just go to the right municipios and hundreds of farmers have seeds they can sell. Getting 200 lbs of seed would be no problem if you just talked with three or four farmers in any of the municipios involved. All of these plants produce lots of seed within 6 months of being planted, and there should never be a need to look for more seed after the first year.
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For perennials (fruit trees, and even lawns in cities, etc.) the best gm/cc is the perennial peanut. It covers the ground in about a year, never needs any upkeep from there on (unless animals get in and graze it), and does not climb the tree stalks. It is very widely used, for instance, among oil palm growers in northern Honduras. When used as a lawn, after the first year, it never needs to be mowed or weeded, and produces a beautiful yellow flower that gives added beauty for several months each year.
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Neither the lablab nor any of the others leguminous species we use needs to be cut down before it flowers or produce seeds, In fact, we almost never do this–we let the plants continue to grow through the dry season and cut them down a month or so before the next maize crop is planted. I assure you there is no lack of nitrogen in the plants at this point. Sending all their nitrogen to the seeds is a problem with annuals, but if perennials did this, they wouldn’t be perennials–a plant can’t survive if it has no nitrogen left in it!
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These recommendations for gm/ccs apply to the tropics, where intercropping can be done easily because the sun is almost directly overhead during the cropping season. Outside of the tropics, the sun is never directly overhead, so in most cases, the sunlight has to go through two or three rows of maize fields before it gets to the shorter legume–so the lagume cannot grow well. Also, when we use trees (gliricidia is the best because it fertilizes the crops extremely well and a has several other important advantages), they must be pruned back heavily before the following growing season, but this is actually a savings in labor because one can prune off all the branches one wants to, and it will save a tremendous amount of labor for African women who usually must walk 3 or 4 kms to a forest and carry all the firewood back to the house on their heads.
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These gm/ccs not only save a lot of money often spent on fertilizer, but save a lot of labor, especially for women. After 2 to 3 years, they will make all soil preparation unnecessary (who ever plows a forest??) and also many of the species, like lablab and runner bean, will eliminate at least one weeding of maize during the year.
Good luck all of you. (If you want to know a lot more about all of this ECHO has copies of my book, Restoring the Soil, How to Use Green Manure/Cover Crops to Fertilize the Soil and Overcome the Droughts.)
All the best, Roland Bunch
Thank you Roland, for taking the time to offer such an extensive response.
We agree on many things, and I have read all of your books…more than once. That’s what prompted this thread. The thing we disagree on is the reliance on seed for green manure. I work with and have connections with most of the agricultural universities in Honduras None of them have been able to identify a source of the bean seeds you mention. In addition, I work with FHIA. As you know, they are a huge agri organization. They do all of our agri lab work. They are all over Honduras and they haven’t been able to help with the availability of seed. ESNACIFOR in Siguatepeque has the largest seed bank in Honduras. They list macuna, canavalia and lablab in their catalog but they rarely have them in stock because they can’t locate a source in Honduras.
I have friends who do contract work for ONG’s all over Honduras who focus on sustainable organic farming and they don’t know a source of seeds. I could go on with other agricultural groups I work with in Honduras who are spread across the country and they don’t know a source of those seeds. If I can’t find those seeds with my extensive network and ability to travel all over Honduras, how is a poor illiterate farmer who’s never been out of his community going to find them? That is THE problem. And, that is one reason the efforts of people like me and those on this list have not worked as well as we had hoped.
I don’t doubt for one moment that what you say is totally true…that the seeds are available in certain communities. But that is not sufficient for the many people like me who are trying to help the poor. Most of those poor don’t have enough land to grow the crops to support the family much less dedicate land for growing seed.
I well recognize that one can begin with a small amount of seed and grow sufficient to plant large amounts of land. Been there; done that many times. But that’s a step that requires dedication and discipline and training and time and extra land. My whole point in this thread is there are options…perennials, that don’t depend on seed availability. The whole process of saving seed is a complicated process, fraught with problems in a tropical climate. It is the process that I have used and taught for decades and I still use but it is a system that I am phasing out because it’s not as well suited to helping the poor as is a system based on perennials that don’t need seed to be saved and are largely available for free locally.
Blessings to you and all the good work that you have done and are doing. You have been a great pioneer in this field and I deeply appreciate all you have done to promote sustainable ag. I have purchased your books in Spanish for our students. They enjoy and find them helpful.
Glen
Thanks Roland, Glen and others for the discussion.
This discussion made me think of a very interesting area for potential research to help guide future research into the topic of how to maximize food production for farmers with a small amount of land: how important is using nitrogen fixing plants for soil restoration in the case where large amounts of biomass are being produced?
I’ve been recently learning about syntropic agriculture and I don’t hear much mention about nitrogen fixation in that system. It may be that is because the system is more focused on trees but it made me wonder if nitrogen is really such a limiting factor in systems that make very large amounts of biomass (even with species not known to be nitrogen-fixing such as Eucalyptus or banana). Obviously mature trees grown for biomass are able to produce much more biomass than even plants like lablab or runner beans so deciding whether to focus on smaller nitrogen fixing plants vs. large trees will likely make a long term difference in total biomass production. Given that difference, it seems like it would be very helpful to have some research to try to determine how much to focus on nitrogen fixation at the expense of biomass. Obviously there are free living bacteria in the soil that can fix nitrogen and presumably some soil fungi can too. Perhaps massive increases in soil organic matter enable a significant increase in soil nitrogen fixation that isn’t dependent on legume root nodules. Knowing this could help determine where to focus efforts in areas where population density has gotten to the point where maximizing food production per hectare is really essential. If nitrogen fixation is still a significant issue for maximizing yields without external inputs, then it would help highlight the need for working on more research on nitrogen fixing trees, especially those with edible seeds that could replace smaller legumes. Any thoughts from others on this?
Joel
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Joel, another part of the equation you raise is the kind/type of biomass being produced. In as much as protein=nitrogen, when one is adding a large amount of high protein biomass from non-legumous plants, the nitrogen contribution can be significant even without depending on annual legumes.
Greetings Glen,
Yes, it is true that high-protein biomass will add more nitrogen. However, it seems to me that the source of the nitrogen is important. If I grow miaze and then cut and drop the whole crop (corn and all) on the ground, that isn’t really an effective GM/CC from a nitrogen perspective unless it is a maize variety that supports some amount of nitrogen fixation. Since all the nitrogen in those plants is from the soil, putting them back in the soil is not increasing the amount of nitrogen available. However, I still wonder if NPK is really the right paradigm to think about soil fertility. I’m hoping someone with more technical capacity than me could do an experiment if NPK levels ever need to be considered in soil with high amounts of biomass being added. Perhaps increased soil microbial life could increase nitrogen fixation regardless of which plant species are being grown.
If you think about a mostly mono-culture Pine forest, where does all the nitrogen come from to make such giant trees? I initially was going to use this example because I thought Pine were not thought to be nitrogen fixers but I did a little searching to make sure I wasn’t wrong and found this very fascinating article: https://agroforestry.co.nz/modern-forest-gardening/nitrogen-fixation-in-pinus/
It seems that some pine species use both soil bacteria and mycorryzal fungi to fix nitrogen without having root nodules. They even appear to be able to fix at least as much nitrogen per hectare per year as Phaseolus vulgaris.
This fits with my observations here in Haiti where certain species can grow very rapidly in very deplete soil in spite of not being known nitrogen fixers. For example, some of our neighbours brought us Castor (Ricinus communis) to plant shortly after we started working to restore the soil. Initially it grew very slowly but within a year is was growing well and now it is growing very rapidly. I can’t be sure this isn’t from other plants adding nitrogen to the soil because we aren’t doing a controlled experiment but looks to me a bit like you expect with legumous plants that use Rhizobia to fix nitrogen that can need a year or so to get enough Rhizobia in the soil and then grow rapidly even without external nitrogen inputs. Castor produces huge amounts of seed all year round and presumable these seeds are high in nitrogen. In depleted soils, where does the nitrogen come from to grow all that seed? Also, we have been amazed at how Napier grass grows in all but the most barren soil here (it is slow in some washouts, but we are working on developing a method of reclaiming washouts rapidly with Napier). Napier isn’t known to be nitrogen fixing but we have lots of it growing rapidly in pretty depleted soil and even after repeated cuttings to make mulch away from where it is grown. Where is all the nitrogen coming to support the ongoing growth of this grass?
Perhaps a system like syntropic agriculture will prove to be effective in spite of considerations of nitrogen just by maximizing photosynthesis and prioritizing biomass production. If so that would allow much more variety of systems to be discovered that could rapidly regenerate land without being dependent on smaller legumous species.
Joel
Joel, I think you are on to something. In some respects, it doesn’t need explaining because we have all seen that happen in forests and grasslands everywhere. My yard has never received fertilize. I just use a mulching lawnmower. My yard is as green as my neighbors who fertilize.
Surely there are monoculture forests where none of the trees are nitrogen fixing. Perhaps it’s maple trees or oak trees, etc. they are hugely productive without any outside inputs. So we know it works. Even if there were some small nitrogen fixing plants growing on the floor of the forest, the amount of nitrogen they could fix would be minuscule in comparison to what’s happening with the forest.
Two experiments come to my mind that I think are fairly well known. The first one I don’t recall the exact details but the gist of it is someone plants a plant in water. The plant receives no input except water. And after a year or two the plant has become significant size. It is harvested and dried so no water remains and is weighed. The question is… where did all of that mass come from when it only received water? That is somewhat analogous to your ideas.
The second one is very similar experiment where the same thing was done but with soil. The plant grew to something like 170 pounds. It was grown in a fixed amount of soil that was weighed before the experiment and weighed after the experiment. The amount of soil before and after growing 170 pound plant was approximately the same. So where did that 170 pounds of plant material come from? I am assuming some of it is what’s happening with the capturing of carbon from the air. But in addition, obviously something is going on to provide the needed nitrogen.
Thanks for raising the idea.