Composting

It's estimated that a human with a compost fork and a watering-can, carefully piling up organic matter with the correct C/N ratio, water content and aeration so that it cooks away at high temperatures and emits jets of steam, can make as much topsoil in a year as nature can make in a century, and nature definitely approves. You can tell when nature's happy, the plants smile at you. When she's not happy you can tell by all the "side-effects". Try it and see. Any gardener can quickly learn to make compost.

-- "Man's work with Nature that furthers Nature's aims is the work that rewards him the best." (I-Ching)

Exceptions
It's not quite true that nature never makes compost. There's an Australian bird that carefully assembles large piles of organic matter to nest on, mixing it up with droppings -- arguably a compost pile. It even generates warmth, which helps to hatch the eggs. And termites build tiny compost piles deep underground from pulped wood to make the special soil needed for the fungus farms that produce the only food they can eat. Sometimes there are even manure worms in attendance at the compost site. Termites could be the world's most scientific composters.

Compost and organics

Soil maintenance is at the heart of organic growing: don't feed the plants, feed the soil -- the plants will look after themselves. The extremely complex subject of soil maintenance can happily be summed up in one word: composting.

-- "Producing quality compost is the most important job on the organic farm. A lot of the problems I see on farms I visit could be solved by making better compost." -- Elliott Coleman, The New Organic Grower

What lives, eventually dies, and its substance returns to the soil to be recycled into new life. This is nature's law of return. Organic growers greatly enhance the last part of the process by composting crop and other organic "wastes" before the soil receives them. Well-made compost is the ideal soil-food. This is how impoverished, sick soils can be restored and maintained at high levels of fertility.

The cycle of growth and decay is often depicted as a wheel, where birth, growth and maturity take place above ground in the light, and the processes of decay below the surface in the darkness, giving birth to life anew. If growth is faster than decay the wheel is broken, destroying nature's balance. Composting accelerates the decay process while maintaining the balance of the wheel -- growth follows automatically as the wheel spins faster.

-- "Growth has been speeded up, but nothing has been done to accelerate decay. Farming has become unbalanced. The gap between the two halves of the Wheel of Life has been left unbridged, or it has been filled by a substitute in the shape of artificial manures (chemicals). The soils of the world are either being worn out and left in ruins, or are being slowly poisoned. The restoration and maintenance of soil fertility has become a universal problem." -- Sir Albert Howard, Farming and Gardening for Health or Disease (The Soil and Health), Faber and Faber, London, 1945

"I know it sounds simplistic," says Keith, "but whatever problems you're having, the first solution is compost -- more and better compost. Pests or disease? Compost will fix that. Weeds? Compost will fix that too, along with mulching -- best of all, in permanent raised beds with fertile soil you can plant so close that the crops themselves form a living green mulch, maintaining a humid zone just above the soil. No weeds, no problems at all -- but it needs lots of good compost.

"Not enough water? Drought? Compost will fix that as well -- it greatly increases the soil's water-holding capacity.

"Too much water? I had an old rice field that was so badly clay-panned from years of overashing that it was still waterlogged after four months without rain, only rank grass would grow there. Compost and weeds fixed it. I cleared it and sowed a lot of wild sunnhemp seeds, and compost gave them a start.

The best crop of weeds in the valley

Those deep roots went down right through the pan. The villagers thought I was crazy -- I had the best crop of weeds in the valley. But sunnhemp's good fodder for livestock, and good compost material, and it's a legume so it fixed lots of nitrogen in the soil. You could grow anything in that field after that."

What a useful weed!
Sunnhemp -- Crotalaria juncea (James A. Duke, 1983, Handbook of Energy Crops, Purdue)
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/duke_energy/Crotalaria_juncea.html

100-Year Drought Is No Match for Organic Soybeans
KUTZTOWN, Penn. (November 8, 1999) -- After one of the worst droughts on record, the harvest for many farms in the US has been a disaster. But one farm is celebrating: "The yield from our organic soybeans is outstanding," says Jeff Moyer, Farm Manager at The Rodale Institute's Farming Systems Trial in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Using replicated plots the trial compares highly productive, intensive soybean systems under conventional and organic management. Figures just released show yields of 30 bushels per acre from the organic soybeans compared to only 16 bushels per acre from conventionally-grown crops. Improved soil quality under organic management is credited for the high performance of Rodale's organic crops in the drought.
http://rodaleinstitute.org/global/11_9_99.html

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