Egremont — Farmers, landscapers, backyard gardeners—in short, anyone who is working on the land—would benefit from the free, hands-on soil workshop to be held at Indian Line Farm in South Egremont this Tuesday, May 13. In “Healthy Soil through Maximum Biodiversity,” Rubén Parrilla, the soil tech and education director at the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA Mass) will lead participants in sampling and analyzing the soil for organic carbon, nutrients, and various properties, equipping them to make their own assessments of soil health. “What are the tests that I can learn myself and apply on the land to know that I’m actually heading in the right direction?” Parrilla describes it. “A farmer should know, when I’m tilling the soil, what’s happening? Is this decreasing or increasing my soil health?”
NOFA Mass will join Evan Abramson of western Massachusetts-based Landscape Interactions for Tuesday’s workshop, which was postponed from an earlier date due to weather. Both groups have been leading workshops across western Massachusetts as recipients of grants through the Healthy Soils Action Plan, which was signed by then-Gov. Charlie Baker (R), and sponsored through a grant from the Massachusetts Office of Environmental and Energy Affairs (EEA). They will join Elizabeth Keen, longtime owner of Indian Line Farm and a luminary in the local food movement. The goal of the Healthy Soils Action Plan was to foster carbon sequestration in not just agricultural land but forests, wetlands, and impervious surfaces as well.
Abramson proposed doing baseline testing to determine soil health in sites across western Massachusetts representing these various land uses. In the process of sampling, Abramson and Parrilla are explaining to the public what they are doing and teaching them how to do their own soil testing. For this particular grant, Parrilla explained, Abramson is following up with landscape installations, planting covers of grasses and trees, creating buffer zones and pollinator habitats, with the expectation that perennial native plant communities will sequester more carbon over time—as well as improve soil health and yield more nutritious food. Participants will have the opportunity to witness part of this installation Tuesday at Indian Line Farm, too, and learn how to increase biodiversity on their property.
“I’m really hoping that there is a paradigm shift,” said Parrilla, when it comes to how people treat the soil. But you have to provide an alternative to conventional practices, he said. “And guess what? The alternative is cheaper, not just immediately, but in the long-term, too, because once you get your soils to a point where they’re balanced and everything is working in concert, the less you have to do to them.”
Even just adding organic supplements to the soil can be harmful, too, said Parrilla. Adding too much phosphorus will “lock up all these other nutrients” and do damage not only to your crop but to the environment through the eutrophication of waterways.
Parrilla, who studied Environmental Design at the University of Puerto Rico and has worked with many beginning and socially disadvantaged farmers, is passionate about soil health as a basis for not only environmental health but for growing foods that are free of toxins and good for us. Last month, he gave a talk for Berkshire Environmental Action Team (BEAT) at their monthly meetup “Green Drinks,” held in April at Race Brook Lodge in Sheffield. The topic was glyphosate and soil health, a topic that many South County attendees were concerned about, given the large amount of land in conventional agricultural production in Sheffield.
Like all herbicides, the active ingredient in Roundup, Parrilla explained, is a chelator, meaning it binds to metal ions, which are the same minerals that plants need for photosynthesis and all their enzymatic activity. Glyphosate, which is now the most widespread herbicide in the world, was originally invented to clean metal pipes. Unlike other herbicides, it is a broad-spectrum chelator, meaning it chelates not just one but many minerals, which is what makes it so effective as a weed killer. It completely shuts down nutrient cycles found in healthy soils and necessary for plant growth, along with microbial activity and diversity, including microbes that naturally control pests and pathogens.
Parrilla cited the work of Dr. Don Huber, who thinks the same mechanisms are responsible for poor gut health and a lot of chronic health issues in humans, with glyphosate residues binding to minerals in our bodies. Glyphosate is highly water soluble, and because our soils in the Berkshires are very sandy, glyphosate travels really well, said Parrilla. In soils with more clay content, “glyphosate is a forever chemical in your soil.”
“There’s glyphosate in our body; there’s glyphosate drift; there’s glyphosate everywhere,” Parrilla said, so even buying organic foods is not foolproof. But they at least won’t be directly sprayed with the chemical. “Chickpeas are the worst!” Parrilla lamented. Glyphosate is also used as a dessicant, sprayed onto many grains, beans, and wheat close before harvest to help them dry out, so these foods often have high concentrations of the chemical. Cheerios, for example, were found to contain 1,125 parts per billion of glyphosate. And we should definitely avoid processed foods, as those “are always laced with glyphosate.” NOFA Mass has a page dedicated to glyphosate, with links to many studies on food contamination, health, and environmental impacts.
“It’s just so sad that us as consumers, we’re left with the burden to know all of this,” Parrilla said. “How did this become our issue? We’re just the consumer.” We can try, at least, to know where our food comes from. “It’s probably more important than organic versus not,” Parrilla believes—talking to the farmer, asking how things are grown.
And growing food begins with understanding how soil works, how to make plants grow without relying on toxic chemicals, as part of ecologically diverse, pollinator-friendly landscapes that benefit us all. People can register for Tuesday’s free workshop at Indian Line Farm, May 13, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., on the website of NOFA Mass, which also describes a couple of soil workshops set for this weekend in Holyoke and Springfield.
