A majority of all our growers have used organic matter inputs (manure, compost, mulches) on their sites in the last 5 years, with home gardeners leading the way.  We only count the organic matter inputs which are acquired off-site in this analysis.  Manure deposited by grazing animals on-site, or clippings from on-site cover crops, are not counted as organic matter inputs here.  Thus, perennial fields with aftermath grazing often appear to have no organic matter inputs, even though they may have many days of grazing animals depositing manure and urine there.

Organic Matter Input use has decreased by 13T/acre on average since 2019.  When we examine our successive years of data and divide our sites into their different crop categories, we see that only home gardeners have increased their Organic Matter Inputs in the last 5 years.  All other crop categories have seen a sharp decrease in Organic Matter Inputs.  Commercial Veg/Flower/Fruit growers have seen the biggest decrease.  Our growers identified several possible causes for this decrease. 

• An exceptionally wet May-June-July in 2023 meant growers had a hard time planting, cultivating and harvesting between storms.  They may not have wanted to or been able to get additional machinery into soggy fields to spread amendments.
• Fuel and hauling costs for amendments have tripled in recent years, putting amendments out of reach for many growers.  Several have switched to amending with more economical cover crops if they have the water to get them established.
  
• Some growers with excessively high phosphorus levels have decided to forego organic matter inputs and use cover crops instead, to avoid increasing their soil phosphorus to dangerous levels.
  
• Our very tight labor market meant growers struggled all season to fill vacant positions.  They may not have had enough workers to do things like spread amendments. Additionally, our tight labor market has increased labor costs sharply.  This has affected Commercial Veg-Flower/Fruit growers the most as their crop category is the most labor intensive.  Recent high labor costs may have consumed any profit that formerly paid for purchased amendments. 

We continue to see a great deal of variability in our lab results when we compare sites with themselves year-to-year.  We divided our sites into 4 crop categories (Commercial Veg/Flower/Fruit; Commodity Row Crops and Dryland Grains; Home Gardens; and Perennial Hay/Alfalfa/Pastures) and examined each category’s variability.  These 4 graphs show that an examination of past practices can often explain some of the exceptionally big jumps in variability which we see in every crop group.