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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.
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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.
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.
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AuthorElizabeth Black is the producer of the Citizen Science Soil Health Project Archives
March 2024
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The Citizen Science Soil Health Project 4340 N 13th St. Boulder, CO 80304 Elizabeth@ElizabethBlackArt.com |