Dahlias in many forms

Why Heritage Farms

Flower bed of Dahlias, using the Pulse Watering method

5 min X 5x day

What if Pests and Diseases are Nature’s way of removing sick plants?

Healthy plants have built-in defense systems.

• Almost all our antibiotics originated from the soil. Now WHY would soil have an antibiotic component? Antibiotics combat diseases.

• Healthy Plants also have an emergency alarm system that gets activated if pests arrive. Chemical attractants are released into the air that attracts predators that feast on the pests.

• Healthy plants are unable to be digested by pests. One bite and they move on. Their gut system can not use them as food.

Here is my question: What if we are pouring on chemicals to protect sick plants?

We are treating the symptoms.

It’s a different way of thinking. Instead, we should be asking the real question, “What can we do to grow healthier plants?”

What did nature, over the millennium, develop as a working system to create healthy plants?

What are we doing that is interfering with that natural system dynamics?

We are creating a vicious cycle;

treating plants with “cides” (herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, miticides = suicide)

that WE absorb through the plants that we consume.

We have been focused on using chemistry to analyze and chemistry to treat “problems”.

Step Back…

Instead of Salvaging Sick Plants

Instead, we should step back and look at how the system worked BEFORE we came on the scene.

It’s a totally different way of looking at agricultural practices.

Today Science is enabling us to take a deeper dive into the biological world of soil & plant health. We now have the science to back up what was once “theory” via 15-30 years of peer-reviewed research. Research NOT sponsored by industrial ag corporations.

We certainly don’t have all the answers yet but we are learning what systems nature created to solve problems.

Instead of trying to force our view of how we thought things SHOULD work, we LOOK at the systems nature developed.

A good example is the use of artificial fertilizers. On paper, they may look great. You can make a plant greener and bigger but then you have to “protect” that plant. It is not healthy. Why?

In a human being, you would know the answer right away.

If you fed someone hamburgers, milkshakes, and fries every day they would get BIGGER but they would not be healthy. In a short time, they would begin to develop some serious health problems. They need a full complement of nutrients to be healthy.

Plants are quite similar. In nature, the microbial life in the soil has a job. It takes requests from the root hairs of plants for the nutrients it wants.

The microbes locate the nutrients and deliver them in a form the plant can utilize easily. In turn, the plant feeds the microbial life exudates, i.e. carbohydrates it creates via photosynthesis.

Studies say that 50-70% of the Carbohydrates the plants produce are NOT for their own use, but to feed the soil life.

A symbiotic relationship that artificial fertilizers break.

• If the plants uptake poor-quality nutrients

• it has to work harder to use them and

• the plants no longer feed the soil life

• leaving the soil life to starve.

  Results: Artificial fertilizers build dead soil and sick plants that pests and diseases attack.

Once we reframe the question of how to grow healthy crops, we begin to see how regenerative agriculture focuses on long-term solutions that are based on nature’s natural processes.

Our whole farm is an experiment in utilizing the soil life to feed and tend to the plants. Our approach is to take natural ingredients and feed the soil with them.

The microbial life feeds the plants with the buffet of nutrients we have provided for them to pull from. The proof is in the pudding, as the saying goes.

We think it has been an incredible success. Come see what you think!