An excerpt from Weeds: Control without Poisons
When I was a boy in Western Kansas during the Dust Bowl days, the weeds were my friends, especially the Russian thistle. On long barefooted walks across wind-rippled fields of dust near our home, they provided companionship when everything else had been scoured from the soil. They piled up where fences intercepted them on their march across the countryside, and then the dust blasted itself under and around this stately, beheaded plant, until finally I could walk right over barbed wire enclosures as if they didn’t matter. I figured there was something sacred about this plant because, once, I heard Grandpa call it a name that sounded like something in the old church tongue.
Grandpa said the tumbleweed came to Kansas with the arrival of the Volga Germans in 1876. “We brought it along with our wheat seed,” he said, and I always figured it must have had something to do with the religion the immigrants introduced to Ellis County. It contained awesome rituals and Latin songs set to the music of masters — Beethoven, Bach, Mendelssohn, Mozart — and at Easter, bits and pieces of Handel’s Messiah. I often sang parts of the High Mass and the Litany of Saints to our pony, Brenny. It was a strange chant that I memorized, words that sounded like Oh, Robert Nobis, and a refrain, Leave her on a stormy day. It was years before I learned that the real Latin was Ora Pro Nobis, and Libera nos, Domine.
That is where the tumbleweed came in. Grandpa got scientific one night and recited genus and species, Salsola kali, and there was a reference to enuifolia, or something to that effect. The next morning I hollered at the top of my lungs, Oh Salsola kali, and then the litany refrain, Leave her on a stormy day. I was imitating the baritone voice of the rotund Capuchin who intoned hell-fire with the trap door open during Lenten sermons, and I figured my voice would one day land me at the Met, or possibly on the stage of La Scala in Milan, but my brothers and sisters said I sounded awful.
…
For the purpose of crop production, farmers have come to view the guardians of the soil as three veritable Musketeers — each as different as Aramis, Porthos and Athos — each a nutrient thief. It is true, weeds are a drain on soil moisture and rate attention as non-economic competitors to the commercial crop.
Arden Andersen, writing in The Anatomy of Life and Energy in Agriculture, scrutinized weeds in terms of the Biological Theory of Ionization, as taught by the late Carey Reams. He concluded that “Each weed species is genetically keyed to replace a specific deficiency.” He divided cropland weeds into broadleafs, grasses and succulents. “Generally speaking, broadleaf weeds are present to correct imbalanced ratio between phosphate and potash. The ratio should be two parts phosphate to one part potash for row crops and vegetables, and four parts phosphate to one part potash for grasses . . . .
“Grasses such as foxtail and quackgrass are generally present to correct a calcium deficiency. In permanent crop areas such as orchards, grasses can be effectively used as a fertilizer simply by keeping them mowed and allowing the clippings to compost back into the soil. In areas where the clippings will not compost back in the soil but rather create a thatch buildup, there is a lack of aerobic microorganisms, an excessive salt concentration, and poor aeration.”
Succulents are usually present to replenish the carbonate ions in the soil as well as to increase its water holding capacity. Succulents also act as a ground cover to protect fragile soil from erosion and dehydration.
The state flower for Kansas is a common fence row weed, the sunflower, a dry weather survivor capable of splashing superb color all over a sometimes stark terrain. The designation fence row does not mean the sunflower couldn’t take over entire fields, but Dad did not see this as much of a problem. A little clean tillage kept that colorful crop to its road corners and ditches. Alf Landon developed his famous sunflower campaign for the presidential election of 1936 using the state flower as an insignia. But this was long before the tribe had become domesticated and enlarged, like steroid-fed basketball players, and sanctioned as a regular oil seed crop.
Both the sunflower and the tumbleweed faded from view during what I now call the unpleasantness with Germany and Japan, but they have never been entirely out of mind. Nor have many of the other weeds that added so much character to the landscape. And so, when the time came and I was writing An Acres U.S.A. Primer some twenty years ago, it seemed only natural to dust off a bit of arcane knowledge and mix in workaday findings, almost always with rewarding results.
These little nuggets fell into my larder softly and stacked up until there was something to talk about. One had to walk carefully in those days. After all, the great professors had decreed killer technology for weed control, and anyone who demurred was downgraded to intellectual underworld status, or ridiculed as a weed quack. This killer technology theory period came hard on the heels of academia’s discovery that chemical companies had grant money.
One day, in Idaho, a man named Ed Weldman thought he had cutworms. He had driven down the gravel road bordering one of his cornfields and discovered some few corn stalks down and out for the season. At one time Ed had used Furadan to control cutworms, but the arrival of some clear reporting on eco-agriculture had prompted him to leave that crude concept behind. And yet when he saw those corn stalks down he experienced that sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that goes with hanging thousands of bucks in a dry well. Bluntly stated, farmer Ed Weldman worried himself into considering the toxic stuff again.
His windshield diagnosis was wrong, of course. Cutworms simply could not survive in that field because the soil had a proper calcium level. The pH was near perfect and in equilibrium. He knew exactly the state of the humus complex in the soil. All seeds had been treated, not with Captan, but with amino complexes that attached an extra nutrient package. No, there was no way cutworms could live in a healthy plant, or weeds in a healthy soil. On-scene inspection revealed that machine damage had caused row ends to ape the look of cutworm damage. There were no weeds, of course. Weeds and insects often go together.
Within a few weeks after I launched Acres U.S.A., I met up with the late C.J. Fenzau, then of Kentland, Indiana. C.J. taught me how to walk the fields and how to see what I looked at. Later on he moved west to Boise, Idaho, and I got to be a regular on the airplane to and from Boise or Twin Falls. C.J. had experimental plots, ostensibly for the purpose of repeating some of the experiments William A. Albrecht of the University of Missouri had accounted for some decades earlier. Albrecht had proved that he could have weed-free plots without poisons, even though nearby broom sedge scattered its seed progeny like dandruff year in and year out.
On one experimental plot, C.J. Fenzau caused excess water along a diagonal line to stress several crops in as many plots. Aphids appeared only where stressed plants permitted them. Furthermore, weed patterns picked up the stress signal. Nutritional limitations inevitably brought on disease, insect and weed response, or production shortfalls. One plot with corn in thirty-eight inch rows had a section on which two tons per acre finished compost had been used. The other section had two tons of halfway house compost, or material not quite finished. This variable translated into 61,000 ears per acre for the finished compost plot, 45,000 ears per acre for the halfway finished compost.
Quackgrass soils hold water because of the extra tension and because they do not have enough air. This inventory of circumstances gives quackgrass a chance to dominate without being subject to fungal attack. “The key to controlling quackgrass,’’ said Fenzau, “is to invite fungus infection of the rhizomes. Wetting agents should make a tremendous difference — again relating to quality calcium availability.”
To put it another way, the soil has to have enough calcium to be able to manage aluminum. Aluminum toxicity is a serious problem in a lot of plants. Quackgrass is not susceptible to aluminum intake. Since calcium is a good governor of aluminum and regulator of it, adequate calcium on the soil colloid is a prime requirement in effecting control of this weed system.
Counting the years I spent with National Farmers Organization (NFO), I figure I have visited more farms in more U.S. counties than most Americans, ag consultants included. I have seen good horrible examples, fields so complexed they could no longer insoak water, if this coined word will do. And I have seen those same fields bounce back, almost always on the basis of an adjustment in calcium and an input of compost or change the structure of the soil. I heard from one of the old NFO crowd not long after An Acres U.S.A. Primer was published. Keith Emenhiser of Monroeville, Indiana wrote that bull thistles literally owned his farm, a hog farrow to finish operation with some cattle, but a few Primer notes took care of that. “I just added manganese (Mn) at the rate of twenty to forty pounds to the acre, and my thistles have almost completely disappeared.” Keith was good enough to note that my “book is worth many times the price you charge for it.’’ I liked that remark and hoped it would become a susurration, maybe more a shout than a murmur, because it was the devil to pay keeping Acres U.S.A. alive in those days. Now it would seem almost criminal not to pass along the many things learned in this enterprise.
Some people like baseball cards, even when they don’t chew gum. I like weeds. And on hikes across someone’s acres or along a country stream, when I am alone, I still like to belt out the refrain I sang as a youth in homage to the lowly tumbleweed, Oh Salsola kali, leave her on a stormy day!
Weeds: Control without Poisons is available from the Acres U.S.A. bookstore (bookstore.acresusa.com).
