Restoring the Soil: How to Use Green Manure/Cover Crops to Fertilize the Soil and Overcome Droughts, 2nd edition, by Roland Bunch.
Many books are written each year about farming. Many are helpful and worthwhile reading. Some are great and are must-reads. Some aren’t worth the time.
Surprisingly few, though, actually talk about how to farm. Most are more “farming adjacent” or “para-farming” (para, from the Greek, meaning “alongside of” — i.e., a paralegal works alongside lawyers to assist them, or a parallel line is alongside another). Many books are published these days about why climate-smart farming is important, about how regenerative agriculture can feed the planet without chemicals, or of the dangers of conventional farming to human health. All are worthy topics. But few help farmers actually do their job.
Those books — the ones that not only come alongside farmers with motivation, but that show them examples of what has worked for other growers — are the ones we try to highlight in this review section. That type of information is also what we try to publish in the articles of this magazine.
Why are there so few of these types of books? One reason is that most farmers spend their time farming, not writing, and the best farming books are usually written by farmers who also make the time and have the gift to write — think Gary Zimmer’s The Biological Farmer or Gabe Brown’s Dirt to Soil or Joel Salatin’s Pastured Poultry Profits. These are titles written by farmers that are both motivational and practical, and that have been greatly influential to a number of fellow farmers.
The other reason not many of these types of books exist today is that it’s much easier to share real-world, on-the-ground information on YouTube and (shudder the thought) Twitter, or via extension-type technical manuals or group email lists (like OGRAIN).
But books are still an important medium for farmers to share information with one another. Media ecologists have been telling us for decades that the medium affects the message, and this is certainly true — writing something in long form, over the course of months of hard work, forces the author to truly wrestle with the topic at hand. They have to anticipate all the counterarguments and potential criticisms of their ideas and preempt them. This doesn’t exist in other forms of media. Books are the opposite of “hot takes”; they instead place value on the tried and true.
I could go on … but my point is to introduce a book called Restoring the Soil that does what the best farming books do: it contains practical advice for farmers — not just vague commendations about why regenerative farming is important — and it synthesizes years of on-the-ground experience from actual farmers.
An important caveat about this book is that it is written about a specific context that is not temperate North America. It’s about the use of green manures and cover crops (gm/cc, as denoted throughout the book) in tropical, less-developed nations by small-scale farmers. The growers in this book are those who are cultivating a few acres of corn or rice or sorghum in order to provide for their families. But just as ranchers in Alabama have much to learn from Gabe Brown in North Dakota, or as California lettuce growers can profit from reading Wisconsin’s Gary Zimmer, so growers here in the states will profit from considering the techniques of these tropical growers.
The book begins with a helpful introduction that provides a nice definition of green manures / cover crops: “any species of plant, usually a legume, whether a tree, a bush, a vine, a crawling or a water-borne plant, that farmers use (among other reasons) to maintain or improve their soil fertility or control weeds.” Bunch goes on to explain some of the differences between the use of gm/cc in temperate climates and in tropical areas — namely that tropical farmers usually have smaller plots, need to save the gm/cc seed for consumption or sale, have difficulty in incorporating gm/cc into the ground, and focus on the role of gm/cc in weed control as opposed to fertility.
The first half of the book discusses gm/cc in general: their advantages and disadvantages, how they compare to animal manure, how they work to build fertility (with attention given to N, P and K dynamics), and how they can aid in drought resilience.
In the second part, Bunch describes 117 different cropping systems that use gm/cc in the tropics. He notes which have been successfully tested and replicated in different environments — 83 of the 117, with another nine that exhibit good potential. Crucially, he provides decision trees for a number of different climates and growing conditions that can aid growers in discerning which gm/cc cropping system might work well in their context. Bunch then describes each system — the crops involved, how to grow the crop and the gm/cc, financial considerations, etc.
The small-scale tropical growers in Restoring the Soil are the very ones we hear so much about in the “para-farming” books — they’re the ones who are actually feeding most of the world on their small acreages, without synthetic inputs! We would be wise to listen to them and to consider adopting some of their proven techniques.
