Rowley Family Testimony
In an ongoing effort to showcase the work of Growers users, this article will describe the success the Rowley family of eastern Michigan has had on the Growers program. The focus of the article, besides telling the story of the Rowley family on Growers, is to discredit the common criticism that the Growers program will bankrupt the soil and the farmer's pocketbook because it doesn't provide enough nutrition.
The Rowley family has run a dairy farm since before beginning on the Growers program. The farm is currently run by two grandsons of the man who began on the Growers program, that being Robert and Ted Rowley, and Art Rowley, respectively. Robert and Ted's mother Maryanne Rowley is still a part of the operation, too. They are the last remaining dairy operation in their township (with only four left in their county), and despite poor milk prices, plan to continue milking cows, in part thanks to the efficiency and affordability of the Growers program. They grow corn, beans, alfalfa, and rye as cover, and oats for seed, all on very sandy soil.
Art Rowley began on the Growers program in the early 1960s. He began liming immediately with sugar-beet lime, and to date, they have applied more than 100 tons/acre to the entire farm. According to the agricultural establishment, this should be enough calcium to send the pH through the roof and prevent a crop from growing for years to come. Of course, this couldn't be further from the truth. They also use GMS both in-furrow and as a foliar application.
As mentioned above, the focus of this article is to discredit the notion that using the Growers program will bankrupt the soil and farm. The Rowley’s provide an excellent case study of this because they have been on the program for nearly 60 years, farm very sandy ground, and on the economic side are continuing to milk cows despite low milk prices, all without mining the soil.
Sandy soil, compared to more clay-heavy soil, has lower nutrient capacity and typically lower organic matter content. As such, it is traditionally considered to need higher inputs of fertilizer to produce a crop and replace those nutrients taken up by the crop. Under this logic, if a farmer does not replace these nutrients, he will mine the soil to a point where there is not enough nutrition in it to grow a crop. This line of thought contains a kernel of truth off of which a litany of falsehoods is based. It is true that sandy soil does not have as much native fertility as heavier soils, but by no means does this mean it has no fertility.
According to the chart titled The Composition of Soils prepared as a meta-study of soil fertility, sandy-loam soils can contain 1340 pounds/acre of nitrogen, 2600 pounds/acre of potash, and 400 pounds/acre of phosphorus. These numbers do not take into account that replaced by residue or that available below the top 62/3 inches of the soil. Clearly there is still fertility available in sandy soil. Furthermore, the idea that a growing crop is basically a mathematical formula of unit-in, unit-out for nutrition ignores nutrient return from stubble and soil microbiological action. Some macro-nutrients are simply washed out of stubble by rainfall or made available with a small amount of decomposition. Further, most nutrients needed by a crop are mostly made available by soil microbes. Our responsibility is to treat the soil in such a way that these microbes and the cation exchange capacity of the soil is working properly, feeding the crop and opening up the soil.
So, maybe land could handle a few years of lime application and low-quantity fertilization and still bounce back, but surely after 60 years of such treatment it should be just useless beach sand, shouldn't it? Such is not the case, as the Rowley’s continuously raise high-quality crops for feed and seed, all while staying competitive in the dairy industry. Their feed value ratings are consistently high, and they consistently have higher refractometer readings than neighbors on establishment programs. Clearly the crops are getting the exact nutrition that they need, both from the highly available ingredients in GMS and from a healthy soil.
To conclude this article, I would like to share an interesting story the Rowley’s told us about their adventures with a pipeline that ran through their land. In 2014, Enbridge ran a gas pipeline through their property. Normally, the soil that is replaced over the top of a pipeline has a yield drag for around 5 years, but Robert and Ted's father decided to mix 6 tons/acre equivalent of sugar-beet lime into the subsoil, and then 6 more tons/acre onto the topsoil that went over the pipeline. There was some noticeable difference the first year, but after that the land was back to normal. Talk about restorative land therapy!
This is an excerpt from the Summer Growers Solution (2021) written by Zach Smith.
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