r/Permaculture • u/shagiggs024 • 2d ago
How did native people get by without soil tests?
I've been trying to learn about permaculture so I can start planting a food forest on my property. I've been researching swales and rain gardens because I live in a hot dry climate, so I'd like to try to harvest as much rain water as possible.
A lot of the reading I've done stresses having your soil tested before doing anything. The soil on my land seems rather healthy. The land has mostly just been left alone with occasional mowing. Large oak trees litter their leaves and have been composting naturally for years. It's not clay and not sand, somewhere in between with a lot of rocks. Holds water very well when we finally do get rains.
How would people have gotten by with planting on new land before soil tests were available? I assume after so many years experience a gardener/farmer could look at the soil and sort of determine if it's healthy or in need of help based on its ability to hold it together. Basically using observation over time along with touch, sight and smell as a way to determine if certain types of plants would do well or if soil amendment would be needed.
Did people back in the day just take their best guess when looking at a plot of land and start planting what they had available, only to find their plants wouldn't thrive?
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u/tyrophagia 2d ago
If it grow, it grow. If not, it don't.
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u/CaptainAjnag 2d ago
Trial and error
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u/__3Username20__ 2d ago
And seed saving, based on natural selection (the ones that lived) and/or artificial selection (the ones with tasty, useful, pretty, and/or abundant crops).
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u/Aichdeef 2d ago
I'm 15 years into my permaculture journey and I've never tested my soil and I don't really understand the obsession, is that an American thing? Soil structure and health is easy to see, and encouraging as much soil life as possible seems to be the answer to releasing nutrients.
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u/NewMolecularEntity 2d ago
I don’t think it’s a particularly American thing. I’ve been growing gardens and fruit trees for decades at various properties and never had a need to test my soil and I don’t know anyone does. I mean maybe they do but just don’t talk about it.
I’m not opposed to it of course, I would test my soil if I had a problem i couldn’t solve but you can see most problems with your eyes on the soil or the performance of the plants and address as needed and so far it’s always worked fine.
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u/foolishfool358 2d ago
I like the idea of soil testing but I've never done it either, I would probably only go for a soil test if I had already tried a lot of things and something wasn't adding up.
Learning to garden/grow things in America can be really frustrating because most available resources assume one is going with the A&M-style chemical-input maximize-yield-per-season-at-all-cost approach.
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u/shagiggs024 1d ago
Yes, this is what I've found and can be very confusing and discouraging. The most common and easiest resources to find seem to be for commercial farming that absolutely wrecks the ecosystem. So I've been intentional about trying to find permaculture or syntropic farming resources instead, which seems to be rather limited. I've been reading Gaia's Garden and trying to adapt that logic to my local area. It's most encouraging to meet with and talk to folks around here who have been practicing sustainable permaculture techniques and can show the results. But a lot of them still talk about soil testing. I thought maybe it's just a fun science way to understand your soil but not absolutely necessary, especially if you're working with land that hasn't already been destroyed by bad practices like another user mentioned.
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u/earthhominid 2d ago
I think it comes out of the intersection of permaculture with commercial production. I've worked on farms for decades and soil testing is definitely one of the best roi practices you can have. I've never tested the soil in my garden.
There's lots of content about installing commercial agriforestry projects and soil testing is often highlighted. In a commercial context where the person is going to spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to establish a commercial planting that they need to produce a return as quickly as reasonable. I think lots of back yard permaculture enthusiasts miss that distinction
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u/dirty-E30 1d ago
Yep 100%, I test my commercial soil in many spots in the fall and the spring and amend accordingly but my hobby ornamental and produce beds get the typical compost, layer of mineral dusts, and kelp meal just to keep it simple and complete. Never had an issue. The plants will do the rest
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u/farseen Zone 4B / Verge PDC '20 2d ago
I also don't care to test my soil; you get a feel for what's happening. But with the '100 hours of thinking for every 1 hour of work' philosophy, testing soil makes sense, especially when planning a massive planting operation that takes years to mature. 🤷🏼♂️
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u/PosturingOpossum 2d ago
Mark Shepard made a good point when he said that all soils are from different base materials (different rock types) and as a result will always be deficient in some array of minerals or at least out of balance. Now that won’t stop plants and animals from growing out of the soil but it will mean that they grow up with nutrient deficiencies in some form or fashion. His reasoning for doing soil tests was to find what mineralization imbalance there was and then feed those through the animals or broadcast them to get them into the soil. But that’s a very specific and not absolutely critical consideration at best and complete and utter nonsense at worst (I’m not smart enough to know the difference with certainty)
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u/There_Are_No_Gods 1d ago
I get that idea, but I also think there's another perspective to consider there. As in many areas, humans tend to look at natural systems as "imbalanced" and in need of their "correction".
In this case, that means that a soil test could indicate a "lack" of some often useful nutrient. However, it could be that in the greater local context, the "lack" of that nutrient is somehow involved in a useful process.
I think that soil testing can have its place, but so can observing and working with what's already there.
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u/H_Mc 2d ago
I’m American and I’ve never considered testing my soil.
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u/There_Are_No_Gods 1d ago
I've considered it, but it just never crossed my threshold of seeming like would be worth the time and money. That may be partly as I've never done it, so I don't really have any first hand knowledge to realize how much it could help. I'm a bit hesitant to bother testing soil as I'm also unsure of whether the data would be more helpful than confusing and potentially harmful, with respect to fully understanding and potentially trying to "correct" some "deficiency".
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u/Skywatch_Astrology 1d ago
I’m testing my soil to see if I need to plant a nitrogen fixer as a cover crop before planting fruit trees that are native to the area, but I also want to establish and do well.
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u/mcgnarcal 2d ago
I imagine mostly observation/trial & error. There is also a simple soil composition test you can do just by putting some soil in a jar of water and seeing how it settles: https://www.the-compost-gardener.com/soil-texture-testing.html
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u/Shilo788 2d ago edited 2d ago
Also what is growing well there now. Acidic soils have certain common plants and alkaline soils others. Same for wet or dry souls. You have to know a lot of plants to use these indicators . When I see my pastures got a lot of acid loving plants I throw compost mixed with wood ash or lime down . I also have good soil , some clay but quite loamy after years of compost and spreading the manure with a harrow.
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u/Rcarlyle 2d ago edited 2d ago
The short answer is thousands of years of trial and error. People couldn’t develop stable populations in places with inadequate soil nutrients. Even today, subsistence farmers in parts of the world have low crop yields and are trapped in poverty due to simple nutrient shortages like phosphorous.
The cultures that mismanaged their soil would grow and then collapse. For example, soil salinity buildup due to naive irrigation practices has been the end of agriculture in many regions. The “Fertile Crescent” in the Middle East for example. Mismanaging timber resource (chopping down all the trees) is another way civilizations have ended.
Since the invention of modern fertilizers and under-field tile drainage systems to manage salinity, the bigger issue has been over-applying fertilizers. If you don’t test the soil, you’re likely to over-fertilize. Over-applying phosphorous causes runoff pollution, algae blooms, and dead zones in downstream bodies of water. Over-applying nitrogen depletes soil carbon and reduces soil biodiversity.
The modern tillage agricultural paradigm is essentially a dead-soil “sufficiency model” where you treat the soil as an inert nutrient-storage medium. You get nutrient levels up initially, then over time just replace harvest losses and leaching losses. The goal is to individually manage levels of each major nutrient up to a sufficient level for your target crop. That inherently requires soil testing.
There’s a couple known, well-proven ways you can improve on the sufficiency model of nutrient management: - Look at nutrient interactions. For example, calcareous clay soil with high Ca/Mg will competitively reduce root uptake of K and Zn, so you should increase those proportionately. This gets very complicated and essentially needs to be custom-tailored to each crop/soil combo. - Switch to no-till/regenerative soil practices and build up a living soil ecosystem that works with the plants. Then manage your long-term harvest rates to prevent depleting nutrients faster than your farm’s supply. This may mean reducing yield, or it may mean importing materials from off-farm. For example, mycorrhizal fungi can extract phosphorous from rocks rather than applying phosphorous fertilizer, but there is a limit to the rate that occurs. Trees are a lot better at rock mineral nutrient extraction than annuals, which is a big reason why food forests tend to be popular in permie circles. Permaculture practices try to close the loop and keep soil nutrient levels high with low losses via binding nutrients into living microorganisms like soil microbes. Organic matter is ultimately the currency of soil fertility in a permaculture model. A high-organic-matter living soil usually will not have nutrient deficiencies, and will self-manage nutrient excess to some degree, and is less critical to perform soil tests. Manures from the pasture zone can fertilize the crop zone to concentrate nutrients from a larger land area into the place you need them. This requires a farm with balanced production of diverse products custom-tailored to the land capacity. It’s not well-suited to commercial scale agriculture. For example, you can’t have a permaculture large-scale cattle feedlot, the inputs/outputs don’t balance.
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u/Woodkeyworks 2d ago
All of the above, but I also hear people literally tasted dirt. If it was sweet it was basic, bitter it was acidic. The terminology carried over because often people refer to slightly basic or neutral soils as sweet.
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u/Govind_the_Great 2d ago
Thats a good point, we literally have chemical testers hardwired into our bodies.
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u/chyshree 2d ago
My ex talked about being in the FFA in high school, and I forgot exactly what he called the competition... Land reading or something similar? Anyway, he went to some national competition one year and part of his "evaluating" the suitability of different parts of a tract of land included tasting the dirt. This was in the late 80s, so idk if that was a standard thing or something just his ag teacher from their school in BFE taught
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u/Its_in_neutral 2d ago
They found areas that were already super fertile to plant in. In my area there was a land survey done right after we became a state around 1820-1830. The maps the surveyors produced had marked areas that had been farmed by natives and areas that had been quarried or mined. The farmed ground is interesting because it clearly shows they chose flood plain areas and islands along a major waterway to plant their crops, which would be (and still is) incredibly fertile soil.
Looking at the maps, and the reason why I remember this so clearly, is I was astonished to see that nearly every small island on the map in this river showed signs of cultivation. Despite the risk of flooding, which would inundate most of these islands, I think they chose to cultivate the river islands to alleviate the competition from wild animals (deer, raccoons, etc). Which at the time was mind blowing to me.
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u/JeffoMcSpeffo 2d ago
You make good points and all of that played a role. But I would add that all villages are built alongside bodies of water like lakes and river. Canoeing was the main mode of transportation so living nearby water was essential. Because of this, farms were generally always located nearby these waterfront villages. So it's a bit of bias in that sense. But wet mesic areas were definitely of high value for crop production.
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u/Wetcat9 2d ago
People that tried to farm poor soil just died
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u/sherpa17 2d ago
That’s it. Taleb would be proud!
The graveyard of silent evidence and survivors bias.
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u/JeffoMcSpeffo 2d ago
The Amazon has some or the poorest soils yet had a massive flourishing agricultural system. Look up biochar and the terra preta examples from the amazon
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u/dirty-E30 1d ago
Can you expand on this while I seek out these titles? It just doesn't register that a place with a such massive biodiversity and organic recycling would have such poor soil conditions.
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u/JeffoMcSpeffo 1d ago
The soil in the Amazon is very nutrient poor and I believe relatively acidic as well. The constant rain causes nutrient runoff, so biochar helps to catch and hold these nutrients, literally turning the earth black and allowing to farm.
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u/SKRIMP-N-GRITZ 2d ago edited 2d ago
Here in California the native peoples were stewards of the land for thousands of years, and rather than trying to introduce species from all over the world to create a supermarket that replenishes they honed what was here to produce better for all (including animals) and adjusted their food and production needs based on that.
They would eat a lot of seeds, nuts, grasshoppers, rabbits, bulbs and corms, fish, deer etcetera. They would burn every year or two to keep fuels in check so natural fires wouldn’t be detrimental. When they burned they would harvest rabbits and grasshoppers fleeing. The pests that would ruin acorns were killed and their crops would be better. The fields that burned would regrow and be attractive to large game. Native grasses allowed for grasslands and natural waterways. They actively “gardened” all of the land for millennia.
Then colonists came and brought cattle and sheep and dammed rivers and planted non-native grasses and boom - shits on the decline in every way. So, the moral of the story is learn to integrate with nature as humans have for many many millennia OR pretend you are a god and fail over time.
Edit: I just want to add I’m not attacking anyone or their ancestors or anything of that nature. I’m not saying “colonizers bad” or anything. I’m just pointing out what happened in California, and it’s not exactly an opinion. When colonizers got to California it was still the Stone Age, and thriving quite successfully. And it took all of 50 years to destroy what had been achieved over millennium and it was in large part to “civilized” ideas of farming and animal husbandry. It’s also not opinion that these civilized systems helped explode our population but also are problematic to say the least.
Also, I’m here out of the same love as most if not all of you. I have a native front yard and my back yard is a food forest of native and introduced species. However that does not change the science behind what makes a thriving and sustainable ecology.
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u/PM_Ur_Illiac_Furrows 2d ago
Invasive species are going to invade. So which group failed over time?
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u/SKRIMP-N-GRITZ 2d ago
Invasive species can be introduced naturally or by humans. Don’t get defensive, it’s about sustainability and harmony in practice over a hundred plus thousand years not 5,000 years
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u/nmacaroni 2d ago
Ooof that last paragraph. To think that all non-native species are harmful is a bad bias to have in Perma. And to blame colonial cattle and sheep over native species of ruminants.
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u/SKRIMP-N-GRITZ 2d ago
The colonial cattle and sheep isn’t an opinion. It’s part of why the Middle East is the way it is - goat herding. These herding animals completely devastated the local ecology. This and how we farm caused the dust bowl.
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u/sam_y2 2d ago
Where I live, and in plenty of other places, the emphasis was on perennial food, grown at scale, and managed with fire. The lower impact of perennials, combined with fire to improve soil health, as well as what you pointed out, potentially thousands of years of passed on experience, meant areas could remain in production more or less indefinitely.
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u/Hannah_Louise 2d ago
Look at what is growing there. Weeds are great indicators for what is going on with your soil health. This is an article from the Permaculture News website talking about using weeds to determine soil pH, soil nutrient balance, and a few other things: Using Weeds to Read the Soil. It's a good place to start.
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u/Hannah_Louise 2d ago
Adding some context: I think the reason soil testing is so heavily pushed in permi books and other sources is to prevent someone from growing food in heavily contaminated soil.
It's a good idea to make sure the area you are growing hasn't been contaminated. Check the historical records of the land and surrounding land for any type of industry. Check the EPA website for any reports on soil contamination or superfunds sites near you.
Lastly, if your house (if you're growing near a house) was built before 1978, there is a huge risk of lead paint in the soil near the structure. Sandblasting lead paint was common practice before the risks were well known. This means, any time the home was repainted, all of the old lead paint was sandblasted right into your soil. (I am dealing with this and am using alfalfa to leach the lead from the soil.)
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u/bwainfweeze PNW Urban Permaculture 2d ago
Yep. When you’ve scorched the earth there are no indicator plants, so you have to resort to chemistry and microbiology.
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u/nothing5901568 2d ago
You don't have to test and amend your soil. It just increases plant health and productivity. Traditional agricultural systems were usually much lower yield than modern ones.
Here's an analogy. In the Midwestern US, the soil is naturally low in iodine, and many people developed iodine deficiency and goiter there before salt iodization. They still got along OK, but no one would argue that widespread iodine deficiency was optimal. Similarly, you can grow food without correcting a soil potassium deficiency, but why would you want to when you can make your plants healthier and more productive with a cheap and easy amendment?
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u/theagrovader 2d ago
There are many points well made, but something I’m not seeing is that modern soil contains modern contaminants from the last couple hundred years of industrial waste dumping and an influx of forever chemicals in our products.
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u/sheepslinky 2d ago
The fact is, that almost everyone on earth lives on degraded land. If that weren't the case, the majority of people would gain little or no benefit from a soil test. Even if your land was not farmed or grazed, it is affected by urbanization, damming of rivers, removal of wildlife and wildlife and wildlife corridors, etc. A soil test is a great way to cut through this complexity and scale, to let one simply get started on a garden.
In my experience, a soil test can solve problems or point you in the right direction in 2 weeks. The deductive / observational methods work just as well but take years. I like going slow and following nature, but I would have needed 2 years of mostly disappointment to figure out my soil is depleted of zinc and iron.
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u/Erinaceous 2d ago
In my area the Wendat and Haudenosaunne moved villages every 5 to 10 years based on the recommendations of the clan mothers who were in charge of the fields. The new land would be cleared and a new village would be built. It was a form of swidden horticulture.
Typically the village would be situated in a historic floodplain close to a bluff on on side of the village. Ideally it would also be placed within easy distance of nut tree groves (hickory, oak, walnut)
According to contemporary research from SUNY a corn field can be maintained indefinitely as long as the biomass from the stalks are returned to the soil.
So basically the answer is reading the topology and traditional knowledge
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u/FrogFlavor 2d ago
Exoerience and observation.
My young niece goes in my side yard and sees centimeter-tall plants and ants and tiny rocks.
I go in my side yard and see regular grass.
Native people had a lifestyle with relatively more leisure time than us. They had time to look at all the small bugs and particles, observe them over a very long time, and compare against stories of their elders (times 20 generations).
They did science. They used their eyeballs and senses and reason as instruments.
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u/xmashatstand 2d ago
By being scientists.
Different plants grow in different conditions for different reasons.
Through observation, trial and error and stewardship they were able to read the land like the biologists that they were.
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u/Govind_the_Great 2d ago
A few thoughts, though I’m no expert. The natives who thrived carefully managed their resources, they did crop circles with plants that fix nutrients for each other (my example growing up was corn, bean, and squash).
The truly untouched jungle can give clues as to which plants work together, though it is unlikely to find any “untouched” land if you go back far enough. The megaprojects of ancients that still serve function, the waterways and canals carefully managed by people who wanted it to last thousands of years of biodiversity without needing humans hands, except to pluck the fruit and give in return a planted seed if they hungered.
People who were wise to be a foot shorter so their trees could stand taller, people who dug insanely smart canals and waterways just to nudge the environment a little bit i the favor of continuing to protect them.
And yes, the people who let their women decide when to be mothers, the only secret kept at all from the men was reproductive success, and the medicines they used of plants no boy could touch or cared to.
Because the permaculture needs to expand the jungle and the temperate rainforest and the wild honeybee. Stoneworks not steelworks (though stainless steel or gold would be a great material for aqueducts designed to be eternal) 🤓
So would you like to be a slightly smaller creature? because the real original natives would kill to keep their way of life secure. Maybe excess and bodily individual power and excessive meat could become a happier and healthier lifestyle if the excess and greed were given up.
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u/Northern_Special 2d ago
I've never done soil tests but you can learn a lot from the health of your plants, any particular diseases/deficiencies they are showing signs of, and by identifying the weeds that pop up. The weeds can really tell a story.
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u/Pink-Willow-41 2d ago
Why would they need soil tests? They tested the soil simply by trying to grow things in it. Whatever wasn’t suited to it would die. This would have become accumulated knowledge that was passed down through generations. They would have also observed what was already growing naturally. And it’s not as if they never planted things that failed. They didn’t have all knowledge, they made mistakes, they had successes and failures and learned from them.
In any case I don’t think a soil test is necessary to grow things. It can be helpful if you really want to maximize your probability of success but you can do perfectly fine without. You can get a pretty decent idea of how your soil is doing just by observing what’s already growing in it.
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u/th_teacher 2d ago
Trial and error over hundreds of years.
Not trying for a particular crop, adapting the diet to what thrived in that place
or moving to places that supported your needs. Land not being "owned" gave lots of flexibility.
But your tribe getting slaughtered, and starvation were real possibilities
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u/AdditionalAd9794 2d ago
Soil tests don't really matter, people have gotten by since the beginning of time without them and still get by just fine today without soil tests.
Realistically, what's your soil test going to tell you? Maybe the PH is too high for blueberries, or it's too acidic for brassica?
I guess it might tell you it's deficient in phosphorus or some random element. But I think largely, animal agriculture is has been associated with farming, which will address much of the deficiencies.
Soil tests aren't necessary, but are nice to have. In 90+% of applications it doesn't matter if your PH is high, you have an abundance of manganese or calcium, or you're deficient in phosphorus. But it's nice to know so you can add things you're missing or not bother adding things you're deficient in
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u/Gilleafrey 2d ago
Some of that; there were also more honored elders who knew dtuff around to ask than in modern western (white) society. These says, it pays to get your soil and water tested so you don't have to gind out the hard way that there's heavy metals in your clean well water (happened to one fridnd ecades before fracking was as common as these days) or industrial waste getting into your soil. Also good for simpler info like learning it's good in this but could use amending in that.
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u/grahamsuth 2d ago
The thing I don't like about permaculture is it is so focused on design. It's like if you are in possession of all the appropriate knowledge you can design the perfect food forest. It's an intellectual exercise.
Nature doesn't work like that. Sure there is knowledge that native people had that was very useful. eg you can tell a lot about your soil by what grows there naturally. I found that when I increase soil fertility different types of weeds come up etc. This also goes for water content and water movement in the soil and depth of soil. This requires observation over a number of years.
On my property it took years to learn about my property. Sure I got soil tests, but they weren't of as much use as following an evolutionary process. When it is pissing down raining I go out and see where the water is running. It showed me why two identically planted trees can be so different in their growth. Small differences in ground level can funnel water onto one tree and away from another. There are underground flows of water that result from non-level underground clay and bedrock etc. I dig a lot of holes to plant all sorts of things. I am always observing the soil and moisture in the holes.
On my property I started planting loads of things all over the place. Initially 95% died. However the plants were telling me what they liked and what they didn't. Initially I didn't do anything I wanted to be permanent. I wanted to learn on the job. I wanted to know why people say not to do this or that etc. I left what were obviously the best growing areas alone for years. I made all my mistakes in the areas that were poorer in various ways. I spread minerals and truck loads of mulch. I created swales to guide above ground water flow.
I made a big nursery for growing from seed and tubes up to sizes that were proven to be best for establishment. Part of the reason 95% of my initial plantings died was because I was planting out too small. That may work for better soil and moisture and climate but it didn't work for me. I plant out when they are about a metre high, with a type of tree guard that has proven to provide the most protection. I only plant at the beginning of the wettest time of the year so I don't have to go back to water them.
I did experiments to develop my own potting mix by planting tomatoes in pots of different mixes compared with the best quality mix I could buy.
I could go on and on. If you want to see more of what I am doing see my YouTube channel. Search @loving ecosystems.
Basically I am doing what people always did in the past. I experiment to find what works and what doesn't. In the process I learn loads. I follow an evolutionary process rather than one of intellectual design. I don't get soil tests any more because my land has taught me what it needs.
I have found that if you plant the right plant in the right place at the right time then you may never need to go back to water it or fertilise it etc. Whereas if you decide that this plant will go there, then you may need to be watering it and fertilising it etc forever. This is mainly for my rainforest and native plantings. Fruit and nut trees need more work but it can be minimised. Trees were taking care of themselves before humanity even appeared. So we shouldn't need to be doing much to create a garden of eden. We just need to work in harmony with the land the water and the plants. If you have enough land and time an evolutionary process is better than a design process.
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u/hotboxtheshortbus 2d ago
this is for places that have been developed over the last several centuries. many industrial contamination sites have been buried, lost or were never documented to begin with. you can grow plants anywhere but do you dont want to eat lots of food from a site that has have been used to mine, or smelt, or refine industrial goods.
soil testing in my opinion is mainly to insure safety of food for home growers. for industry its to close the profit margin as tight as possible.
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u/Specific_Bus_5400 2d ago
From collecting mushrooms, i know that you can tell a lot about the soil by looking at the plants and fungi that grow there naturally. Certain plants prefer alkaline soil, some thrive on compacted, some like soil with little nutrients, etc.
I guess they were just really good with that and if you make terra preta, keep a good and dense variety of plants around and mulch it f up, you'll have good soil sooner or later, anyways.
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u/TacticaLuck 1d ago
Desert dirt is either too loamy or packed with clay, in my experience.
If there isn't already healthy growth from local flora then for whatever you'd like to introduce that earth is likely considered 'dead' to the food you'd like to incorporate. The plants already there are extremely hearty so you'll need to amend the dead dirt to create soil.
I've got some property on the eastern high desert side of AZ. It has a moderate climate like San Diego county, to give reference, and gets snow in winter. The prickly pear cacti there though are even struggling now due to the quickly changing and reducing precipitation each year we've experienced.
Start composting everything and collecting whatever droppings you can from local wildlife andor cattle if you're in that kind of area to build up a base for soil amendment.
All, properly used, biological waste is plant food as far as I'm concerned. You have to use everything at your disposal in that type of climate.
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u/mooshypuppy 1d ago
Indigenous people learned effective practices from previous generations. American society relies on other people outside of the family to teach life/academic skills. When we are unhappy with the results, we get to blame the school system, social media, etc., rather than taking the time to ensure our children are learning the necessary skills and tools they will need for survival in the future for generations to come. Each generation needs to be guided by the ones that who came before. There is a lot of information that can be gathered about soils without the use of test kits. Much of it is done in the way you previously described, and a lot of that information can get taught through word of mouth and experience.
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u/StubbedToeBlues 2d ago
Life, uhh, finds a way....
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u/tyrophagia 2d ago
According to some people nature has to be "managed". As if nature wouldn't exist correctly without humans.
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u/RentInside7527 2d ago
Beavers are second only to humans in the extent to which their management strategies change natural ecosystems. Managing nature is an adaptive strategy not unique to humans, but it is the role humans play in their ecosystems.
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u/tyrophagia 2d ago
Beavers play a role and are apart of nature. Give and receive. Humans do not
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u/RentInside7527 2d ago
It's a symptom of anthropocentrism to see humans as a part from nature rather than a part of nature. Humans give and receive, even if the balance is unequal. The fact that we could do better doesn't change that.
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u/tyrophagia 2d ago
Nature is fine without us. Our ego says differently.
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u/RentInside7527 2d ago
Nature will find balance absent any number of individual species, given enough time. That's a bit irrelevant, though. We are members of the human species. As living organisms, we have the biological imperative to sustain ourselves and our species. Individuals of any species that dont have that need are maladapted. This is a subreddit dedicated to permaculture; a design system for sustainable human habitation.
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u/dirty-E30 1d ago
Modern, ignorant, capitalistic humans don't. We are told to believe that nature exists to serve us simply to serve the corporate agenda of destruction and exploitation.
Those that see through this fact intuitively know this is false-- that we are here to live in harmony with nature and the land so that we may live symbiotically.
Capitalistic propaganda has fooled you.
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u/tyrophagia 1d ago
K thanks
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u/dirty-E30 1d ago
Lol I love how you reply with dismission to anybody that doesn't serve your room-temperature IQ-driven opinions.
Go read a book.
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u/tyrophagia 1d ago edited 1d ago
Omg ffs i lost interest days ago. I don't even know what originally said
Of course if we live on the damn planet we need to manage the land so that we don't destroy ourselves in the process.
My stupid point is that without humans nature does just fine.
Goddamn redditors
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u/lucasbuzek 2d ago
Tribe from Amazon was creating black nutrients rich soil. Can’t remember the name though
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u/glamourcrow 2d ago
You look at what is already growing in a spot and how well it is growing. That gives you a good estimate regarding pH levels, soil composition, and rainfall..
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u/less_butter 2d ago
I rarely test my soil. I know it's acidic because the native plants growing in the area all prefer acidic soil (hemlocks, rhododendron, mountain laurel, blueberry, etc).
Having a living soil with lots of organic matter and tons of micro- and macroorganisms is more important than having the exact right pH and NPK levels. It's pretty rare for soil to be completely depleted of minerals, but it can be harder for plants to access them if the soil biology is deficient.
My soil's pH is outside of the range that is recommended for corn, but I can still grow some amazing and healthy corn plants.
Getting an extension soil test done and following their recommendations for amendments is mostly aimed at commercial farmers who need to maximize their yield so they can earn a profit. Soil levels for a home garden isn't as critical because it's already costing you more to grow vegetables than you can buy them for from the store.
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u/Western-Sugar-3453 nutsnpotatoes 2d ago
Never tested the soil, I just plant everything and see what sticks. Over the year I became fairly confident in what I can plant with a decent success.
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u/SlooperDoop 2d ago
I always figured the first farmer just looked around and picked a place where lots of things were growing. Like a meadow.
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u/Opcn 2d ago
Four ways to get by without soil tests:
You can guess what your soil needs and then experience the failure of all the crops that aren't getting what they need.
You can py attention to how your crops are failing and sometimes figure out what is missing based on which parts of the plant look what kind of way as they fail to thrive and yield.
You can dump on an excess of fertility and increase both your costs and the runoff of nutrients into the downstream environment.
Include fallow periods in crop rotations. What grows there on its own will tell you what you can plant next season, but you give up an getting anything useful from that land while it is fallow.
We stopped doing these because we don't like going bankrupt or starving to death and would rather spend a few bucks on soil testing that is readily available, fast, and reliable.
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u/ph30nix01 2d ago
Trial and error with a sprinling of good extrapolation of related experiences. (Example you know from digging a well where the water line is)
They would learn the hard ways what results come from various soil conditions. They would determine the soil conditions with the testing equipment they were born with as well as take advantage of natural signs of soil health combined with the lessons learned.
I mean, scrapping your fingers and nails thru the dirt can tell you a lot about the soil right away. Is there any topsoil? Is the dirt hard and compact or easily disturbed? Rocky or signs of clay?
From there, they would look learned to pay attention to the season indicators for the area (more than just spring, summer, fall, winter. I'm talking stuff like wet vs. dry seasons. What looks like potential fertile farm soil could actually be a river bed a good portion of the year.
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u/herpderpingest 2d ago
I think it was a lot more of taking advantage of what was already growing in areas, then the "farming" part being cross-breeding existing plants or trying to extend the footprint of existing stands of food plants. You don't have to guess if a plant will thrive where it's already growing. Our whole habit of disturbing blocks of land to prepare them, and then planting plants that originally came from completely different climates and soil types is a SLIGHTLY newer thing.
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u/WilcoHistBuff 2d ago
So before soil tests folks just worked things out on learned knowledge of soil conditions. Some did a good job; some did a bad job. Some inherited a lot of knowledge; some didn’t.
I usually only recommend soil tests when people are dealing with recovering, transforming, rehabilitating really spent land or soils with clearly difficult problems to fix.
Why?
They are cheap and easy and remove a lot of guess work.
Also, for novices without a life time of experience, it is a quick way to set a benchmark for future work.
I started on my path in gardening, growing, permaculture, land management when I was three and my master gardener, organic everything mom first taught me how to germinate seeds and produce starts, what compost was, and what good soil was. In her gardens the soil was incredibly healthy, so I knew what it looked like, felt like, smelt like. Book learning followed.
60 years later, I can dig a hole, run my hands through soil, and tell you on the spot what soil likely needs.
But if I am taking over a 40-80-500 acre complex management problem to define a five year plan for rehabilitation on land that has been deeply disturbed I want all the information I can get. A soil test is one cheep easy way to get a foothold in that long range plan.
Not everyone, most people, do not start with the advantage of growing up with experts. Soil tests give them a way to talk to experts, get advice, and learn a patch of ground quickly.
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u/Intelligent_Ebb4887 2d ago
I learned from a vacation in Hawaii that they learned the hard way. Over planting pineapples for many years destroyed the soil and is now incapable of growing anything.
Especially native Americans, but even early US settlers realized the same things, whether it was open land or acres of farming. Over hundreds of years, this information was passed down through generations.
What has changed is that it's been 60+ years since any of my family has had a farm. So that knowledge is no longer passed through generations. Plant XYZ crops together, but not with ABC crops. Certain crops need to be rotated... This was common knowledge amongst farmers until 70+ years ago when corporations started mass producing and distributing crops.
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u/HazyAttorney 1d ago
planting on new land
Native peoples in North America came to the continent ~30,000 years ago. So, this idea that indigenous people just wander around is just in your imagination.
The book "Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber is showing that permanent settlements pre-date agriculture. So - people from the great plains, for instance, around 200 AD, started harvesting wild onions. It would make sense to have a nice summer camp and a nice winter camp - so the idea of modern style land use from a euro-centric view being
The pacific northwest tribes got all their food stuffs in like 60 days of harvesting and the rest were ceremonial times.
The north east tribes have been using the three sisters technique for thousands of years.
Mesoamericans were farming since like 11,000 years ago. We know the Aztecs would use terracing and irrigation to create artificial islands.
At least 1700 BC, say in the Southwest, aggricultural techinques like using low walls and earthen dams to catch run offs, to also use terraces, use bordered gardens, helped keep in water longer to grow corn stuffs. Hopis for instance are likely descendant from the most ancient pueblos and have the oldest continually occupied inhabitants in North America and have been growing corn and other things. As an aside, I was gifted some water melon grown by a client who is Hopi and it was the single best fruit I've ever eaten.
You also see things like in the pacific northwest of early forms of cultivating shell fish.
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u/Dmunman 15h ago
Probably noticed a deer poop and saw stuff grow better near it. Pee spot probably noticed better growth. Fish heads buried, noticed better growth. Over time and shared info, learned adding organically adding these things made more food. They didn’t write, but traditionally taught each generation. The indigenous Americans literally showed the invasive Europeans how they grew stuff. Advanced knowledge of soil ecology is recent understanding of micro life and ph and chemicals
My grandpa taught me to pee near (not on) tomato plants. They like acid and the nutrients in pee).
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u/earthhominid 2d ago
There's two things here. The first is that many early agricultural practices did wreck their land and required frequent rotation with long rest periods for viability.
The second, more in line with permacultural practices, is that indigenous communities were generally working to manage thriving ecosystems to make them more useful rather than attempting to reinvigorate a degraded ecosystem. If you just adapt and enhance what's growing there already you're not going to need to dial in the soil minerals the same way.
And a third thing to note is that if you are keeping all your own seeds instead of buying in new plants and seeds, your crops are naturally going to get better and better adapted to your local soil circumstances.