Mother Earth bares her bum!

This is the scourge of the modern farmer... bare earth. It is like losing your wallet... your wealth just leaks away.

Bare earth where no Nitrohumous was spread. Grass where Nitrohumous was spread. Human waste saves agriculture! (Time lapse one year.)
An Holistic farmer hates the sight of bared earth. Bare earth is unproductive. It leaves the soil open to erosion from wind and rain. It leaves the soil open to colonisation by weeds. It offers the farmer nothing but problems. (Many conventional farmers will routinely bare their earth by ploughing, preparing the ground for sowing a crop. We never do that. Even when we sow a crop we use “Pasture cropping”, a technique of direct drilling the seed into undisturbed pasture. We believe in “Minimum Tillage” farming to protect the soil. More on that in a future blog. Billions of tonnes of topsoil are lost to the world’s farmers each year through baring the soil via ploughing. It is estimated that Australia has lost half its top soil since white settlement, due to continued baring of the soil. The wind simply carries it away.)
Bare earth can become ‘capped’ – develop a hard shell that water cannot penetrate. This can be caused by excessive pressure from heavy farm vehicles such as tractors. Exposure to the sun will also bake the soil hard. (That's why we prefer some cover, any cover...) Heavily cropped soil is often capped (many of our paddocks have been cropped continuously, without relief, since the first pioneering family took up the land for farming). Capping makes it hard for plants to push through.
We have tried many techniques to cover bare earth with productive pasture. One test was with human manure…We applied “Nitrohumous” (treated biosolids) on a 50 acre test bed. Biosolids are waste products produced by sewerage treatment works, usually in big cities. They sell them to farmers. But only after they have been treated so that the material can be safely applies to pasture.
Here are the results a year later. We applied the Nitrohumous during the most vicious drought in living memory. We are normally blessed by 650 millilitres of rain in an average year. But in 2002 we got only 413mls, in 2003 only 555mls fell. Most of it at the wrong time. In each year, we went between 14 and 16 weeks without rain. But this year we have had 705mls up to the end of November, most of it in the growing season. The dams are full, the long devastating drought is over! Now we can see the delayed effect of the Nitrohumous.
I took these photos on the fringes of the 50 acre test plot. And you can plainly see bare earth where we have not spread the stuff and flourishing grass where we have. This is because the Nitrohumous is returning the microbes to the soil. The unseen microbes are the foundation stones for growing more complex life forms such as plants. They feed the bugs that are needed for healthy soil.
This is why we spend so much time scrabbling around in the soil – looking for signs of life. We are slowly renovating this property. We are confident we can double the carrying-capacity (the number of sheep we can run) once we have done renovating. We are farming for the triple bottom line (financial, ecological, and social profits - more of this later).