How can I improve my soil’s biological nutrient cycling?

Anything that promotes soil health will also promote biological nutrient cycling!

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Principles of regenerative agriculture affecting nutrient cycling

Minimise disturbance

Damage to your soil structure (the home for microbes) creates conditions for nutrients to be leached, locked up, or emitted as greenhouse gases, and therefore hinders biological nutrient cycling.

• Minimise compaction and tillage from machinery and livestock, particularly when soil is wet.

• Consider alternatives to typical forage crops, such as bale grazing, deferred grazing, or multi-species forage crops that do less damage to soil.

• Minimise the use of agri-chemicals as some have a direct negative impact on soil biology and therefore nutrient cycling.

Harness diversity and maximise photosynthesis

• Maintaining highly diverse plant cover year-round will maximise biological nutrient cycling, consistently providing soil microbes with root exudates.

• Use cover cropping techniques such as drilling green, relay cropping, under-sowing, and living mulches to maximise in-crop diversity.

Manage livestock strategically / holistically

• High density, short duration, rotational grazing and leaving longer residuals allows pasture plants to recover quicker and continue feeding soil biology.

• Use longer rotation intervals to allow pasture to recover fully, grow taller, and therefore root deeper, enabling biological nutrient cycling to occur deeper in the soil profile.

• Similarly, deferred grazing allows plants to root deeper, increasing the amount of soil with active plant roots and microbes and therefore nutrient cycling.

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Other factors that can impact nutrient cycling

• In cropping systems, diverse rotations (especially those that incorporate a grazed pasture phase) will improve nutrient cycling.

• Keep all crop / plant residues on the paddock to increase the amount of organic residue returned to the soil, i.e., minimise baling and avoid burning.

• Use biostimulants and inoculants to introduce microbes and microbial stimulants to your soils.

• Make sure all nutrients (macro- and micro-nutrients) are at recommended levels, including pH. All forms of life (plants and animals) need approximately the same types and ratios of nutrients (chemical elements). When soil nutrients are at the right levels for plants they are at the right levels for all soil life.

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