Tag Archive for: Nina Prater

In a new video series: Soil Health 101: Principles for Livestock Production, NCAT Sustainable Agriculture Specialist Nina Prater makes the case for modeling soil health strategies after nature’s blueprint that produced that situation in the first place.

We all know the basic story. Plants photosynthesize sunlight and make sugars. They use the sugars to build leaves and stems and roots and seeds – pretty much everything that makes a plant a plant.

But at the same time, they share the wealth by exuding sugars from the roots to feed a “community” of soil microbes and fungi that in turn help keep the soil healthy for the plant.

A classic win-win situation.

“This layer of productive soil on top of the bedrock that we all have to work with is this vibrant living thing that has a community of life within it,” Nina says. “You have to treat it like a living thing because it is.”

And just like any living thing, there are practices that can keep it healthy and practices that can cause it harm.

Nina and other NCAT staffers produced a three-part webinar series – Soil Health 101 – through the ATTRA sustainable agriculture program, along with support from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program (Southern SARE).

You can watch the webinars here:

The series has a particular focus on the role livestock can play in soil health, but its strategies for keeping soil healthy is good information for any producer.

Those strategies are often described as the principles of soil health. Nina breaks it down to five.

  • Minimize disturbance to the soil
  • Maximize biodiversity on the land
  • Keep the soil covered at all times
  • Keep living roots growing in the soil during as much of the year as possible
  • Incorporate animals and use regenerative grazing practices

Nature provides models for how to put those principles of soil health into place, Nina says, and the webinar is full of practical examples of just that.

“To build soil health on our farm, we have to look to nature to figure out how to do that. Nature built all of these soils in the first place,” she explains. “The planet wasn’t created with all these, you know, lush terrains and prairie and everything. All that evolved over time. And it evolved with these ecosystem that built soil.”

To learn even more about the importance of soil health, and to connect with farmers, ranchers, and land managers taking steps to regenerate their soils, visit SOILFORWATER.ORG.

Photos and text by Nina Prater, NCAT Sustainable Agriculture Specialist

Image at right: Jeremy Prater practicing his shiitake mushroom inoculation skills at the mushroom workshop in Fayetteville, AR.

Last year, the NCAT Southeast office partnered with the University of Missouri’s Agroforestry Center to host a one-day mushroom cultivation workshop in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Gregory Ormsby Mori with the Agroforestry Center provided hands-on instruction, showing multiple ways of growing mushrooms. These included shiitake mushrooms in logs, oyster mushrooms grown on log totems, and wine cap mushrooms grown in a straw/woodchip bed. (Read a re-cap of the event here: https://www.ncat.org/growing-edible-mushrooms-workshop-recap-and-resources/). My husband Jeremy and I attended the workshop and were inspired to get started right away. We have a livestock farm in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, but we’re always looking for ways to diversify our operation. Mushrooms seemed like a good fit. We manage over 100 acres of forest, a ready source of both material and shady land for mushroom production.

Making a Wine Cap Mushroom Bed

There’s nothing quite like a hands-on workshop to inspire you to dive right into a new project. After the workshop, we went home and ordered spawn for oyster mushrooms, shiitakes, and wine caps. We got the oyster mushroom totems and shiitake logs inoculated last spring, but ran out of time to do the wine caps. We stored the wine cap spawn in the back of the fridge for a year (farmers’ fridges are such interesting places—we also have animal vaccines and pawpaw seeds tucked in the back at the moment).  In early April of this year, we were able to establish a wine cap mushroom bed.

You can watch this short video to see exactly how we made our wine cap mushroom bed. If you prefer a very brief written version, it’s easy: you find a shady spot either within your garden under tall plants, or in a wooded area. First, clear the surface to expose the soil and sprinkle some spawn. Next, start layering your wood chips (hardwood preferably), spawn, fresh straw, then spawn again. Continue that lasagna-like pattern (chips, spawn, straw, spawn) until you run out of spawn. Finally, top it off with wood chips to hold it all down. Soaking your wood chips and straw ahead of time is ideal.

In our video, you can see that we watered the materials as we went, since we were not able to pre-soak. We have followed up on this by making sure we watered the bed well on days it didn’t rain. It’s too early yet to say if we were successful, but I’m already optimistically researching wine cap mushroom recipes.

More on Mushrooms

Mushrooms are a great way to add diversity to your farm operation. On our farm, we’re doing it primarily for our own consumption. But our secondary purpose is as a trial-run to see if it is something we would enjoy doing commercially. To learn more about mushroom cultivation, check out these resources:

ATTRA Publication:

Mushroom Cultivation and Marketing: https://attra.ncat.org/product/mushroom-cultivation-and-marketing/

ATTRA Podcast:

Introduction to Mycology: https://attra.ncat.org/introduction-to-mycology-podcast/

University of Missouri:

Cultivation and Cuisine: Getting Started with Wine Cap Mushrooms, By Hannah Hemmelgarn, University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry: http://agebb.missouri.edu/agforest/archives/v23n2/gh4.php