Free The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food by Dan Barber Page A

in the eighteenth century who fed their cattle with roadside grass because they had no land of their own. These cows ended up yielding large amounts of milk, much more than other people’s pastured cows did. So farmers purchased the women’s calves for large sums, only to realize that once on pasture, the cows produced less milk. The farmers thought they were buying superior animals, but in fact it was the free, roadside grass that made the difference. Its diversity met the cows’ nutritional needs better than any poorly managed pasture.
    Perhaps the cows at Blue Hill Farm had been telling us something similar. Mr. Mitchell’s praise of the land might not, for all I know, have been genuine—a small lie to soften my grandmother and persuade her to let the cattle graze for free. Or maybe the health of the pasture had diminished overtime. Either way, the cows were telling us
something
, but instead of wondering what it was, we went ahead and fixed fence. We secured the borders, or tried to, because handling the symptoms of the problem (a faulty fence line) was a lot easier than dealing with its root cause (a hungry cow).
THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOIL
    Klaas took Rademacher’s wisdom of weed control and made it his own. He moved away from his lifelong mission to destroy weeds—a Sisyphean pursuit for any farmer—and took up a suite of interrelated strategies to strengthen the plant.
    “You can’t compartmentalize farming,” Klaas told me. “Soil fertility here, crop rotations over there, weed control somewhere else—it doesn’t work over time. All decisions should connect to plant vigor.” If plant vigor is properly supported, weeds can’t compete. Which was Klaas’s point. Is a weed really a weed if it doesn’t compete with the plant?
    Klaas and I walked to another field, this one growing spelt, an ancient species of wheat that has become one of the more profitable crops on Klaas’s farm. I wanted to learn about the mechanics of growing wheat like spelt, but Klaas was still focused on weeds.
    “At a certain point you start to notice patterns—and when I see patterns, either in a repetition of certain grasses or the absence of others, I see it as the soil talking to me,” he said. “I know it sounds corny, but the soil has a language, and its language is at least partly expressed through what weeds are growing and not growing, what’s strong and what’s weak. The trick is to learn the language of the soil. To learn what the weeds are telling us.”
    If you pay attention to which weeds proliferate, the soil will tell you what it needs. The presence of chicory or wild carrot or the lovely Queen Anne’s lace means the soil is low in fertility, a classic problem that arises when you harvest crops without returning nutrients to the soil. Milkweed is a sign thatthe soil lacks zinc; wild garlic means low sulfur. Foxtail grows most often in soils where water is poorly filtered, and thistle thrives when soil is too compact, so there’s not enough room and air for proper germination.
    In Klaas’s telling, soil communicates pretty clearly, perhaps even more clearly than people. It doesn’t mince words, doesn’t get passive-aggressive when hungry or annoyed.
What
it needs is expressed directly.
How much
of what it needs depends on the type of soil and where it’s located. Factoring in these variables, Klaas can take corrective steps for the next planting to satisfy the soil’s demands.
    That’s not to suggest that soil is
needy.
Soils can just as easily be overwhelmed by too much fertilization. I learned this lesson from Eliot Coleman as it relates to pests. Soils spoiled with an excess of nutrients become too rich. They lose balance. And pests eventually attack the weakness.
    “The crops start to resemble a guy on the street who’s had too much to drink,” Eliot told me once. “He slowly walks toward you, and you know something isn’t quite right, but from where you’re standing you can’t put your finger