Soil Acidification Is an Awaking Giant Close to Home

Author: Joel Huesby | Published: December 17, 2017

The Dec. 12 front-page article, “Region’s farmers seek answer for soil acidification,” describes what may well be the most far-reaching threat to conventional crop production: soil acidification. The repeated application of relatively inexpensive nitrogen fertilizers over the past 70 years or so has indeed increased crop productivity, but it has also come at a great hidden cost.

The threat of soil acidity is like an unseen sleeping giant who is only now being awakened. Soon enough, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to undo what was done.

Even moderate soil acidification is hideous because it prevents crop roots from growing properly and taking up nutrients. The very practice that gave abundance now takes life away. Few things in nature come free. It turns out that particularly ammonic-based nitrogen fertilizers are both plant food and soil poison.

You wouldn’t want to take a whiff, but the nose knows. If soil acidification is not abated or reversed, food insecurity — on a local as well as global scale — will surely follow, and like the giant, it’s already awakening here close to home. This should get your attention.

Soils in the foothills of the Blue Mountains of Walla Walla and Columbia counties, the Palouse, and the Idaho Panhandle regions indicate acidity is widespread and becoming more severe, much with a soil pH well below 6. Peas and lentils get into trouble below 5.6 and wheat below 5.2. But some pH samples are in the mid 4s — nearly 1,000 times more acidic.

Our remarkable soils have had the ability to buffer, that is, to mask or hide, the harmful effects for a time. Like the giant, his rumblings went largely unnoticed and then… there he is.

Amendment or correction won’t be easy. In the soil on a chemical level, lime must be mixed with several feet of top soil, not just applied to the surface, in order for the reaction to occur.

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