LONDON, Ohio — During any planting season farmers have a never-ending battle against plant disease, plant stress, weather, insects and hungry wildlife.

But what goes on beneath the soil concerns soil expert Jim Hoorman the most. And he believes farmers aren’t giving the below-ground activities enough attention.

Hoorman, an assistant professor at Ohio State University, is an expert in the biology of soil compaction, cover crops, no-till, manure management and water quality. “Unfortunately, we’re growing plants year-round on our soils, and all we’re doing is absorbing the soil’s energy,” said Hoorman, an OSU Extension agent from Putnam County who was one of the key speakers at last month’s Farm Science Review in Ohio. “Farmers need to think of the soil as a live organism.”

According to Hoorman, there are healthy soils and sick soils. Healthy soils, he said, can support plants all year and have a healthy microbial population. Sick soils, he added, have poor water infiltration due to dense soil compaction. “Eco-farming is a system to improve one’s soils by growing and adding organic matter,” he said.

“How? By simply reducing tillage, growing diverse cover crops and improving crop rotations. The result from all this is improved soil structure, higher soil organic matter, improved water infiltration, better water storage and improved soil resiliency.”

According to Hoorman, in the past 50-100 years Ohio farm soils have lost 50-60 percent of their organic matter. “The more organic matter we have, the more productive our soils will be,” Hoorman said. “And with certain cover crops, we can restore that organic matter and have ecological farming.”

Hoorman, a proponent of no-till, begged the gathering to head in the direction of no-till if they hadn’t done so already.

“Farmers have done conventional farming for two reasons,” Hoorman said. “First, they did it to kill all the weeds. Second, they mined the soil for nutrients. They believed that – with tilling the land – they released much-needed oxygen from the soil, but in the process they simply burned up all the organic matter in the process. We need to reduce the tillage and let the microbes do the work.”

Hoorman concluded by saying that within 4-5 years of switching to no-till, they will need much less nitrogen, phosphorus, herbicides and fungicides on the soil as it will be rejuvenated.