Is the common knowledge about fallowing farm land wrong?

Very complicated topic and you need to narrow it to a time period and a people. The parts in Exodus which direct farmers to let land lie fallow every 7th year seem to indicate basically a welfare program for widows, orphans and criminals, who could sneak on to your land and feed themselves.

In my studies, American Indigenous people would farm land until they reached a point of diminishing returns, then abandon farmland and burn new areas of forest for farmlands in a semi-nomadic existence.

Nitrogen can be burned from the soil due to agriculture, but different crops can fix nitrogen from the air. My understanding is modern fallow practices are based on the use of domesticated clover to fix nitrogen into the soil in off periods, which is a far better method than the use of pea and bean crops previously. Of course, modern fertilizers make the whole thing moot.

I will let you know, we have been doing it for two years now trying to get grasslands back. I just have to be careful not to lose my ag exemption.

One interesting note, I have only recently become involved with the farm and one of the first things i noticed was the general attitude of other farmer/rancher types in the area is that if you were not actively planting a crop in a field you were wasting the land. If it is not producing something that you can sell, it is considered worthless. I am having a hard time with this concept. By my way of thinking, the land need time to replenish itself and growing back into its natural state is the best way for it to accomplish that.

Fallowing land is a dry land farming technique. Typically it was used where there wasn’t enough precipitation to grow wheat every year, so the land was not planted every other year. It does help with replenishing some nutrients and probably cuts down on pests but water was the driving force.

@Adirondackwannabe I know that is what has driven us to let the land lie. It was turning to dust with the last 3–4 years of drought conditions. Even the water we have gotten this year is barely helping.

Interesting. That makes sense that it would be tightly linked to the local environmental conditions. I think he was talking about farming in the Middle East primarily, many hundreds of years ago, though he also talked a good bit about rice paddies and their paracites so I’m probably mixing something up.

@rojo Obviously you’re stuck with the weather you’ve got, but does the fallow seem to be helping? You mention a risk to your ag exemption, does that mean you’ve got to weigh your decision to fallow, regardless of it’s effectiveness and the optimal estimated fallow time against government imposed critera unrelated to the health of your fields?

@fundevogel Yes, This is going on our third year. We are seeing the grasslands and native plants return in the Springs. The fields are burning up right now and the water levels, if you have any in your tanks, is low. We have a couple of springs that up until three years ago kept a creek flowing. One has completely dried up the other is barely seeping. It puts out so little water that the creek is dry 30 yards from the spring.

And yes, in a way. The land has to be “productive” in order to get and keep the exemption. One way to do it is to rotate through pastures/fields and let certain areas lie while using the rest. Unfortunately this was not done in our case.
If you have drought conditions or some other problem you can leave things alone for a limited amount of time if you keep your fences up and grasses mowed. One thing that helps us right now is that the guys whose job it is to check and verify also have farms and ranches in the area so they are intimately familiar with the situation and are suffering like the rest of us. If we were at the mercy of some beancounter in a city office we would probably be in a world of hurt right now. If you lose your ag exemption you cannot get it back for 5 years and have to go through a ton of paperwork to prove you are agricultural (and not a budding subdivision I suppose).