Do weeds come to heal the soil?

Some people believe weeds come to show us what a patch of soil needs.

For example, Paterson's curse (Echium plantagineum) can cause copper poisoning problems in the liver. So some people presume that it spots a copper deficiency in the other plants in a field and then comes to fix the deficiency.

If you think about this for a moment, it will be clear that this is attributing human thinking to a weed. And some people even view the weed almost as if it is a comic book superhero, flying in to rescue the situation and defeat the evildoers.

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Weeds do not think. Nor do they sit somewhere waiting for the opportunity to go somewhere else once they spot a deficiency. The only lying in wait they do is pretty much in one spot or where wind, water or animals have transported them to.

In some sense it is good to use weeds as "teachers", because they indicate what is missing from the farm management and what we can learn from that. However it is that people can learn from weeds rather than weeds are teachers. It is certainly not an active process on the part of the plants.

And nor is the learning all that active on the part of some people who don't connect the increase in weeds to the changes in farm management over the past 50 years.

Weeds increase because they are the plants most able to exploit that particular niche and so the ones most likely to succeed in it. Weeds have the ability (as any other living thing does) to exploit an opportunity or make use of an advantage they happen to have.

Many weeds take this even further, they are Opportunist species.

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If you allow the weed to exploit that opportunity or get that advantage, you let it get ahead of your pasture or crop.

If instead, you give that advantage to your crops, you allow the crop to get ahead of the weed under the same conditions. If you change the conditions, you can make them more favorable to the crop and less so to the weeds.

However a lot of farming over the past 50 years or so has made it the other way because the causes weren't tackled, just the symptoms - the pests or weeds.

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Rather than attributing intentions and special healing powers to weeds, it makes more sense to
  1. LOOK AT what is going on and get an understanding of all the factors contributing to the situation. This could include working out where the weed seeds came from.
  2. WORK OUT what causes or allows the weed to get ahead or the crop to fall behind and
  3. ACT to deal with that.
  4. REVIEW the results of your actions
  5. MODIFY what you will do next time to suit what you learnt from the review.

A pest problem is an indication that the management of the farm is lacking something. By identifying what this is and dealing with it, you can have fewer pest problems.

Farmers are mostly practical people who like to do things. As a result, many farmers faced with a problem try to work out what the problem is and then use a tool on it. This satisfies the desire to do something but is not necessarily the best thing to do in that situation.

For example, if the weed could be there because the crop is not sufficiently competitive, they might apply more fertilizer or a herbicide, hoping that this will give
However, it may not make much difference in the long-term.

If the soil is in such a state that this happens regularly, there is probably a soil or management problem. It is far more sensible to deal with the overall problem the soil is facing than to try to fix the results of each problem separately.

It is far more sensible to shift management to set the farming system up for success rather than fight a continuing and worsening battle with pests.

Using tools such as fertilizers, sprays, tractors and tillage equipment to fix a problem is usually dealing with symptoms, not causes. If you work on the causes and develop a healthy farm instead of a farm that is highly medicated, you are likely to have more success.

A robust, healthy soil will have fewer weeds and the weeds will be easier to manage than those in soil that is knocked around by

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Sometimes the problem is caused by trying to do something that is not really practical. You may be trying to grow a crop in an area where there is very high pest pressure.

Rather than pouring more chemicals on, it is generally more effective to rethink it and come up with a different crop or a different market for the same crop that might be more profitable.

Otherwise, if you keep pouring chemicals on, you will end up with damaged soil and a damaged ecosystem that is less able to help you deal with pests in future.

So instead of using more and larger hammers until each one is broken by the development of pest resistance to it, it makes more sense to rethink the whole farm system before you end up farming in a wasteland.

So, do weeds come to heal the soil?
They can heal the soil

BUT

No they don't come to heal it.

They just respond to conditions that favor them. We can learn from their presence, success and failings what we need to do to heal the soil ourselves.

So weeds can help smart farmers who want to understand the causes of their problems and do something practical about them.


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Related info:

Niche

Understanding the causes of weed problems

Weed control without chemicals

SWOT analysis to boost profit

Beat pests by using advantage

Using SWOT to beat a major weed

Learning from pests

Ground cover

Selective grazing

Choosing a farming course and teacher

Allelopathy

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Summary
In some sense weeds are "teachers", because they indicate what is missing from the farm management. However it is more that people can learn from weeds than that weeds actively teach.

Weeds increase because they are the plants most able to exploit that particular niche and so the ones most likely to succeed. Weeds have the ability (as any other living thing does) to exploit an opportunity or an advantage. If you allow the weed to exploit that opportunity or get that advantage, you let it get ahead of your pasture or crop.

If you give that advantage to your crop, you allow the crop to get ahead of the weed under the same conditions. You can make the conditions more favorable to the crop and less so to weeds.


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This page was updated on December 27, 2007