🌱 This week at Red Ants Farm
Every ewe bar one has lambed, Agnes had her litter, and the whole place is mud.
The hard part wasn't the lambing. It was working out which lamb belonged to which ewe. I wrote a whole issue a fortnight ago about getting that down at the moment it happens, and I can report from the mud that the reason I wrote it is that it's genuinely difficult. Two sets of twins in the same corner within the hour and you are, frankly, guessing. There's another one on the bottle now as well.
And it's been properly wet — which is awkward to admit in an issue about looking after your soil, given the week I've spent carting things across paddocks that would rather I hadn't.
Which brings me to the conversation I started.
I finished last week's Facebook post by asking how you'd fix my worst paddock. You told me, and led me down two different paths. One: spread lime and fertiliser. The other: stop buying inputs, get more species in, and let deeper roots and better biology sort it out.
Both argued well, and reading them I had an uncomfortable thought: I'd asked people to diagnose a paddock without giving them the one measurement that would let them. I have never tested its pH.
So I spent the week reading both sides properly, including two soil scientists making the case against liming. Here's where I came out.
🧪 This week's topic
Nobody is actually arguing about whether pH matters.
That's the thing that surprised me. I went looking for the strongest case against liming, and the soil scientists making it don't say pH is unimportant. They give more reasons it matters than the lime camp does.
Three reasons, and the third is the one you've probably never heard
1. Nutrient availability. Different nutrients become available at different pH. Beef + Lamb NZ put the optimum for pasture at around 5.8 to 6.0, and note that on hill soils lime is needed once pH drops to about 5.4.
2. Aluminium. Below roughly 5.5, plant-available aluminium climbs. And the mechanism is worth understanding, because it isn't poisoning — the root reaches aluminium and simply stops growing there. You end up with a shallow root system on a plant that looks fine in spring and falls over in January, because it can't reach water the deeper-rooted version of itself would have found. Aluminium hits legumes hardest.
3. Charge, and soil structure. I'd never heard this one before this week. A lot of the electrical charge in soil — much of it on organic matter — is pH-dependent, and that charge is what binds fine particles into crumbs, which is what creates the pores that move water and air and let roots through.
So let pH fall far enough and the charge goes, the crumb structure collapses, and the soil hardens, blows and washes. It stops being a fertility problem and becomes a soil problem. (Credit to soil scientist Phil Mulvey, who explains it better than I just did.)
So — everyone agrees pH matters. The argument is only about what to do when it's low.
What the diversity camp is right about
More than I expected, and it's not hippy stuff.
Deep-rooted species — chicory, plantain, lucerne, the clovers, cereals, radishes — put roots and organic matter further down than ryegrass and cycle nutrients up from depth. Different root shapes do different jobs, which is the real case against a ryegrass-and-clover-only sward: both are shallow and fine-rooted, and neither breaks a pan. Organic matter also buffers pH, so a rich soil holds its number more steadily.
And there's a real mechanism under the word “biology”, which I hadn't understood. Nutrients tied up inside microbes get released when something eats them — protozoa and nematodes graze bacteria and fungi and excrete nitrogen in a form roots can take up. That's the soil food web, and it isn't fringe: Dr Elaine Ingham's 1985 paper on it is foundational and heavily cited. (Massey's Whenua Haumanu programme is running long-term NZ work on this.)
Two things follow. Liming corrects the chemistry but doesn't restore the biology — the organisms that built your structure died on the way down, and the acid-tolerant ones replacing them don't do that job. And a fungal-rich soil is argued to hold on to calcium rather than let it leach away, which is a better answer than I expected to the obvious objection below.
Where I'd push back — on both
At the diversity end: buffering means pH resists change. That's not the same as rising. A well-buffered acid soil is actually harder to lift, not easier. “Diversity will bring it back up to six” is the one claim I'd want the trial data on.
And retaining calcium is not the same as replacing it. Deep roots move nutrients around the profile and good biology loses less of them — both genuinely valuable — but every lamb, bale and fleece leaving your gate takes base cations with it. Export for decades and either something comes back on, or the reserve draws down.
At the lime end: chemistry isn't the only thing wrong with most tired paddocks. Last week's Paddock 2 has been grazed too hard for months, and no amount of lime fixes that. I'd also treat “we lime every few years, so lime works” and “you have to lime every few years, so lime doesn't work” as equally lazy — pasture soils acidify continuously, so reapplying isn't proof of failure. But if you're liming more often each time, that's worth a hard question.
The bit that catches both camps out
Both sides' hero plant is the legume. Clover is the engine of the natural approach — nitrogen out of the air, free, forever. It's also, per Beef + Lamb's figures, the plant that needs pH above 5.5, an Olsen P above 15 and sulphate-S above 8 to establish, and the one aluminium goes after first.
So on a genuinely acid block, the diversity strategy can't start. You sow the clover, it never thrives, and you conclude diverse pasture doesn't work on your place — when the soil simply wouldn't let it. And the sting in the tail: fixing nitrogen is itself acidifying. The free-nitrogen engine slowly sours the ground it depends on.
So lime isn't the opposite of diversity. On an acid block it's what lets diversity work — and if your pH is already fine, the lime camp is solving a problem you haven't got and your money's better spent on seed.
So the disagreement isn't really a disagreement. It's a missing number. A soil test measures the stock — what's in there. The biology argument is about the flow — how much of it actually reaches a root, and how fast. Both camps are giving sound advice for different soils, and neither of them knows which soil you're on.
Get a soil test. Funnily enough, neither camp actually told me to — but neither piece of advice is safe without it. It's one of the cheaper things you can do on a block, your farm supply store or fertiliser rep can arrange it, and it turns a two-year argument into a fact.
Two things decide whether it's worth having: sample one paddock at a time, and walk a straight line taking 15–20 cores, well off gateways, troughs and anywhere you feed out — those spots are enriched and they'll flatter you. Note where you walked and how deep, and walk the same line next time. A test you can repeat is worth several you can't, because the number that matters isn't your pH today. It's whether it's moving, and which way.
⚠️ The fair caveat: I'm a block owner who spent a week reading, not an agronomist. Every number above belongs to Beef + Lamb NZ or the Fertiliser Association and I've said which. What to actually do about your result is a conversation with someone who can stand in your paddock.
📲 And where the app fits
Somewhere to put the result so it isn't a PDF in your inbox in three years.
A soil test is a dated measurement of a named paddock, which is exactly the shape of thing My Block Hand is for. Put the pH and the key numbers in that paddock's notes, and photograph the report while it's in your hand.
Because the value isn't this test — it's the next one. One tells you where you stand; two on the same paddock, years apart, tell you whether what you did worked. Almost nobody has the second, because the first went in a drawer.
🛠️ What's new
The vet-ready record, and two fixes worth owning.
🩺 The printed animal record is now vet-ready. Promised here twice; it's in. An animal's full history, laid out to print and hand over at the clinic, farm name on it. A confession that fell out of building it: the print button did nothing at all inside the phone apps. Not badly — silently nothing. Fixed.
💾 “Backup downloaded” was a lie on every phone. The message said saved; on a phone it hadn't. Found by audit rather than by anyone losing anything — but if you've ever taken a backup on your phone and felt reassured, take another one.
🌾 Feed had a big week, all of it from your emails. The feed store has moved out of Finances, because about a third of you had that module off and couldn't reach it at all. It's stopped assuming everything comes in bags, and you can record feed you've made or sold, not just bought.
📱 And it fits the screen better — a screen and a half of wasted space off the phone dashboard, bigger tap targets, and the animal record down from six scrolls to under four.
⚠️ All live on the web and Android — iOS is a version behind. Our 1.4.0 update has been stuck in App Store review, and nothing new reaches an iPhone until it clears. I'd rather say so than have you wondering why yours looks different.
🔜 Still coming: a block biosecurity checklist with a 14-day quarantine countdown · exports that include the milestone and timeline data they're currently missing.
💡 A practical tip
Getting a ewe to take an orphan — the perfume trick.
Thanks to Ben for this one — the sort of thing that only ever gets passed on in person, which is exactly why it belongs in here.
If you've got a lamb whose mother won't have it, spray a bit of perfume on the ewe's nose and on the lamb. She smells the same thing on both, the objection loses its footing, and often enough she takes it.
The second half is the bit I'd never have thought of. Got a second orphan going onto a second ewe? Use a different perfume or aftershave. Same scent on both pairs and you've made every ewe in the mob smell identical to every lamb — a problem you did not have five minutes ago.
💬 A community question
Have you ever soil tested your block — and did you act on it?
I suspect most of us haven't. And I'm just as interested in the people who tested, read the report and then quietly did nothing — usually that's not laziness, it's that the report didn't answer the question they actually had.
So: tested or not? If you did, what changed? If you didn't — cost, hassle, not knowing who to ask? Hit reply. I'll run the results in a future issue, and I'll have my own numbers by then.
📘 This became a full guide
Soil pH and lime for small farms.
The conversation in this issue grew into a proper evergreen guide: Soil pH and lime for small farms: do I need lime, and can pasture diversity fix it?
It covers what a soil test actually tells you and how to take one worth having, what lime does and doesn't do, why the "right" pH differs by country, soil type and sampling depth, and an evidence-first look at whether pasture diversity can correct acidity — plus what we're now doing about it on our own block.