Episode #253
Helen Atthowe: Living Pathways for Mulch, Fertility and Habitat

What if soil could grow its own fertility, suppress weeds, and feed your crops — all while building habitat for insects and microbes? In this episode of the Real Organic Podcast, Helen Atthowe joins Dave Chapman to share a lifetime of lessons from The Ecological Farm. From her early days studying under Masanobu Fukuoka in Japan to her current work in Montana, Helen has spent 40 years experimenting with living mulches, reduced tillage, and microbial balance. Her “living pathways” approach replaces off-farm inputs with home-grown fertility and ecological harmony — a blueprint for truly regenerative, real organic farming.

Our Helen Atthowe interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviews Helen Atthowe on Zoom, Fall 2025

Dave Chapman 0:00
Well, welcome to the Real Organic Podcast, and I’m talking with Helen Atthowe today, and we’re talking…it’s hard to put a real snapshot. I’ll use the title of your book, “The Ecological Farm.” And I think this is a book that bears reading a number of times, but it’s a way of thinking. It’s not just a series of techniques or it’s not a simple system. It’s a way of thinking about farming as a system and the world we live in, and seeing it as an ecological system. And how do we work with that system? So you’ve done many years of research, and I think, pretty fresh thinking about it, not, of course, nothing, nothing is invented. You got to actually farm with Fukuoka at his farm in Japan. And you know, that’s pretty amazing.

Dave Chapman 1:03
But I want to talk about, I want to go back and just review the way that you’re thinking about things. And then I want to talk about some of the challenges when this hits the economic world where either you make a living or you’re out of business, unless you happen to have significant financial resources, and God bless those who are doing something good with those resources. But let’s start Helen with, how do you think about growing food, farming and gardening?

Helen Atthowe 1:45
I’m so glad you threw in that economic caveat, too, because, of course, when I started 40 years ago, that was a huge part of my focus, because I needed to make money and pay off my land, and then I’ve spent the last 40, 45 years trying to replicate what I saw at Fukuoka’s farm. And yet, remember, there wasn’t the US economic constraint. And we could talk about that all day, but we won’t. So very different. And and so when I first started farming, I started in New Jersey, actually. And oh my goodness, I look at what I was doing then, perhaps all of us look at what we did 40 years ago and wonder. But it is kind of shocking what I believed was an organic approach, and now I’m really pushing the envelope.

Helen Atthowe 2:54
And really I’ve learned quite a bit since I wrote the book and put in all that I had done and my late husband, Carl Rosato, who really changed my thinking about about soil fertility and what our goals are when we’re trying to make a living, have a fertile soil and crop nutrition. I’d always thought about that on the side, but Carl and his mineral balancing changed it all for me.

Helen Atthowe 3:19
So that’s kind of a long introduction to where I am. I think I have always tried, even before I understood the term, to maintain a living root in the soil at all times. And that, of course, comes from Fukuoka. And that meant trying to learn to deal with cover crops and living mulches with reduced tillage, and that is what I am still learning about practically and trying to take a lot of the new microbial research, the last 5 to 10 years, and fit that into what I’m doing. And so, great success on the farm in Montana, I started with in the early ’90s, using living mulches with high nitrogen, legumes. Started out with more tillage, moved towards significantly less tillage, but always legumes with a focus on that early nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium was never an issue, and then all of the other nutrients just came along for free before I began to realize how important they were.

Helen Atthowe 4:56
Then farming with Carl in California and realizing with his orchard, his well-established orchard system, how to reduce tillage even more. We semi-retired to 211 acres in Eastern Oregon and began a new no-till orchard and experiments with how far could we reduce tillage and maintain that, that living root in the soil, and still make a living. And what could we, what could we add to the system that, since we were growing all of our fertilizer in place and taking up land to do that, what were the other benefits, such as maybe reduced weeding, significantly reduced weeding, and no spraying and no applying off-farm inputs for disease and insect control? So we we did get to those levels, but again, I am ever reminded of the complexity involved. My last statement before I let you talk again, is I so enjoyed at Churchill-

Dave Chapman 6:19
Churchtown, Churchtown.

Helen Atthowe 6:21
Churchtown, excuse me, Churchtown! I so enjoyed Churchtown and JM Fortier’s interview of Eliot Coleman, where he said, “We’re thinking in terms of process rather than products,” and that really has been the journey for Carl and I over the last 20 years, anyway, if not longer, trying to understand these processes.

Dave Chapman 6:56
Yes, okay, I already have a million questions. We’ll never get anywhere, because there’s so much depth here. Let’s go back just for a minute. We’re definitely going to go forward to Eliot’s conversation. That’s very important that we share about that. But just way back to Fukuoka, most people actually won’t know who that is anymore, because when I was young Fukuoka was this kind of rock star of alternative agriculture. He was a Japanese man. He wrote a book called “One-Straw Revolution” and the idea of that was essentially, as I understood it at the time, was no-till. And it was really inviting a complex, a very complex ecosystem, into your farm. And I have to say, I heard a story once from somebody else who went and worked over with Fukuoka that, yes, that was his “One-Straw” plot. But then there was his commercial plot, which was very much like a typical market garden. Did that person get it wrong? Or was that true?

Helen Atthowe 8:05
I think there was evolution over time, for sure, and I think Fukuoka kept learning as well. I think the orchard and the grain production was relatively what we read about in “One-Straw Revolution,” but honestly, there was some chicken manure involved, not till then, but more to the nitrogen dynamics than I had originally believed when I read the book.

Dave Chapman 8:38
Yes, and you know, that’s one of the things I just want to say that I truly appreciate about your work is I believe it. And, you know, people can be very, I’ve heard it said of fertility, fertility pastures, you know, that his reality was a little bit different from what he wrote about. And, you know, and it’s fine, but it’s important, if we’re going to base our choices on these other words, that we can believe that they told us the good, the bad and the ugly. Because sometimes the ugly is ugly, so-

Dave Chapman 9:14
But you said from Fukuoka, you did get this belief in the importance of the roots. And I think this is a question I’ve had for a long time working with Eliot. And, you know, I’ve always wondered, well, if you had a mixed field of forbs and legumes, and you chopped it, and then you spread it as a mulch on your crop- I happen to grow a very intensive tomato crop- are you getting the same benefits as a living mulch? And I think you would say, no.

Helen Atthowe 10:34
Yeah, very good. Okay, okay, just to help me out a little bit. Your bed, if you had a vegetable bed, which might be a mixture of vegetables in that bed, or it might be all one thing, you might have all carrots, you might have some chard in there, whatever. How wide is a bed?

Helen Atthowe 14:39
So it used to be that beds were anywhere from 300- to 600-foot length by about, I had a bed-maker that could make me about a 3 1/2-foot bed, and I still kind of try and do that by hand. So about a 3- to 4-foot bed, maybe a little wider now that I’m doing it with the equipment that I do have. And by the way, I grew up with equipment, I still utilize a lot of equipment. I am a believer in equipment. So I no longer have my raised bed equipment, darn it. That would make life easier if I did, but I don’t.

Helen Atthowe 15:26
So I do that, and then the living mulch, or the living walkways, have varied in size from in my early years to not more than a foot, to wide enough that I could get a mower in between them, so I didn’t have to push my little BCS mower, which I’m far too old for at this point. To when I, when my late husband Carl and I designed these no-till orchards, or these vegetable production systems where our goal was to see really, what did we need? What amount of land did we need to not bring anything in from off-farm.

Helen Atthowe 16:23
We got to even larger, wider beds in between, and now I have orchard. So I have a 600-foot row of orchard, and then I have enough to take my 10-foot rotary mower when I need to in between that and the vegetable production, which is a long 600-foot row, about 3 1/2- to 4-foot wide. And now, of course, there’s mixed vegetables in there. I am no longer farming commercially. So we, we no longer have 600-foot rows of a single vegetable.

Dave Chapman 17:10
Yes, although I saw some boxes of tomatoes that you sent me a picture of, so it seems that you’re still selling a little bit.

Helen Atthowe 17:18
Honestly, I had to sell sweet corn because the yields were so darn high, and all my young farming friends didn’t have organic sweet corn, so they were happy to get boxes of that and sell it at their stands. Right now, some of them would like the tomatoes, but honestly, I have been not selling those gorgeous heirloom tomatoes, and I could have made money on those.

Dave Chapman 17:48
They look great. Okay, gosh, too many questions always. So I’m going to jump, I’m going to jump line here, because I want to just talk about what I do and get your response to that. So I am a super intensive grower of greenhouse tomatoes, and I would say that, you know, there’s this continuum from wheat farmers who have very low yields and in desert-like conditions, to the old classic intensive market gardeners, and JM and Eliot are both examples of that, and Eliot has loosened up a little bit. He’s got more green manures integrated into his system now, and because he’s kind of trying to completely eliminate bringing in anything for compost. And he wants to grow it on the place, because he doesn’t trust the materials, the animal manures, that he might get from the world.

Helen Atthowe 18:49
Oh, interesting.

Helen Atthowe 18:51
Right? Because we know that virtually, not all, but virtually all animal manure is now coming from a CAFO. And, you know, even ethics aside, the content of the manure has changed based on that what the animals are eating has changed. And so he’s like, I don’t want to bring in something and discover I’ve got glyphosate in my garden. So, I’m going to grow it.

Helen Atthowe 19:24
Can I just interrupt?

Dave Chapman 19:25
Please.

Helen Atthowe 19:26
Let’s say that, coming back to Montana, after farming with my husband for 15 years, it is now very, very difficult to get manure that doesn’t have herbicide in it. And more than glyphosate, we have even longer-term herbicides people are spraying for things like knapweed and terrible, terrible results. And then the other thing that has happened is that there used to be, down the road from me, certainly down the road from my old farm, a pellet mill. And I could get them to grind me 100-pound sacks of alfalfa meal when I started just fertilizing the bed only, and not the whole field, with compost. That pellet mill is gone. The only way we can get that kind of fertilizer in this part of Montana now is to import it by truck. Can you believe it?

Dave Chapman 20:32
Yes, I know. Let me quote Tom Willey, whom I interviewed. I’m sure you know Tom. Of course, you know Tom. He was moderating the panel you were on, and he said to me, “Well, let’s face it, there is no organic agriculture without Haber-Bosch process.” And I said, “What do you say?” And he said, “Well, because all the compost that all the organic farmers are using are coming from CAFOs, and without that compost, organic isn’t going to continue.” I said, “Well, that might be, might be true in California. It’s not true in the rest of the country.”

Dave Chapman 21:11
It’s true, though, what you say that a lot of compost is being derived from confinement livestock, and it’s not right. We need to do something about it. So, and you know, this is back to, Eliot says, “Well, let’s grow it.” Okay, so you’re growing it too. You’ve completely stopped using compost years ago, and you’re not using that as an input. You’re growing your organic matter, which is creating this not only abundant but diverse microbial community in the soil. What an interesting thing. You don’t ever need to sell anything Helen. You just need to keep doing your research and spreading the word. Because who else is doing this, really?

Dave Chapman 21:54
I want to get to that too, but, so okay, Eliot is saying, you know he’s still, well he has passed on his farm, but he’s still testing, just as you and in fact, he’s cleared a field in the back. So it’s the same terrible soil he started with on his whole farm. It was this spruce forest, and he cut it and cleared it. And now he’s seeing, rather than bringing in somebody’s old horse manure, which is what he did, and a whole bunch of seaweed, he’s seeing if he could do it all with green manures. And how long does it take to get that soil up to snuff?

Dave Chapman 22:30
Now, a difference between Eliot’s technique and yours is that Eliot actually believes in tillage, and so he will grow his green manure, and maybe even for a year, year and a half, and then till it in, and then plant, and then come back again. And so let’s just say approximately half of his land, it might be a little less, but let’s say half of his land is in green manure in a given year. And you’re saying, “Well, I’m kind of doing the same thing, except I’m spreading my beds out and putting the green manure in between them and then mowing and blowing.” Did I get that right?

Helen Atthowe 23:07
You did get that right. I want to interject and say that one of my heroes, Ian Tolhurst in England, has been doing cover cropping only for 20 years. He’s a veganic farmer, so he doesn’t use any manure. And he does that. He’s got this exciting rotation, and I won’t go on too far. But yes, at least a year in cover crop that then he lets bloom to provide what my living mulches do, which is a sequential season-long bloom for beneficial insects, predators and parasites. And then he kind of balances carbon to nitrogen ratios. And after a year to 2 years, he he tills that in. Anyway, kind of an interesting-

Dave Chapman 24:00
Oh, that’s all so interesting, it’s very important that there are, there are pioneers out there trying this and that, and developing these systems.

Helen Atthowe 24:08
Exactly. And I want to say that I am now moving a little more towards what Eliot’s talking about. Because I have found over the last 15 years of playing with, can the living mulches provide enough fertility for a good yield? And of course, there’s that question of the living mulches becoming competitive over time with the crops in the bed. So the way I have changed things a little bit for certain crops – I didn’t used to seed cover crops because I didn’t have to, I had all this residue – but what if, instead of having so much space devoted to living mulch, what if I have a little less space? What if I overseed the crops that that we know work well, are not so competitive if our timing is exactly right? What if we overseed cover crops and have our cover crops be part of the rotation?

Helen Atthowe 25:30
And so I’m doing that, and the results this year were just extraordinary. Adding one other piece of equipment, I used my, I call it my single-shank chisel plow. But my ripper, using my ripper at one point of the strip-tillage process and then overseeding things like sweet corn when it’s about six inches tall. And, oh my goodness, you should see how I used yellow sweet clover because the seed is so cheap, you can see how competitive it looked like.

Helen Atthowe 26:08
But the yield was great, and now I have a much better, what I call balanced carbon-to-nitrogen ratio, which, in my belief, gives me a balanced, abundant and diverse microbial community. When I strip-till in the old corn roots that are, of course, not living anymore, with the exuberant, still in Montana in October, yellow sweet clover roots. And they will, of course, by the time I till them in, they will be greening up in very…a much lower carbon-to-nitrogen ratio when I till them all in. And that will give me more nutrients than just the mowed-and-blowed living mulch. Does that make sense?

Dave Chapman 26:57
Well, for a minute, let me get some clarity here. So, you’re saying the corn is up, and then you undersow with the clover?

Helen Atthowe 27:04
Mhmm.

Dave Chapman 27:04
Did I get that right? Okay.

Helen Atthowe 27:06
Dead. I just wanted to say that I stole some of these overseeding timings (they obviously have to be tweaked for Montana) from Doug Collins’s great work at Washington State University. And, oh dear, I’m having a mental block. Oh, there’s some great work at Oregon State University. Nick Andrews is doing some really good work with the small farm group at Oregon State University, working with some of the pioneers in organic farming, almost as old as I am, who are now trying to figure out how to get this living root into their systems, but not change their system so significantly. So they’re figuring out equipment for overseeding and what cover crops can be overseeded at what times, and what crops for effectiveness. Isn’t that great?

Dave Chapman 28:17
So when you’re overseeding, I call it undersowing, so it’s great. I’m just-

Helen Atthowe 28:20
Sorry.

Helen Atthowe 28:21
No, no, no! It’s just to understand. So are you broadcasting that seed? Or are you drilling it in some way?

Helen Atthowe 28:28
I would drill it, were I in my old system. And that’s what Nick Andrews has done, has worked on some great equipment for drilling it into different crops. Because I’m so small now, I am overseeding it, which means it’s very thick. I mean, I’m sorry, hand-sowing, which means-

Dave Chapman 28:46
You put a lot of seed in.

Helen Atthowe 28:49
Yeah, and I just want to add that one of the reasons I like my hand-sowing is I did get to try this with a bucket list project in, oh, I guess it was about 2010. My good friend, who’s no longer with us, wanted to try to do some more ecological approaches to their 2000 acre vegetable, organic vegetable farm in Colorado, and we just tried a small block. We had 10 acres of broccoli compared to 10 acres of broccoli without seeded living mulch. And that was an interesting learning experience for me, the yield was significantly lower-

Dave Chapman 29:43
In the broccoli with the living mulch?

Helen Atthowe 29:46
With the seeded when we went through. And what we did is we drilled it onto the bed, then we transplanted the broccoli immediately.

Dave Chapman 29:54
Yeah.

Helen Atthowe 29:56
Okay, remember, I was still learning, you know, that was 15 years ago. Still learning timing, and I would do it very differently now, but equipment, that’s what we had. And then the other block was cultivated and hand-hoed with a crew of 300. Aha. So the yield was lower, but the profitability was comparable, and even perhaps a little higher. And that was an “aha!” moment for me, although, honestly, I was so embarrassed by what the field looked like at the time. So, anyway.

Dave Chapman 30:42
You were embarrassed because it was considered, I’ve noticed on Midwest and California farms that people are embarrassed if there’s weed in their field. Is that-

Helen Atthowe 30:52
Oh my gosh, yes.

Dave Chapman 30:53
That’s what it was like? The farmer was like, this is, I don’t want anyone to see it.

Helen Atthowe 30:57
And I remember that this was a 2000-acre farm that was, you know, had been going for about 30 years, very heavy inputs of manure. It was in an area where there were a lot of dairies, and I guess, you know, at this point, some of them we would call CAFOs. So then we could get manure. At the time, it was still, it was becoming expensive even then, but we could get it. But that they had done lots of tillage, lots of dairy manure, and, oh my goodness, the weed seed bank was extraordinary. So, of course, now I’ve learned that you don’t just jump into this system. You assess the weed seed bank as well, first.

Dave Chapman 31:46
Okay, okay. So, good. Let’s go there just for a minute. All right, you’ve learned a great deal. You’ve learned a lot just in the last two years since we last did a formal interview. Well, let’s start with my farm, and then we’ll go to a field system. So here I am. I grow in very expensive greenhouses. So, these are expensive on inputs, not of chemicals or anything like that, but of energy, of propane and the capital cost of the greenhouse is high. And so we have the typical farmers equation, which is that we need to have high yields in order to meet that, or we need to find something else to do. And, you know, great, we could make this a research thing and fund it somehow as a non-profit. That’d be good.

Dave Chapman 32:38
But trying to do it as a business. We have very rich soil. We’ve put a lot of compost in. We don’t tend to have much of a weed problem, but we’ve got a 42-inch bed and then about an 18-inch path. Would you- you would start off first by seeding those paths, and you’d get, because there, if I just let them go, it would take quite a while for much to come up there.

Helen Atthowe 33:06
Are these movable high tunnels, or are these, you know-

Dave Chapman 33:09
No, this is a glass greenhouse.

Helen Atthowe 33:11
Ah! Well.

Dave Chapman 33:12
Yeah. It’s prime-

Helen Atthowe 33:14
Real estate.

Dave Chapman 33:15
Yeah, it’s expensive real estate. Yeah, that’s right. I did build, I think, the first movable greenhouse in America. That was a long time ago, and it was beautiful. We rolled it back and forth over tomatoes and melons or lettuce or whatever. But this is just tomatoes. So if you were looking at this going, well, I want to, maybe I can’t grow all my fertility, but how much could you grow with that 18-inch path? And actually, we’re transplanting the tomatoes, so you could undersow those plants at some point, if it wouldn’t create more competition than it was worth, if you see my point.

Helen Atthowe 33:56
I do.

Dave Chapman 33:58
We could undersow them, but with the competition, set back the crop. I’m very mindful of the 3-year experiment in low-till in California. And our friends, you know, who did it, and, you know, Scott, and Full Belly, and Phil. And their conclusion was that this works very well, except we had a 10% reduction in yield, so we can’t do it. Not to say that it will never be worked out, but to say that’s where we’re at. And these are people who are amongst the best organic vegetable growers in America, in my opinion. And they did very competent job.

Helen Atthowe 34:40
Exactly. I’ve seen, certainly Full Belly’s fields, and chatted with them a lot. I guess what I’m going to say now, I’m struggling a little bit with my high tunnel, and I didn’t struggle with the high tunnel in Oregon, and I’m still trying to figure out the difference. Well, one of them was that it was, well, they’re both movable, but on my own now it’s harder for me to move this high tunnel, so I haven’t moved it, and this will be the third winter in the same place. So I-

Dave Chapman 35:20
What crops are you growing in that tunnel?

Helen Atthowe 35:22
And, of course, I’m growing everything. And actually the tomatoes are doing the best. But I have had slug issues with my greens, particularly my brassicas. And the first year I had vole issues. So I learned, learned about the biology of voles and, knock on wood, that one seems to be figured out. But then the slugs have been an issue for the first time. So, long story short, without my heavy mulch system, obviously, in the field, we have enough of a balance with the beneficial organisms that slugs are are not problematic, but in the greenhouse, or in the high tunnel, I’ve not had a, uh, this new farm has has not been high yields for me.

Helen Atthowe 36:15
That being said, I think that you probably can’t grow your own fertility in that level of real estate at that system. Maybe, if it were movable and you could throw it over to a cover crop for at least, you know, the spring, I think you could, you could do it. I’m going to just throw this thought out. There might be a reason to go with an annual legume, something that you could change the diversity within the system, something that would be there perhaps longer, and something that would not screw up your nitrogen dynamics too much. Which is, I think, what I know, was the problem at, for example, at Phil’s and at Full Belly.

Helen Atthowe 37:22
My good friend, who’s been a friend for years and years, oh gosh, 30 years, is hardly speaking to me. Actually, I’m teasing, but he is, he’s just recently retired as as Phil’s field consultant, and he was so against all of the reduced-till and no-till experiments, but actually their best results were with tomatoes. So what I’m going to say is I think if we get it right, we can do overseeding or underseeding, if we think about a really low carbon-to-nitrogen ratio residue, we incorporate it and/or surface apply when the carbon-to-nitrogen ratios are- certainly when we have higher nitrogen and higher phosphorus-to-carbon ratio, or carbon-to-phosphorus ratio.

Dave Chapman 38:29
So Helen, does that mean that you’re going to mow it when it’s younger?

Helen Atthowe 38:33
Exactly.

Dave Chapman 38:34
You’re going to deal with it more like a mature lawn, as opposed to something that’s going to grow two feet high and then you’re going to mow.

Helen Atthowe 38:43
Yes, although not too early. Some experiments that I did at the other Montana farm when I was younger, I was so intrigued to see that, actually, with my white clover mulch, when I mowed it too early, it was a higher carbon-to-nitrogen ratio. I had to wait till it got big enough to establish a root system and develop functioning rhizobium nodules. Does that make sense?

Dave Chapman 39:16
It does. I have a question about that. So-

Helen Atthowe 39:19
Now remember, I had, I was really lucky, one year or two years, to have one of the top mycorrhizal specialists in the world be at the University of Montana. So he was very helpful on that experiment. But with, with this particular experiment, remember, I am not a microbial ecologist. I just play one in the field.

Dave Chapman 39:46
So in your experience, it was my understanding that, that legumes won’t fix nitrogen if there is a lot of nitrogen in the soil. So if you have a very rich soil, they’re not going to bother.

Helen Atthowe 40:03
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 40:03
But if they’re hungry, they’re going to, we’re going to get a lot of nodules, we’re going to fix a lot of nitrogen. Is that, does that sound right?

Helen Atthowe 40:09
And we saw that too, indeed. So, so we, you know, we were, by the time I did this experiment, I was down to adding about two tons per acre of the manure compost, and you have to drive really fast to put out that little amount of compost. And I was, you know, I had the living mulches and, anyway, things were- we had what I am thinking of now as available, and slowly available, nitrogen.

Dave Chapman 40:46
Yeah. So, okay, so you’re saying, if you were to undersow some kind of legume under the tomatoes, that could work, but don’t let it become too carbonaceous. Fairly young, in order to keep the nitrogen balance right for the tomato plants.

Helen Atthowe 41:10
Exactly, and see, and I would sow relatively thick, because a lot of people, to manage weeds, of course, do a nice mixture, which is true, and it would be a little more higher carbonaceous. But I think in this, I think in this case, we would choose the nutrient cycling dynamics and the faster rate of decomposition, and try to make sure that the legume itself didn’t become competitive. Hence why I suggested perhaps an annual to begin with, not, God forbid, what I used later in my years, red clover, which is ridiculously competitive, more competitive to the white clover, which is significantly more competitive than berseem or one of the other annual clovers.

Dave Chapman 42:15
Okay, so you would, you would try berseem or some other annual clover as an undersowing in the tomato crop, and then keep it mowed. Don’t, don’t let it go into flower and all that.

Helen Atthowe 42:30
Well, here’s what I would do. I would mow it. I would do selective mowing. I would mow it early, as your tomato transplants are establishing their root system. Then as your tomatoes got bigger, as long as it wasn’t too difficult in your high-value real estate area, I might let every other row flower and then mow and let the other one flower, because if we’re going to do it, let’s get those living roots. Let’s add some diversity, but let’s also get some wonderful habitat. You know, I, I am so excited to say I just haven’t seen aphids in years. I’ve got slugs in this new no-till, or, you know, minimal-till high tunnel. But I used to have, you know, 30 years ago, I would put my transplants out. They would go out, my pepper transplants. I was a big tomato and sweet pepper grower. I would put them out with a few aphids. They would still have aphids. And, you know, I would deal with that. It just doesn’t happen anymore.

Dave Chapman 43:40
Yeah, yeah.

Helen Atthowe 43:42
And those heirloom tomato shots I sent you? Here we are with some darn cold temperatures in October for, I mean, in Montana, not as cold as it should be, but, but cold. I am still not seeing blossom end rot.

Dave Chapman 44:02
Yeah.

Helen Atthowe 44:02
Isn’t that shocking? You’re a tomato grower, you get it! Everybody else around me, I- I’m sending friends pictures of all the tomatoes out in the field and the ones in boxes. And people think I’m strange and wonder why there aren’t pictures of people. But it’s so exciting to me.

Dave Chapman 44:22
No, the whole thing is very exciting. You know, the farm that I have seen your ideas expressed in, I have to say, in this case, he didn’t get the ideas from you. That’s fine. They just evolved their own system, is King Grove down in Florida.

Helen Atthowe 44:38
Yes, yes, I’ve seen that.

Dave Chapman 44:40
They entirely, their whole fertility program is mowing the living mulch and blowing a thatch into the rows of blueberries. And the plants are old, and they continue to be very productive, and the fruit tastes incredible. And they have zero insect problems. They have plenty of insects, but zero insects that become a problem. And, you know, it’s, it’s your whole ecological system being expressed. I’m curious, are there, are there farms who are- you’re connected to, and you’re sharing, I, you know, they’re saying, “Yes, we’re doing this,” and you’re going, “Great, tell me all about it.”? Is there a network of farms who are really working on this with you?

Helen Atthowe 45:26
I want to say yes, but first, I want to just make sure it’s clear that for me, with perennial crops, like our orchard crops and even my strawberries, but that’s another story, but certainly with my new orchard, which is sweet cherries, apples, plums, pears, this no-till and the living mulch, and growing your own fertility is pretty much a no-brainer. I am adding some some Azomite and seaweed. But in terms of my my main fertilizer, my main NPK, calcium, all my nutrients, it is farm grown. So that is a no brainer. My struggles have been with the annual crops.

Dave Chapman 46:16
Yeah, and in the, in the tunnel, you’re, because the space is expensive and precious, you’re not able, necessarily to grow all of the, all of the fertility, in the past, you might need to bring something in.

Helen Atthowe 46:32
And so I’ve been bringing in my own farm grown alfalfa, grass, hay mix. And yeah, the crops do like it. My yields have been not good enough, but the crops are doing okay, but the slugs adore it.

Dave Chapman 46:51
So you, you bring it in as a brown matter mulch, or green chopped up mulch-

Helen Atthowe 46:58
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 46:58
-to lay on the bed. Do you ever consider composting it first and bringing it in as a brown compost?

Helen Atthowe 47:05
I think that’s a brilliant idea. And remember, I’m trying low labor inputs too, because, as I said, you know, I’m doing- it’s only 120 fruit trees, and, as I said, you know, one 600-foot row of vegetables- but I’m doing it virtually myself, with equipment, and so adding composting to the story would probably put this old lady under. But I do think it’s a good idea for young, energetic people.

Dave Chapman 47:36
It would take care of the slugs, instead of giving them this perfect slug habitat. I just, I want to call out because, so, in the consultants…go ahead.

Helen Atthowe 47:51
I forgot to mention that Jesse Frost did a wonderful podcast, which, what he called “The Legends of Living Walkways.” And there were several of us, and it was so much fun to ask each other questions. And the other two farmers were back east.

Dave Chapman 48:16
Okay, okay, so there are other people doing it. We know that. I mean, I know that, I was just curious, actually, when I started to ask that question about, about how much of a…cohort have you formed of people who are sharing these ideas and going, “I tried this. This is what happened.” Is there an ongoing dialog? Do you have a chat room where you share ideas?

Helen Atthowe 48:40
I don’t have a chat room. That’s a really good idea. I talk to people as I go to different conferences. I think the people I’ve chatted with most are people like Doug Collins at Washington State University. I really just love his research. And he, he’s the one that got me to thinking, you know, my brassica yields are lower than when I used to use, probably that 10% that, that Full Belly and Phil talked about, lower than when I used to use a lot of compost. Some of the other yields aren’t, interestingly enough.

Helen Atthowe 49:24
But so how do I, how do I manage my nitrogen dynamics? And that’s what, what has led me to some of these different things I’m doing the last two years. Shoot, I was going somewhere with that. Oh, yes. And, and then this work that Nick Andrews has done with some of the pioneering market gardeners from, you know, one to, I believe, 20 acres in Oregon. So yes, I don’t, we don’t have a chat. We probably should, but I periodically talk to them and we commiserate, and we talk about our successes.

Dave Chapman 50:11
You know, it strikes me, Helen, that, that the things you’re working on, those ideas, really address directly, most of the failures of industrial agriculture. And I mean, they really do. They solve the problems. It’s like, look, you no longer need pesticides because you’re growing your insectary…in my world, in the world of greenhouse vegetables, and most of it is hydroponic, most of it is in, not even in the United States. Most of it’s in Holland. And now it’s moving into Mexico and, you know, Canada, they’re, these are big greenhouses, much, much bigger than mine. But there’s some really interesting work with some great entomologists, and they’re working a lot with banker plants and hanging them. They’ve got, they’re, listen, hanging these pots around the greenhouse and all.

Dave Chapman 51:05
But you’re, you’re going much, much further than that, and you’re saying, “To heck with that.” Let’s just be growing this beneficial habitat throughout, throughout the crop and if we can figure out the mowing so that we keep habitat going, so we alternate where we mow when, we don’t have a problem, right? It’s like, you don’t see aphids.

Helen Atthowe 51:29
Absolutely. And your point is well taken. I feel like, you know, I came out of the integrated pest management world, so that was how I first started thinking about this. And then, you know, when I was at Rutgers 100 years ago, they were telling me that I would never be able to get the nitrogen, the NPK, but particularly nitrogen, that I needed for organic vegetable production. Well, I proved them wrong with lots of compost, and we all did. And Stuart Hill, I remember, when I was at Rutgers, I corresponded with Stuart Hill because he was doing, some, 40 years ago, some of the most exciting cover crop work. And he said, “Yeah, you can, I think”.

Helen Atthowe 52:15
And I mean, just, it was just 40 years ago that we thought we couldn’t do this, and now I’m trying to figure it out with living mulches, and realizing, yeah, now maybe too much land is needed for the living mulches, but if I add this low carbon-to-nitrogen ratio legume into my rotation, my legume cover crop into my rotation, whoa! You should have seen the beets and the onions looked like small pumpkins this year.

Helen Atthowe 52:54
So this is, you know, of course, I’ve got to do it for another 10 years to make sure that it’s real, but I’m really excited by how poorly I did the first year on this farm, and a little better the second, and this year it would have been commercially economical selling at a farmers market. I still have not figured out how to do this on the scale, for example, that my 2000 acre friends did, where we use a lot of equipment. So I had these gorgeous, long, uniform carrots, but I had to dig them by hand. Oh, my goodness, you know, that-

Dave Chapman 53:44
Wait, wait, you said gorgeous, long and uniform, but were they delicious?

Helen Atthowe 53:49
They were delicious!

Dave Chapman 53:51
Don’t leave that out!

Helen Atthowe 53:53
We haven’t even, oh my goodness, the difference in the the nutritional quality, which I’m still having trouble measuring, but I want to, we’ve been, my husband and I measured minerals. You know, micronutrients and, you know, minerals, but I really want to get at vitamins and antioxidants and just barely playing with that. So this year, there were peppers grown with extra nitrogen, and peppers grown with just the system nitrogen, and still waiting on the antioxidant and vitamin data.

Helen Atthowe 54:35
But what I noticed, and I’m going to be interested to hear what you think about this, because I think I’m surprised. This was with sweet peppers, the yield was higher, ultimately, both above-ground biomass and fruit yield, and not significantly, probably more like 5% than 10%, but the yield was higher with the extra nitrogen peppers, but they turned red two weeks later. They were slower to come to what I consider the saleable part of my peppers. And I’m a little surprised by that. What do you think?

Dave Chapman 55:24
I don’t know peppers [laughing]. Sorry!

Helen Atthowe 55:28
Oh, ok. Think about it with tomatoes!

Dave Chapman 55:31
Yeah.

Helen Atthowe 55:31
And maybe, now that I think about it, because, boy, these tomatoes, you know, with less water, for example. So maybe, because they, yeah. So maybe they were, I don’t know [laughing]. They didn’t, they didn’t look stressed, except that they did have less foliage earlier, right? They came into their foliage weeks later than the higher nitrogen. So were they stressed? Hence, they ripened earlier? They set fruit and ripened earlier?

Dave Chapman 56:08
Yeah.

Helen Atthowe 56:08
I don’t know, and it’s only one year of data, so-

Dave Chapman 56:12
That’s right. I still have a lot of faith in the tongue test, is, which ones are delicious? I really, I- we’ve tried testing for nutrition, and it all seems to be crazy talk, the results are just nuts. And what isn’t nuts is how they taste and, and actually, it’s not complicated, and it’s not like, well, you think they taste good! Pretty much, if I think it tastes good, everyone thinks it tastes good. And I think that that is a reflection of nutrition. Now, I don’t know about, you know, you start talking about Twinkies and Doritos, you know, okay, that creates craving in people. So I can’t say everything that you crave is good for you, but I think if you’re talking about carrots? I think the ones that taste good are the ones you should eat. Tomatoes?

Helen Atthowe 57:01
And the color.

Dave Chapman 57:03
Are the ones you should eat.

Helen Atthowe 57:04
And the color. So these carrots, for example, were a darker, lovely orange. And I said, oh! This is going to be good. Let’s taste them. And indeed, of course, they were. And, as we know, color correlates with antioxidant content so I think that’s good. Yeah. I mean, our whole business in California, my late husband and I, our peaches. We went to seven farmers markets. That was our, our business model, and it was based on having some of the best tasting peaches in the Bay Area. So, yeah, I agree. And when I raised peppers, when I raised peppers, it was the same thing. Not only the taste, but people said they lasted longer. They, you know, they were heavier. I don’t know. I just say thicker cell walls. But indeed, they they were thicker. They didn’t break down.

Dave Chapman 58:05
All right, look, we’re going to run out of time, but I have a couple things I have to ask, and then we’re just going to have to keep doing…I’ll, I’ll just interview you three times a year, and we’ll get caught up eventually. So I want to, I want to just give you a chance to talk, Helen, about…we’ve talked a bit about the idea of the habitat for all the beneficials, and the bad guys! So what we’re looking for is a balance. We’re not just saying I want to have a habitat that is really great just for persimilis so I don’t have spider mite. I want to have a habitat that is good for such a diversity of insects that nobody gets out of balance. It’s just, there’s a balance there, and as long as there’s a balance, my crop is very happy.

Dave Chapman 58:48
And so we’ve talked a bit about nitrogen cycling, and that you have to watch the carbon-nitrogen ratio. So if you’re, if you’re mowing your green manure, and you might have a conflict here with your habitat, but you want to mow it when it’s, if you’ve got a high nitrogen crop, like tomatoes, you want to mow it when it’s fairly young. Okay. Well, let’s talk just for a minute about, and I know this is the one that’s probably hardest to test, but the microbial diversity. And, you know, we’ve got a complex conversation going on in the world.

Dave Chapman 59:24
We now understand that we have a microbiome, we all do, and we understand that our health and happiness is very dependent on that microbiome. And it’s not just, oh, I need to take my yogurt supplement, or whatever. It’s creating a whole complex feed stock for a very complex group of microbes, not just a lot, but a real diversity. It’s the same thing, with building a very diverse community in and on us. So you’re taking that principle and looking at it in the soil, and you’re saying, if I, if I can speak for you for a moment, you can correct me. If you’re just growing tomatoes, Dave, then it’s great. And you’ve put in compost, so you’ve got a lot of things living in that soil. But if you’ve got 15 plants growing between this row of tomatoes and that row of tomatoes, something special is going to be going on that will benefit those tomatoes, right? So could you talk about that?

Helen Atthowe 1:00:28
The way you describe it, it sounds like magic and perhaps part of it is. I like to think that I have done enough field testing that I’m beginning to understand this, along with doing just ridiculous amount of literature review and trying to figure it all out. So when I first started in the ’90s, I looked at total microbial biomass, number one, because the soil scientist at the University of Montana was an expert in that method. And then, and fortunately, it was all with the same crop. I started with brassicas, and I continue to do brassicas.

Helen Atthowe 1:01:15
Then we were lucky enough to have Matthias Rillig come from Europe and be at the University of Montana, so we did mycorrhizae, and that was fascinating, because, of course, brassicas are not mycorrhizal formers, right? So the experiment we did was comparing regular, quote, unquote, conventional tillage, minimal tillage, which I’m learning so much more about, but we were just starting with the concept of two inches of tillage. And what does that mean, versus the system of no tillage, and then vinegar…

Helen Atthowe 1:02:00
So we did all of these different things, and anywhere where we did just a little bit of tillage, we diminished it, the mycorrhizae, significantly in the first season. Where we did the minimum-till, where we did the no-tillage, which, of course, the yield was ridiculously, I think it was more than 10%, I believe it was closer to 30% lower with total no-till. So that was not even strip tillage, right? That was not even the quote, unquote, two inches of reduced tillage.

Helen Atthowe 1:02:36
And then where we did the reduced tillage, this two inches of tillage, we had in between, in between the tillage treatments and the no-tillage treatment, there was this kind of sweet spot with the mycorrhizae, and that was, was a learning experience to me. I’m going to finish up here quickly, because my computer is telling me that the battery is low because I’ve got your mic plugged into that portal. But then in Oregon, we did a much larger study, and we did standard soil tests and the Haney soil test, and with the Haney soil test, comparing the treatments of mulch, from just the living mulch mowed and blowed in, or added mulch from our hay fields as well, which was fascinating. We also did a much more microbial soil analysis, where we could look at bacteria-to-fungi ratio, and predators, and so many of the other dynamics. And that was very interesting, too. So, now I’d like to do some of these things I’m reading about in the literature, of course, and never will.

Dave Chapman 1:04:08
All right, I have about a million questions so, but we’re going to call it because your computer’s about to die, so we’re going to call it a good, a good start and we’ll be back this winter sometime, and we’ll keep talking.

Helen Atthowe 1:04:22
Isn’t it exciting that you will never get dementia, because I keep making so many mistakes that I have to continue to read things and do things, and there’s always more to learn.

Dave Chapman 1:04:35
Yeah, I actually think that this job has staved it off for quite a while for me. So, you know, I also am just learning so much and, and never get there. Of course.

Helen Atthowe 1:04:47
Can I just say one thing-

Dave Chapman 1:04:48
Please.

Helen Atthowe 1:04:48
Because we didn’t talk about nutrition well enough. I am trying to do more of these nutrition studies, but I do want to say that, you know, as a 65-year-old, I had a severe skiing knee injury, and it looked like I was going to be hobbling around for a while, and thought about surgery, but I said, you know, I’m just going to continue with my eating the majority of my own foods. And you know, this strong antioxidant diet, which is an anti-inflammatory diet. And I’m happy to report that I did a five-day backpacking trip this year, went contra dancing for a weekend at a contra dance camp, and am running with my dog in agility. No knee surgery, even with a severed ACL two years ago.

Dave Chapman 1:05:42
Well, there it is.

Helen Atthowe 1:05:44
So, does that count as nutrition from my crops?

Dave Chapman 1:05:48
It counts for me! So, you know, I understand that a test group of one is not very compelling. Nonetheless, it is an example of something that is possible, and we can bring great curiosity to this to see. I’m quite convinced that, you know, a superior diet, just, you feel better, and things work better in your body. It’s, it’s not rocket science, actually.

Helen Atthowe 1:06:17
That’s a great answer, it isn’t indeed. Thank you for all the good work you’re doing, Dave, and I’m so glad I got to hear all of the exciting people at Churchtown. I’m going to keep sending you donations, and maybe I’ll just get certified, even though I don’t sell, so I can support Real Organic.

Dave Chapman 1:06:37
That’s wonderful. We’d love that. Thank you so much, Helen.