- Apr 9, 2011
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Look up "podzolic soils" and you'll get a thorough explanation of how and why they suck; not as bad as laterite but with many of the same problems. Add to that less than 13,000 years since glacial maxima and you've got a soil environment that has to be treated with respect to remain productive. I have 36 acres of pasture here and run a maximum of 16 cow/calf pairs, and suppliment with hay 8-9 months of the year, although when we irrigated and fertilized we could get three cuttings of hay. I'm on the extreme end of soil fragility, though, since I'm on sand. The Everson and Spanaway series soils are more moisture retentive and shed their nutrients more slowly because they have lots of clay... of course it's lots of clay glueing great big rocks together, but I digress.
Every climate has the advantages of its disadvantages: the climate resulting in thin soils with low inherent fertility is neither hot nor cold enough for temperature to be an issue in keeping animals alive either summer or winter. With more moisture retentive soils (those developed on cemented or uncemented glacial till or glacial muck, or most especially glacial-alluvial silts, which CR and CL almost certainly have, and maybe Illia) irrigation is not as much of an issue during the summer, when it is not uncommon to have less than an inch of rain for ten weeks starting the second week in July.
All of this is true for West of the Mountains only. East of the Mountains is dead dry, the soils are mostly volcanic in origin, and summer and winter temps are extreme. Excluding the Palouse- always excluding the Palouse, which gets 40 inches or so of rain a year and has soils that got blown in from elsewhere.
Had to look up Palouse, it looks like Kansas just ignore the the big water fall.
I think Kansas is a lot flatter: the Palouse hills top off at around 1000ft of vertical gain.
I know this all too well: I went to WSU, and my first apartment was a third-floor walk-up in a building (now demolished, near where Paul Allen's museum is now) on the top of one hill, and my 8am class was on the third story of a building where the elevators were...interesting, on the far side of campus. The shortest way was through Martin Field and taking the elevators from the field level (which was something like the -5 floor) to the plaza level, then walking five blocks downhill to the basement entrance and up three flights of stairs. Could have been worse, I suppose: could have lived in Orton and had my first class over in the fieldhouse.
I hear there's buses in that town these days.
Look up "podzolic soils" and you'll get a thorough explanation of how and why they suck; not as bad as laterite but with many of the same problems. Add to that less than 13,000 years since glacial maxima and you've got a soil environment that has to be treated with respect to remain productive. I have 36 acres of pasture here and run a maximum of 16 cow/calf pairs, and suppliment with hay 8-9 months of the year, although when we irrigated and fertilized we could get three cuttings of hay. I'm on the extreme end of soil fragility, though, since I'm on sand. The Everson and Spanaway series soils are more moisture retentive and shed their nutrients more slowly because they have lots of clay... of course it's lots of clay glueing great big rocks together, but I digress.
Every climate has the advantages of its disadvantages: the climate resulting in thin soils with low inherent fertility is neither hot nor cold enough for temperature to be an issue in keeping animals alive either summer or winter. With more moisture retentive soils (those developed on cemented or uncemented glacial till or glacial muck, or most especially glacial-alluvial silts, which CR and CL almost certainly have, and maybe Illia) irrigation is not as much of an issue during the summer, when it is not uncommon to have less than an inch of rain for ten weeks starting the second week in July.
All of this is true for West of the Mountains only. East of the Mountains is dead dry, the soils are mostly volcanic in origin, and summer and winter temps are extreme. Excluding the Palouse- always excluding the Palouse, which gets 40 inches or so of rain a year and has soils that got blown in from elsewhere.
Had to look up Palouse, it looks like Kansas just ignore the the big water fall.
I think Kansas is a lot flatter: the Palouse hills top off at around 1000ft of vertical gain.
I know this all too well: I went to WSU, and my first apartment was a third-floor walk-up in a building (now demolished, near where Paul Allen's museum is now) on the top of one hill, and my 8am class was on the third story of a building where the elevators were...interesting, on the far side of campus. The shortest way was through Martin Field and taking the elevators from the field level (which was something like the -5 floor) to the plaza level, then walking five blocks downhill to the basement entrance and up three flights of stairs. Could have been worse, I suppose: could have lived in Orton and had my first class over in the fieldhouse.
I hear there's buses in that town these days.
