Rachel's Review

You know what's great about having eclectic, curious, skilled friends?  They can do things like interpret convoluted soil tests.  The one I got from Ag Unlimited Organics doesn't give the sample volume so that I know what their percentages refer to.  Thankfully, Rachel did some interpreting and comiserating with me.  Yep, Rachel, currently a soil science PhD student at Cornell with a focus on farming fertility, previously a geographer, ship builder, and farmer.  And still one of the best cooks I've ever met.

Her comments:

General thoughts: Your soil's pH, cation exchange capacity (CEC), calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) all seem a bit low.  Adding compost and lime will help with this. I think that it's nice that you will be planting a small variety of crops in the first year--this should make it easier to assess how the soil (and its ability to support crops) varies across your land.

Lime: There are different kinds of lime that you can use.  I don't have strong recommendations about the specific kind, other than that you shouldn't use gypsum if you want to increase the pH.  (Gypsum contains sulfur, and does not increase the pH of the soil.)  If you want to increase the Mg in addition to the Ca, you can use dolomitic lime.  I am not sure what would be most cost effective.  Also, I do not recommend trying to raise the pH too much in one season.  If I have interpreted your soil test results accurately, you would need 7,200 lbs/acre of lime to bring the pH up to the "ideal" pH (probably ~6.8, although they don't specify). That is a lot of lime, and I'm not convinced that your pH really needs to be that high.  The "ideal" pH will vary to some degree based on the kind of crop you're growing and the soil's organic matter content, and plenty of crops can do alright at a pH lower than 6.8.  That said, it probably would benefit you to increase the pH and the soil Ca content.

Compost: Adding compost should increase the soil organic matter, CEC, N, and P to some extent, depending on the type of compost.  If you don't use a relatively P-rich compost, you may want to consider adding another source of P.  I think that using sheep to fertilize is a great start, but in the long run, I expect that you'll need to add larger quantities of compost/organic matter (although this also depends on your other management practices, i.e., crop rotations, cover cropping, tillage intensity, etc.).

Micronutrients: The micronutrient levels all seem pretty good (B, Cu, Zn) or high (Fe, Mn).  The high availability of Mn and Fe might be due to the low pH.  It is possible for these nutrients to be present at levels that are toxic to plants, but this is usually associated with soils that have a pH of 5.5 or lower.  I am not sure why your lab didn't test for sulfur or molybdenum.  These are both important plant nutrients.  However, it probably isn't essential that you retest the soils this year--I think that it would be more interesting/useful to test them again next year.