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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Organic and us
  • Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2006 10:08:53 -0500


I vaguely remember reading about some pioneer in the field developing
-- I think it was in the 1930s -- a method of no-chemical no-till
farming.

Marie, surely you are much too young to remember that far back!

Perhaps you are thinking of Edward Faulkner, who published Plowman's Folly in 1943. Before Faulkner, F.H. King published Farmers of Forty Centuries, which included information on how the Chinese used no-till methods.

When my father and I were farming in the fifties we plowed but used very few purchased products beyond lime. Just couldn't afford the chemical fertilizers being pushed.

"You ask me to plough the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stones! Shall I dig under her skin for bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men. But how dare I cut my mother's hair? "

--Nevada Chief Smohalla's reply to agricultural directives from Washington







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