Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Now that's a thought. When you're growing so much for export, you could be 
growing more for home consumption. Truly, exporting crops is exporting your 
topsoil and all that makes it productive. And we all need to feed from the 
most healthy soil.

IMHO, ethanol is nothing but a taxpayer subsidy to agribusiness.

paul, tradingpost@riseup.net
---------------
The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not 
television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only 
those who know the most about it can appreciate how little we know about it.
   - Aldo Leopold in  Round River, 1933
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 4/27/2006 at 2:55 PM Mark Nagel wrote:

>Thanks Paul.
>
>I was going to mention the report's comments about poor use of organic
>fertlizers, but felt that this would suggest a solution, when in fact
>there isn't any solution when, as you note, you're exporting (and burning)
>your minerals.
>
>One can see that as natural gas prices increase there will be a push to
>utilize animal manures.  This should be a no-brainer, but unfortunately
>industry will look to scale this up.  Scaling up will likely mean that
>more animals will be raised and more forest land cleared for them.  And at
>some point there's going to be contention between land for the animals and
>land for agriculture.
>
>It's really a shame that we're heading down the biofuels path, as this
>just perpetuates the inefficiency of long-distance food transport.  And I
>see it as a wicked trap to suck small food producers into the corporate
>web, where they'll fall prey to the big conglomerates (and loose their
>land).
>
>Anyone want to speculate on how long it is before agribusiness and
>big-energy combine?  ADM and Exxon for example?  As we here are all to
>familiar with, food IS energy!
>
>BTW - Wouldn't marginal land produce less energy dense biomass?  In order
>to make up for this lesser density more land would be required.  And
>marginal land isn't likely going to be nice flat or gently rolling land,
>which means that it'll be fairly difficult (read energy intensive) to
>cultivate.
>
>
>Mark Nagel
>Everett, WA