Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Agreed, Mark. And the mycorrhizal connection is one of the most widely
studied and demonstrated features of modern soil science. Humus-building
cover crops, composting, crop rotation, all of these are proven practices.
Now no-till or "conservation tillage" is coming into its own, and theory
and practice are coming together to debunk the industrial-chemical approach
to growing. Gimmicks come and go. 

paul, tradingpost@riseup.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 6/19/2006 at 2:52 PM Mark Nagel wrote:

>I'll second Dr. Michael's statement/comment.
>
>We should not be overly constrained (waiting for science to catch up)
>though.  This is a point that I had tried to make before (which I didn't
>do very well).  Just because something hasn't been vetted by science (keep
>in mind that there's good science and bad science) doesn't mean that it's
>not resulting in what is being claimed.  NOTE: I may regret opening up
>this can of worms by allowing crackpots to exploit it, but we should treat
>things like our [U.S.] legal system in that we should presume that there's
>merit until proven otherwise (rather than not yet proven- as in, innocent
>unil proven guilty; allow nine guilty men to go free in order to not
>incarcerate one man).
>
>It's pretty safe to say that folks realize that much of what we do today
>was in practice before scientific vetting.  And folks should also know
>that there are practices occuring today that haven't been vetted by
>science, yet such practices provide actual repeatable results: an isolated
>tribe may do something for which science and the outside world know
>nothing about; to the outside world hearing of such an activity/activities
>is annecdotal, but to the tribes-people they're perfectly repeatable.
>
>The bottom line is that if we really want to SHARE information (in any
>wide-spread way) then we should expect to apply scientific vetting before
>doing so.
>
>
>-Mark Nagel
>Everett, WA
>
>
>=====================
>From: Soilsecrets@aol.com
>
>Good Science almost always starts with anecdotal evidence from an
>observation.  The trick to good science is to design the methodology of
>the study in order to isolate what actually gave the benefit or results.  
>Dr. Michael 
>
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