Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Long day on Living On The Land. Spectacular, excellent posts. Some may
wonder, legitimately, what's the bottom line? Given all those things are
true about healthy soil, what's it to me?

We know agribusiness is failing on several fronts. Also, organics is still
too expensive for the masses. Farm families may survive on niche markets
and value added products, but too many need a job to support the farm. It's
too much work and costs too much for too little profit. So who's going to
feed everybody when groceries are unaffordable? Will we leave food
production to corporate agriculture, ADM, Cargill, Tyson, and the like?

We've seen how productive soil is made. Cover crops, compost, rotation,
possibly inoculants in some soils. Two or three years and you increase
production and produce quality, and lower input costs and labor. Gross
profit minus cost equals profit. Cost goes down, profit goes up. Healthy
soil clearly means less energy costs (including fertilizer from natural gas
and pesticides from oil), less labor in cultivation (no-till hopefully)
with permanent mulch, and much better production for the growing area.

Growing practices affect the bottom line, esp for market growers. Wide rows
or raised beds (depending on your situation) make more efficient use of
land available, concentrating inputs and labor on the growing soil intead
of bare, compacted dirt between single file tractor rows. With no-till
techniques the soil can reach its potential.

Those are some of the answers for hard-pressed growers trying to be
sustainable.

Millions of families need to start learning productive growing yesterday.
This is my passion.

   “If economics is reconceived in the service of community, it will
begin with a concern for agriculture and specifically for the production of
food. This is because a healthy community will be a relatively
self-sufficient one. A community’s dependency on outsiders for its mere
survival weakens it. It is often unable to develop the policies it desires
for the sake of its own members, since its survival depends on terms
dictated by others. The most fundamental requirement for survival is food.
Hence, how and where food is grown is foundational to an economics for
community.”
   --Herman Daly and John Cobb
http://www.ecobooks.com/books/comgood.htm


paul, tradingpost@riseup.net
---------------