Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Art Corbit" <art_c@cox.net>]

Hi Paul,

That is a very good read.

A while back I read an article that was publisher but the department of agri
in 1936 that said in no uncertain terms that the soil being used to raise
food was depleted of about everything it needed to produce food with any
real food value. This was in 1936 and you know it would have to be even
worse now.

I also agree with what the article says about re-distribution of the land.
We have something like 1.4 million acres in Arkansas alone that is owned by
the Forest service. All it is doing is laying there costing the tax payers
money. That land needs to be cut up into 5 or 10 acre tracks and given to
families that could use it to raise some of their food. The people have
already bought and paid for the land with their tax dollars so it is nothing
but right for the people that paid for it to benefit from it. I know several
families that would jump at something like that and would make good use of
it.

Art


----- Original Message -----
From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
To: <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2006 10:29 PM
Subject: [Livingontheland] Biotech has bamboozled us all


> Biotech has bamboozled us all
>
> Studies suggest that traditional farming methods are still the best
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4054683,00.html
> George Monbiot in the Guardian
> Thursday August 24, 2000
>
> also see Special report: what's wrong with our food?
> http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/food/
>
> The advice could scarcely have come from a more surprising source. "If
> anyone tells you that GM is going to feed the world," Steve Smith, a
> director of the world's biggest biotechnology company, Novartis, insisted,
> "tell them that it is not... To feed the world takes political and
> financial will - it's not about production and distribution."
>
> Mr Smith was voicing a truth which most of his colleagues in biotechnology
> companies have gone to great lengths to deny. On a planet wallowing in
> surfeit, people starve because they have neither the land on which to grow
> food for themselves nor the money with which to buy it. There is no
> question that, as the population increases, the world will have to grow
> more, but if this task is left to the rich and powerful - big farmers and
> big business - then, irrespective of how much is grown, people will become
> progressively hungrier. Only a redistribution of land and wealth can save
> the world from mass starvation.
>
> But in one respect Mr Smith is wrong. It is, in part, about production. A
> series of remarkable experiments has shown that the growing techniques
> which his company and many others have sought to impose upon the world
are,
> in contradiction to everything we have been brought up to believe,
actually
> less productive than some of the methods developed by traditional farmers
> over the past 10,000 years.
>
> Last week, Nature magazine reported the results of one of the biggest
> agricultural experiments ever conducted. A team of Chinese scientists had
> tested the key principle of modern rice-growing (planting a single,
hi-tech
> variety across hundreds of hectares) against a much older technique
> (planting several breeds in one field). They found, to the astonishment of
> the farmers who had been drilled for years in the benefits of
> "monoculture", that reverting to the old method resulted in spectacular
> increases in yield. Rice blast - a devastating fungus which normally
> requires repeated applications of poison to control - decreased by 94%.
The
> farmers planting a mixture of strains were able to stop applying their
> poisons altogether, while producing 18% more rice per acre than they were
> growing before.
>
> Another paper, published in Nature two years ago, showed that yields of
> organic maize are identical to yields of maize grown with fertilisers and
> pesticides, while soil quality in the organic fields dramatically
improves.
> In trials in Hertfordshire, wheat grown with manure has produced higher
> yields for the past 150 years than wheat grown with artificial nutrients.
>
> Professor Jules Pretty of Essex University has shown how farmers in India,
> Kenya, Brazil, Guatemala and Honduras have doubled or tripled their yields
> by switching to organic or semi-organic techniques. A study in the US
> reveals that small farms growing a wide range of plants can produce 10
> times as much money per acre as big farms growing single crops. Cuba,
> forced into organic farming by the economic blockade, has now adopted this
> as policy, having discovered that it improves both the productivity and
the
> quality of its crops.
>
> Hi-tech farming, by contrast, is sowing ever graver problems. This year,
> food production in Punjab and Haryana, the Indian states long celebrated
as
> the great success stories of modern, intensive cultivation, has all but
> collapsed. The new crops the farmers there have been encouraged to grow
> demand far more water and nutrients than the old ones, with the result
> that, in many places, both the ground water and the soil have been
> exhausted.
>
> We have, in other words, been deceived. Traditional farming has been
> stamped out all over the world not because it is less productive than
> monoculture, but because it is, in some respects, more productive. Organic
> cultivation has been characterised as an enemy of progress for the simple
> reason that it cannot be monopolised: it can be adopted by any farmer
> anywhere, without the help of multinational companies. Though it is more
> productive to grow several species or several varieties of crops in one
> field, the biotech companies must reduce diversity in order to make money,
> leaving farmers with no choice but to purchase their most profitable
seeds.
> This is why they have spent the last 10 years buying up seed breeding
> institutes and lobbying governments to do what ours has done: banning the
> sale of any seed which has not been officially - and expensively -
> registered and approved.
>
> All this requires an unrelenting propaganda war against the tried and
> tested techniques of traditional farming, as the big companies and their
> scientists dismiss them as unproductive, unsophisticated and unsafe. The
> truth, so effectively suppressed that it is now almost impossible to
> believe, is that organic farming is the key to feeding the world.
>
> g.monbiot@zetnet.co.uk
>
>
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