Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Hi Paul,

The old farmers, especially the small family operators respected the land a
lot more than the big farmers.  My dad worked for a big farmer when I was a
kid. My Dad respected the soil much more than the man that owned it. To Dad
it was a way of life and to the owner it meant money and that is all he was
interested in.

The owner and my Dad are both long gone and that mans land now wouldn't ever
sprout grass if you didn't pour the water and oil based fertilizer to it. It
is still producing food and soy beans but only a fraction of what it did in
times past.

Art


----- Original Message -----
From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
To: <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2006 11:49 AM
Subject: [Livingontheland] Soils And Men/ Biotech has bamboozled us all


>
> You mention a 1936 article. This is from 1938. I posted it Jan 30 when
this
> was the Soilmakers list (now combined with SoilmakersGrowing. Is there any
> greater cause, any more urgent mission, than the soil that gives life?
> ---------
>
> Finally got my own copy of a classic ordered from Alibris. It's Soils And
> Men, the 1938 USDA Yearbook of Agriculture. It was timely coming right
> after the Dust Bowl of the midwest, and in the Depression. It's a 1200
page
> book, very readable and useful today. Also it contains the well known
> article by Albrecht, Loss of Soil Organic Matter and it's Restoration.
>
> Henry A. Wallace as Secretary of Agriculture, wrote the stirring words in
> this forward to the volume:
>
>  "The earth is the mother of us all -- plants, animals, and men. The
> phosphorus and calcium of the earth build our skeletons and nervous
> systems. Everything else our bodies need except air and sun comes from the
> earth.
>
>  "Nature treats the earth kindly. Man treats her harshly. He overplows the
> cropland, overgrazes the pastureland, and overcuts the timerland. He
> destroys millions of acres completely. He pours fertility year after year
> into the cities, and flush what they do not use down the sewers into the
> rivers and the ocean. The flood problem insofar as it is man made is
> chiefly the result of overplowing, overgrazing, and overcutting of timber.
>
>  "This terribly destructive process is excusable in a young civilization.
> It is not excusable in the United States in the year 1938.
>
>  "We know what can be done and we are beginning to do it. As individuals
we
> are beginning to do the necessary things. As a nation, we are beginning to
> do them. The public is waking up, and just in time. In another 30 years it
> might have been too late.
>
>  "The social lesson of soil waste is that no man has the right to destroy
> soil even if he does own it in fee simple. The soil requires a duty of man
> which we have been slow to recognize.
>
>  "In this book the effort is made to discover man's debt and duty to the
> soil. The scientists examine the soil problem from every possible angle.
> This book must be reckoned with by all who would build a firm foundation
> for the future of the United States.
>
>  "For my own part I do not feel that this book is the last word. But it is
> a start and a mighty good start in helping all those who truly love the
> soil to fight the good fight."
> ---------------
>
> paul tradingpost@lobo.net
>
> Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
> --Henry David Thoreau
>
> *********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********
>
> On 7/26/2006 at 9:53 AM Art Corbit wrote:
>
> >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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> >
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