Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[firekeeper@netscape.net]

I have been enduring floods these last few days and now there is Bacterial bloom making the swimmers sick that swim off the Texas shores.  The floods have flushed pet and cow poop and fertilizers offshore.  The same things have been happening along streams, aquafers and offshore in many places.   Not only if this affecting our shores but far more critically to farmers and homesteaders is the contamination of rivers and aquafers.  I am looking at the map of droughts across Texas and the rest of the nation and I just feel I need to dialog on water, since water is critical in every level of farming, or even living to be able to farm

 

The building of topsoil is just the beginings of addressing this issue, building swales tanks water-retention cisterns and created wetlands have all begun to show ways to reverse the trend.

 

This link is a paper on current Chinese methods to stop the advance of their new northwestern deserts.  They are using till and chem, but less so than I had expected, however it must be said that this paper only addresses success, where in reality quite a bit of China has become Dunes and that driffting sand, now freed from it's thin cover of steppes grassland and tiny bit of topsoil is simply being abandoned.  The subsistence level farmers just do not have any resource with which to impliment the ambitions of this paper.

 

http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/freshwater/our_solutions/policies_practices/conservation_agriculture/index.cfm

 

 

http://www.ramsar.org/info/values_sediment_e.htm

 

 

This article is on Indias water and irrigation and about human factors have caused much of their water starvation;

 

http://www.mindfully.org/Food/Kalahandi-Syndrome-Sharma19apr02.htm

 

This link is a very funny, serious dialoge about the farmers of India and the government efforts to get those darned traditional farmers to do the things that the government thinks need doing.  I find it super funny if you know the back story;

http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/books/ar2004/ar2004_essay02.asp

 

and here is the back story; ....the government-owned PDS system has been a near disaster: it encouraged the purchase and consumption of rice imported into areas like the Medak district where it had never been a part of the staple diet. "Eating rice became fashionable" says Satheesh. "Communities which had thrived on a highly nutritious diet based on sorghum and millet switched over to a staple that was alien to them. Their immune systems were compromised and they were laid bare to diseases".

"Culture and food are inseparable" he adds. "Denial of indigenous food is a political act, and we must become conscious of it". With a community controlled PDS, traditional foods that were once almost forgotten have become again common in many households. Prices sometimes differ considerably from those in the regular markets. For example coarse millets that fetch very little outside in the 'mainstream', are given a high value in the women's markets.

Even though the rains are poor this year, the women's sangham in Eedulpally village will be able to feed their family three times a day without going into debt.

 

http://www.indiatogether.org/agriculture/dds/upsidedown.htm

 

http://www.sdnpbd.org/sdi/international_days/wed/2006/sus_way_living/index.htm

 

 

and here is another link on our previous topic of Dream farms and sustainable human cycles.  This guy get a little nagging because he doesn't find "Sustainable" to be a sexy enough word to describe what he is doing but hey, it is what it is;

http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2006/07/i_left_al_gores.html