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