Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Harvey Ussery <huboxwood@earthlink.net>]

> I don't know, un-eaten food is crop waste ( at least to me ).
>
> I know of one guy that goes around to all the bars in his area leaves tanks 
> with them, and the bars dump all the left over beverages into the tanks. 
> He later picks the liquid up and checks for alcohol content and sugar 
> content.    If the alcohol content is high enough, he distils it, for fuel.
>
> At least to me that is one way to utilize a type of crop waste.
>
> Greg H.

I think such use of uneaten food is eminently rational. (We'll leave 
aside for the moment how rational is a society that generates the amount 
of uneaten food that we do.) I read recently of a farm in Maine that 
grows large amounts of green veg's in big greenhouses in the winter, 
using spent cooking oils from restaurants to heat the greenhouses. Good 
use of the old noodle, taking new points of view on what constitutes 
"waste."

But in the original context, I took "crop wastes" to mean things like 
corn and soybean stalks, the residues of crop plants after the 
harvestable parts (the people-food parts) have been taken off. Many 
claim that we can make lots and lots of biofuels by fermenting these 
crop wastes--even manures--and extracting out the volatile burnables. 
And of course we can. But the more we use such "wastes" to run our cars, 
the less are available to return to the soil as organic matter/humus. 
We're already returning vastly less OM to agricultural soils than we're 
taking off--accelerating that trend will only increase the rate at which 
we are turning some of the best agricultural soils God ever took the 
time to turn out--into desert.

~Harvey
--
Harvey in northern Va
www.themodernhomestead.us