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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Southwest Farm Press News
  • Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 10:59:56 -0600


Some of what we've been advocating here is really just standard advice for
decades - but growers large and small ignore it for short term profit ...
and long term loss.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------------------------------

Southwest Farm Press News
Editor’s Notebook
Aug 9, 2006 12:51 PM, By Ron Smith
http://www.southwestfarmpress.com/index.html

Terracing, stubble planting, conservation tillage and efficient irrigation
also diminish potential for Dustbowl conditions. ...

Aug. 8, 2006. It tried to rain again yesterday. I even put out a measuring
cup, hoping to determine, scientifically, how much precipitation fell. I
needn’t have bothered.

It was a political rain: a lot of promises, a lot of loud noise, a light
show and no meaningful results.

I did read this morning that July goes down as the second hottest in U.S.
history, bested only by 1936, during the Dustbowl. Jim Shrefler, a reader
in Oklahoma, made that connection in an e-mail yesterday. He quoted the
following from our August 3 posting:

“The drive from Denton, Texas, to Olustee, Okla., takes about four hours,
mostly through the Rolling Plains, an area where farmers plant significant
acreage in dryland cotton....”

He added this observation: “Sounds like a story from a few decades back
in Dustbowl times!”

Excellent point. The weather this summer, throughout the Sunbelt and across
the Midwest, the heart of U.S. agriculture, resembles the devastating heat
and drought that ruined many good farms and many good farmers during the
1930s. But we no longer see the wind-ravaged acreage that turned so much
productive farmland into a giant sandbox. We’ve learned much about
conservation since then. Conservation Reserve Program plots hold erodible
soil in place. Terracing, stubble planting, conservation tillage and
efficient irrigation also diminish potential for Dustbowl conditions.

Farmers don’t use sodbuster plows as much as they did back in the 1930s.
Technology allows them to plant and harvest with as few as one or two trips
across the fields.

In the process they save soil, conserve moisture and spend less money on
energy, equipment and labor. I can’t remember talking to a farmer in the
past decade who was not doing something to reduce the number of trips
across a field.

If John Steinbeck were alive today, he’d find few Oklahoma farmers
willing to pack up and trek across country to pick peaches in California.
And thousands of school kids would miss The Grapes of Wrath.





  • [Livingontheland] Southwest Farm Press News, TradingPostPaul, 08/13/2006

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