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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Sustainable market growing 2
  • Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 19:52:48 -0600


Pardon the repeat, but I'm trying to refine this little essay to pass on
elsewhere. Comments, criticisms welcome.

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

Sustainable market growing

Too many growers don't make enough profit to keep working the land and
fulfill their dreams of growing sustainably, selling healthy produce, and
being in control of their own occupation. Yet market growers who take
advantage of every technique that works can survive financially. Each of
these cost cutting, production raising methods practices has been
demonstrated by growers and researchers for decades.

The soil

1. Building healthy soil can double or triple production for the same or
lower input costs and labor. This can take from one to three years or
longer, depending on what you have to start with and how intensively you
work these techniques.

2. You can achieve healthy, humus-rich, productive soil at much lower cost
with the right cover crops, rotations, and composting free materials or
what's produced onsite.

3. The resulting soil crumb structure needs much less irrigation, drains
better, and makes crops more resistant to weather and pest problems without
chemical inputs.

4. Permanent layout of wide rows or raised beds concentrates inputs in the
growing areas instead of aisles you walk on. No monster tractors needed.
You don't waste money fertilizing or weeding ground you walk on. This
layout alone can double production or better. And once permanent beds are
laid out, they don't have to be remade in coming years.

5. Intelligent no-till techniques and mulch can slash cultivation
equipment costs, energy costs, and labor. Weed control can be done with the
proper timing of the right cover crops, some labor, mulching, and avoiding
bringing up seeds by cultivation. Herbicide costs money, depresses soil
biological activity and humus formation, and is highly persistent as well
as dangerous to wildlife and humans.

The growing

6. Best selection of crop seed and varieties for the location, climate,
and market improves chances of getting good yields and selling them. (This
is a hard lesson for those who think they know what they want to grow - it
may not be what people want to eat in Peoria or Tuscon.)

7. Companion planting and succession planting can get better production
from a given growing area.

8. Season extension techniques can grow more and longer, producing more
for the space available without increasing all other costs.

The bottom line

9. With your available space much more productive, and with lower input
costs, you get that wider profit margin on more produce volume, and this
yields tastier, more saleable produce.

10. Of course selling direct to regular customers gets you the retail price
without wasting time at a farmers market (though it's a good place to
locate regular customers). Plus you're not at the mercy of the middleman.

Go back and count how many of those points mean higher profits for the
market grower.

Putting it all together points to the revival of the family farm as a
viable way of making a living and providing affordable healthy food for
all. This is realistic and necessary. This is the old way before chemicals,
only better. We have the benefit of far more knowledge and networking today
than the isolated homesteader over a century ago. We can work smarter
instead of working harder. What we can bring about is nothing less than a
complete revolution in agriculture. The urgency is not debatable. And
techniques will continue to improve as more and more people learn how to
live better and more financially secure on the land.

Sustainable market growing means first of all making money to sustain
the grower. It's simple. If the organic grower can't survive without a 9 to
5 to live on, then there won't be many around to grow sustainably in the
first place. How many market growers today have to work in town just to
keep growing? How many millions of family farms have gone under in the past
half century? How many dairy farmers are working themselves into an early
grave just to break even?

Living on the Land refutes the tired myth of "get big or get out". I
am convinced the death of small family farms has been the mistake of
playing by the big boys' rules. Buy or lease more land. Buy more equipment
and inputs, chemical or otherwise. Go in debt up to your eyeballs. Only
raise what the middleman wants from you, and put all your eggs in one
basket. Then comes one or two bad years and you're history. The bank owns
the farm and you're nothing but a sharecropper.

Few of us can start with humus-rich, virgin soil. If we can't take a
year or two to start building soil, and spare some of the land for cover
crop rotations, and treat it like a business, then we'll be out of
business. Not everyone should try to farm, or go into dry cleaning or
selling popsicles. Not every climate and market will work either. On the
plus side, energy prices and economics will guarantee a new playing field
for local producers.


paul tradingpost@lobo.net
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