Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

from Ken Hargesheimer website
much more on page at http://www.minifarms.com/rba.html


Raised Bed Agriculture

- Food Production
- Traditional & Historic
- Five Principles
- Benefits

- Applications
- New Crops
- Urban RBA
- Rural RBA
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For home gardening raised bed agriculture means: less work, less
irrigation, improved soil, higher yields and no poisons. For market
gardeners, mini-farmers and mini-ranchers it means all the above plus
profits. People can have a comfortable income, a high quality lifestyle,
provide a great service to their community and it's a great way to raise
children.

RBA creates a healthy soil to grow healthy plants to provide healthy food
to feed healthy people. For the human population to be healthy, we need to
consume healthy foods [organic] which come from healthy animals eating
healthy plants grown in healthy soil [C Scheaffer, VMD/holistic].

Health:
People suffer due to very poor diets. The greatest benefit of RBA isn't the
increased yields but the better nutrition provided to the families. This
reduces their medical needs tremendously.

 Agriculture is in a crisis worldwide. The Green Revolution is not
ecologically sound, economically viable or socially responsible. The "Green
Revolution", which attempted to impose inappropriate crops and techniques
in the Andes, has been a miserable failure. [The same is true around the
world. KH] Srs. I. Garaycochea and J. Palao refer to the remains of twisted
windmills, cracked irrigation canals and rusted out tractors littering the
rural countryside as the "archaeology of development". It is ironic that
the groups promoting the Green Revolution had to destroy ancient
agriculture fields, to introduce the inappropriate technology and
capital-intensive farming practices.

    "The prehispanic raised fields are classified on government maps "for
wildlife use only". It is a good thing that those ancient farmers didn't
have access to those maps!"
    C. Erickson, UPA.

The Green Revolution makes farmers depend on, even economic slaves to,
agribusiness and multinational corporations: Cargill\Monsanto, ConAgra,
Novartis\ADM and others. Their goal is to increase profits and to control
the world's food supply from research to production to consumer by
controling seed, fertilizers and chemicals. These seeds must have chemicals
sprayed on them to produce and the seed can not be saved for the next crop.

    "These companies tell the US patent office that the plants are novel
and unique to get a patent but they tell the FDA/EPA that that they are
natural and not new and not subject to regulations." [S. Ogden,
Straight-Ahead Organics, 1999]. 

Other corporations are beginning to market irradiated food which may be
dangerous to our health. Most governments, USAID, most ag extension
services and ag universities in most countries help the companies by
promoting the use of their products. They are more interested in export
crop production than in food crops to feed local people.

    "If I had taken what I learned about agriculture at Texas A & M
University to a third world country, I would have starved to death". Mike
Sullivan, ECHO, Ag Missions Conference 1998, quoting his son.

The world's farmers can produce all the food the world's population
requires, regardless of how high it goes, using RBA.

Note: A salesman promotes chemical fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides,
etc and gets paided by the chemical company from the sale. Promoters of
organic gardening and farming have nothing to sell. 
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Thanks, Ken.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net