Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Eliot Coleman may be the best known sustainable grower. I say sustainable
because he combines no-till, no-dig with intensive planting and season
extension with organic soil building. In his 1999 edition of Four-Season
Harvest he explains how he gave up turning the soil. Growing without
gas-powered equipment is a step beyond organic which just avoids chemical
fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. And he's financially successful
with it, unlike so many market gardeners. He makes money.

There's a circular reasoning that goes like this: you have to work a lot of
land to make any money, so it takes expensive equipment to farm a lot of
land, and it takes a lot of land to justify expensive equipment. You have
to wholesale to the middleman so that cuts your profit, which is why you
have to work a lot of land to make any money. Got that? Hmmm. It's like,
well we've always done it that way, so why change. Maybe because the
average farmer is going broke, is that a good enough reason?

What I've been saying is what Coleman's been practicing for 30 years and
succeeding at it. If your profit per unit of food is high - like retailing
direct to the customer - then you don't have to grow as much to make money.
And if you don't have to grow as much then you don't need as much land, and
you don't need a lot of expensive equipment to work it. And if you don't
have a lot of debt for land and equipment to pay off, your profit per unit
of food is even higher. Further, if you're growing intensively in permanent
beds you can avoid tilling and digging completely once you've got deep,
rich soil built up, and you get far more production from the same space
year round. There's more to it of course, and I can elaborate much more
based on current cutting edge trials, websites and books by researchers.
All the elements of sustainable market growing are demonstrated and
available to check out. But the combination is almost nowhere to be found.
Why? There's nothing in it to earn pH.Ds, nothing to sell high-priced
tractors and planters, nothing to snag government grants and publish fancy
papers. It only works for the grower. And nobody cares about the grower. 

But this is the ONLY practical way for young growers to start out without a
lot of cash or crushing debt. 

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 1/26/2007 at 10:41 AM Bobby G wrote:

>--- livingontheland-request@lists.ibiblio.org wrote:
>
>
>>    2. "entry-level farming" (Dianne Palmer-Quay)
>
>> Our local sustainable ag non-profit is hoping to
>> start several farm
>> incubators (one is newly up and running) in the
>> Carolinas over the next 4
>> years.  Our inspiration was the Intervale farm
>> incubator in Burlington, VT.
>>  I have only seen printed material from this project
>> but I am sure they are
>> also on the web.  
>> 
>> Dianne in central SC
>> 
>
>THanks, Dianne, i'll search them up on the interweb...
>
>meanwhile, your "local sustainable ag non-profit"
>sounds interesting is well.  are they linked anywhere?
> i'm interested in any and all models for
>sustainability esp. in agriculture/permaculture etc.
>
>bobby g
>