Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

"The premise of this book is that you can make a good living on five acres
or less of intensive vegetable production. .. if five acres is all you can
afford, it  is more than sufficient for an economically successful farm."
(Eliot Coleman in The New Organic Grower p.17)

"In 2003, Four Season Farm grossed $100,000 on just an acre and a half of
ground, including 12,500 sq ft under cover. Now both in their sixties,
every year Coleman and Damrosch reevaluate "each crop's profit and pain
factor," as Damrosch puts it. As a rule of thumb, they say each crop has to
return $1.50/sq ft for two months to be worth growing." - (about Eliot
Coleman,
http://www.georgiaorganics.org/Files/Archives/GOnewsWinter05Web.pdf )

"Clearly, organic agriculture would benefit if no-till or low-till
technologies could be adapted. Advances in this area are now much further
along than many critics acknowledge."  George Kuepper, NCAT/ATTRA Technical
Specialist

"Economically, conventional agriculture in the US produces on the average
up to $100 per sixteenth of an acre; the net return on a $500,000
investment on the average 500-acre farm is about $12,000, or a little over
2  percent. We are depleting our agricultural economic base and indirectly
our farming community base. Biointensive economic mini-farming, in
contrast, can produce up to $20,000 on a sixteenth of an acre through
increased yields, decreased resource use, and direct marketing." -- John
Jeavons, http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_3659.cfm

"John's methods are nothing short of miraculous" -- Alice Waters, from the
forward in How To Grow More Vegetables, Jeavons. And from Bob Bergland,
former Secretary of Agriculture, quoted in the same book, "The Jeavons
approach has done more to solve poverty and misery than anything else we've
done".

"Farmers are also in a perpetual struggle to maintain a decent standard of
living. As consolidations and other changes occur in the agriculture input,
food processing, and marketing sectors, the farmer’s bargaining position
weakens. The high cost of purchased inputs and the low prices of many
agricultural commodities, such as wheat, corn, cotton, and milk, have
caught farmers in a cost-price squeeze that makes it hard to run a
profitable farm." p.viii Building soils for better crops, 2nd edition, Fred
Magdoff and Harold van Es p.121
http://www.sare.org/publications/bsbc/bsbc.pdf

"Biointensive Mini-Agriculture allows people to feed themselves on a local
basis that provides total community food security and is a proven food
production system that is ecologically sound, economically viable and
socially responsible." - Ken Hargesheimer, (
http://www.bagelhole.org/?page=114 )

F.H.King (in Farmers of Forty Centuries) reported intercropping of “two
rows of maize, kaoliang or millet alternated with soy beans” and
commented on the nitrogen fixing ability of the soy (ch. XVI), and that
rice crops were followed by red clover (ch. XII). He reports the
“planting of cotton in wheat fields before the wheat is quite ready to
harvest … without plowing … the growing of multiple crops is the rule.
Sometimes as many as three crops occupy the same field in recurrent rows,
but of different dates of planting and in different stages of
maturity”(ch. XI).

"Population will increase rapidly, more rapidly than in former times, and
'ere long the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving a
comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil." -- Abraham Lincoln
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paul tradingpost@lobo.net