Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Gloria Baikauskas <gcb49@flash.net>]

Every farmer thought they were farming right.....and then in the 1930s the topsoil blew away.  They had farmed the way they were taught.....but more importantly....the way agribusiness was beginning to teach them.  So...they were taught to plow in a different pattern. 

 

The damage from the loss of the topsoil was huge, though.  By the 1950s the US was still importing food because we could not feed ourselves.   That is when those in charge decided to take the chemical route.  The chemicals killed what was alive in the soil.  No farmer knowingly did that.

 

My grandfather <mom's dad> was a farmer in Kansas....grew up on a farm in Kansas because he was the son and grandson, and so on back of farmers.  He later farmed in Washington State until he was incapacitated.  He did not knowingly damage his land.  I know when he scaled back from the acreage down to one acre of garden he did things more the old-fashioned way.  He grew the best peas I have ever eaten.  <g> 

 

Farmers have been getting advice from ag agents for decades now that has been wrong.  Yet, now the USDA has them advising differently....when they will listen to them.  Or they were.  NOw the USDA is packed with folks from the big agribusinesses and is also making their own GM food product line.  It is a delicate balance of pleasing the agribusinesses that line their pockets, and the research scientists that work for them advising farmers not to till....not to mow....and so forth. 

 

No one is trying to cast bad reputation on your family of farmers, Barbara.  The topsoil is again blowing away.  Here in Texas it has been a horrible problem the last two years because of the drought, as it has in other Western states.  More folks than you can possibly imagine have had to be hospitalized because of lung problems and diseases caused by the soil in the air we can't even see most of the time. 

 

I used to garden wrong.  I used chemicals.  I prided myself on my gardens....and my food crops in them.  Now I wonder what damage I did to myself since I am a cancer survivor.  I thought I was a good example of someone from a farming family that could grow just about anything.  I was wrong.  Took coming here to dead soil to change me.  Took failures to make me research.....and the warnings of the farmer's daughters next door as to what was on the land.  They had had to use stronger and stronger stuff to get good yields. 

 

Please don't take it personally. 

 

Gloria, Texas