Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

from
We Must Imagine a Future Without Cars
By James Howard Kunstler, AlterNet
Posted on April 4, 2007, Printed on April 6, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/50049/


We'll have to grow our food differently. The ADM/Monsanto/Cargill model of
industrial-scale agribusiness will not survive the discontinuities of the
Long Emergency -- the system of pouring oil-and-gas-based fertilizers and
herbicides on the ground to grow all the cheez doodles and hamburgers. As
oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming
organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to
fix this.

We will find out the hard way that we can't afford to dedicate our crop
lands to growing grains and soybeans for ethanol and biodiesel. A
Pennsylvania farmer put it this way to me last month: "It looks like we're
going to take the last six inches of Midwest topsoil and burn it in our gas
tanks." The disruptions to world grain supplies by the ethanol mania are
just beginning to thunder through the system. Last months there were riots
in Mexico City because so much Mexican corn is now being already being
diverted to American ethanol production that poor people living on the
economic margins cannot afford to pay for their food staples.

You can see, by the way, how this is a tragic extension of our obsession
with running all the cars.

In the years ahead, farming will come back much closer to the center of
American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally,
at a smaller-and-finer scale, and will require more human attention. Many
of the value-added activities associated with farming -- making products
like cheese, wine, oils -- will also have to be done much more locally.
This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for
America's young people. It also presents huge problems in land-use reform.
Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things
has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history.

rest at
http://www.alternet.org/story/50049/