Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Laurie Ann Powell <laurie@powellclan.com>]

For me, the greatest issue turning me away from growing for market is the shirking of responsibility by consumers.  

As consumers, we want food guaranteed, insured, hermetically sealed and to not look like food, but to look like plastic.  And to come in expensive containers!

One family in our community experimented with market gardening last year, and it was going pretty well, though certainly not a living. It meant getting up at four a.m. to have the freshest possible produce, racing to the market, having only one day a week to sell it, and then having questions asked because her produce looked weird because it was healthy. Why are those cucumbers so big? Why are those tomatoes so red?
Then came the spinach scare and people wanted to know, "Are you fertilizing with manure?!"  Well... yeah! Hellooooo??  
People buying raw milk don't want to see manure in the barn, or animals in the area. Aren't animals germy??

I'm not going to get into messing with that. Until people understand that there is poop in the food cycle, and dirt is a normal part of food production, I'm going to grow for myself and other farmers.

I think I'm becoming a distributist: let me buy 3 acres and a cow and leave me alone! Or maybe an anarchist: let me buy three acres, a cow and a gun and really leave me alone...

Laurie Ann