Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

As I observed, the demand is there already. Before long those who have a
bit of land and can grow saleable produce at affordable prices without
fossil fuel machinery will be more in demand. 

We can see inflation everywhere, not just gas which goes up and down but
never down to where it was. Whole Foods (whole paycheck?), housing,
utilities, insurance, medical, all up. But we can produce food affordably
by ditching conventional farming in our own communities - and do it
sustainably, conserving water, improving soil instead of depleting it. 

Conventional farming is a dead end with the cost-price squeeze. Big farms
trying  to survive on credit, expensive chemicals, machinery, and fossil
fuels are all part of the problem. We can't keep feeding the country with
one or two million big farmers; we need 10 or 20 million little people
feeding their local communities, and doing it without being vulnerable to
high costs or lack of credit and land. So we get out of the System. We do
it our own way, and do it far better. 

I stress selling at affordable prices. It means controlling costs. Those of
us with some background in growing can start on a shoestring without
expensive equipment if we don't have it. We can learn cost-cutting best
practices while we start producing for friends and family - permanent
mulch, no-till beds, homemade cold frames or starter greenhouses for season
extension, succession planting to get two or three crops a year, even
perennials, and selling direct by farmstand or market. The key is, working
without expensive equipment is realistic if these methods cut down on the
land area by producing on one acre what others need four acres to produce.
On average we slash labor and costs by 3/4 to produce the same amount as
conventional gardening. There's a learning curve but it's not rocket
science. I certainly don't know it all but that doesn't stop me from doing
it, and I'm almost 64 and not in the best shape physically. 

There are plenty of people with a bit of land they can use, doesn't take
much to supplement your income. What else do millions of retirees have to
do with their time? What about the unemployed? The kids just out of school
without job prospects? Homeschoolers? The list goes on. 


paul tradingpost@lobo.net

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

On 5/25/2007 at 12:17 AM Pego Rice wrote:

>As a service-oriented business owner I see this all
>the time. New to sales, unfamiliar with being teachers
>and not having the answers to questions can be a great
>torment to new business owners.  In my industry many
>of these questions were asked when I worked under
>other people and all the answers yet available have
>publications that I can refer to and display.  As I
>apprenticed I was introduced to these sources and
>coached through appropriate dialog to use, as well as
>what dialog land-mines to avoid at all costs, a range
>of useful information sources to common questions and
>sales courtesy.  You would think that people can come
>up with all that by themselves, but not really.  That
>is actually a whole slew of stuff done by many people
>and only assembled partially in me.
>
>Just like Market gardening people get into my industry
>because we don't do well in cubical life and don't do
>well, either, as sales marketeers.  Even today, as my
>new business is reaching it's full capacity I can
>honestly say I am a lousy sales person, but I love
>what I do and I love talking about it and teaching,
>which works very well instead of sales.  The greatest
>problem is lack of information to hand out and lack of
>assurance that comes from practice.  
>
>In Market gardening you seem to just have to start out
>at racetrack speed to catch up with your expenses and
>darned little in the way of coaching through all those
>loops.
>
>This seems to be a very specific problem, saying that
>they just need to "shazam"! BE! fully cultivated
>market educators without any experience or
>preparation, and without referring them to methods of
>preparation, sounds just about as useful as me telling
>my kid to grow up already.
>
>Fortunately there are market garden How-To manuals
>on-line and perhaps we can suggest doing part-time
>work for other people who are already succeeding. 
>That would give both information, aaaaand the critical
>practical experience.
>
>Yours, Pego
>