Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

We've spent the last 3 years just trying to "get the hang" of the gardening/farming life.  Before we spend much more on improvements, we need to decide whether it would be worthwhile to try to move somewhere cleaner.  My husband is in high tech, which is supporting our virtually hobby farm, but he's willing to do more with the farming and work more from home with high tech, if we can work out the logistics.

Our neighbors on both sides spray, one for bugs and the other for weeds.  Obviously, this is not ideal, but we do not yet have the kind of credibility to ask them to change (when you are a Yankee in the Southern Wild West, you have to be very careful!).  We did ask the one neighbor to not spray OUR land (he was going to spray ours as a favor - phew) and have tried to drop hints about why, and made a point of asking what the others were spraying. But they both think stuff like Roundup and 2-4D are harmless.  Doesn't Monsanto tell me so?

We have noticed that even just not spraying directly for a couple of years makes a difference -- the fireflies, which are considered an important pollution indicator in Japan, have made a great comeback - and they literally light up our whole acreage and stop right at the fence-line.
Another problem is that there are high tension power lines right here, so the power companies (in their continual quest to improve our quality of life) spray nearby areas as well.  The drought really drew attention to how damaging the stuff they are spraying is - whole patches of woods just dropped dead in neat squares.

So, in a sense I wonder if we can even consider the food we raise on our land as any healthier and safer than what is commonly available through farmers' markets or health food markets.  Yet, I know this is a problem everywhere, to one degree or another.  

I'm interested in how others are thinking about this.  We could seek a bigger acreage a bit further out, and do testing for contamination.  Or we can just continue to do soil remediation and eat as much de-toxifying food as possible.  We can just give up the whole enterprise and support others who are doing the hard work, searching out those with the cleanest farms, which truth to tell would suit me fine, though I'd miss the great education my kids are getting out of this farming life.  

For example, all the green stuff I'm composting probably has a high contamination rate, as would the manure from the animals that graze and browse.  Should I worry about that?  

Laurie Ann