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  • From: "E. E. Mitchamore Jr" <emitch@att.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Synergistic Agriculture
  • Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2007 16:08:25 -0500

This is good stuff.  Two questions:
 
1) This webpage format is not familiar.  Is it part of a larger website devoted to natural farming?
 
2) Brief mention is made of encouraging "beneficials".  I've been thinking lately that importing beneficials from elsewhere is not ideal.  So, is there anything to be done to promote native (to each specific area) beneficials and pollinators, other than the often-mentioned diversity of native "host plants"?
 
E. E. "Mitch" Mitchamore
www.hillcountrynatives.biz
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2007 12:39 PM
Subject: [Livingontheland] Synergistic Agriculture


Synergistic Agriculture

http://www.your-data.com/A5559C/FSDesign.nsf/5e8c14f7d1d2c13f86256d5f0081452
6/3eba340771680cb886256dff005143d0?OpenDocument


Over the course of almost 40 years, Emilia Hazelip has developed a method
of herb and vegetable gardening she calls "Synergistic Agriculture". While
her early work drew on the methods of Ruth Stout, Marc Bonfils, and
Masanobu Fukuoka, it has evolved through experiment and experience into a
very productive tool for use in market gardens with a very unique
perspective. Hazelip's method focuses on, and emphasizes the need to
restore and encourage what she calls "wild soil". Her gardens are
conciously designed to allow all the dynamic lifeforms present in the soil
to remain and thrive while growing abundant food crops with minimal inputs.

Where Fukuoka is primarily concerned with orchards and rice/barley
production, Hazelip focuses on growing annual and perennial food and
medicianal herbs and vegetables. Hazelip not only wants to create
profitable market gardens using minimal inputs, but to do it without
destroying all of the creatures, microscopic and larger, that live in the
soil.

            "I truly believe that as long as we have not found peace with
the soil, we won't find peace above the ground. That as long as we justify
the exploitation of any organism, other exploitations will follow and we
will remain parasites, consuming more than participating, and spiralling
into entropy until we commit mass suicide. The living world is not
understood by the technician, and since it is not understood, it is not
studied for its diversity. People always want to apply mechanical laws to
it... "

The four basic principles of Hazelip's method are:
    1. Keep the soil undisturbed and uncompacted.
    2. Use the soil's self-fertility as fertilizer.
    3. Integrate the litter zone with the agricultural soil profile.
    4. Establish a partnership with beneficials to protect crops.

Hazelip was able to demonstrate the practicality of her work in at least
three different countries by supporting her family solely from the income
of her market gardens. Because of the importance and usefulness of her
method, we have established an entire section of this website to provide
online access to her published work. It is the Synergistic Agriculture of
Emilia Hazelip Section.




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