Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Noticed this in one of our local papers. Back to the land.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
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Amid crisis of waste, why not turn valley back to agriculture?
http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2007/aug/18/vb-price-amid-crisis-waste-why-not-t
urn-valley-bac/
By V.B. Price columnist
Saturday, August 18, 2007 
   
  How can Albuquerque survive a major economic downturn brought on by a
confluence of drought, aquifer depletion, water pollution, an oil crisis
and unpredictable weather patterns? Such a mess is on the way.
   
  First things first. Ending the war over water between predator developers
and hard-up farmers and ranchers cannot be postponed. In a decentralized
future of petroleum scarcity, in which national distribution networks cost
too much to maintain, locally grown food is more important than new housing
starts.
   
  And fooling ourselves about desalinating water for the sake of urban
growth has to stop. It's the developers' pie in the sky, feeding
ever-expanding populations completely dependent on the automobile and cheap
fuel.
   
  Desalination is expensive. It leaves behind mountains of salt. Salt in
soil and fresh water is a disaster. The leftovers will have to be trucked
somewhere, at someone's expense. And there isn't a hole in the ground
anywhere that's big enough to secure it. The only good reason I can see to
desalinate is to find more water for growing edible crops in a dire
emergency.
   
  Will Albuquerque exercise its brainpower and rethink its economy into
survivability? Or will it, like most other Western cities, remain paralyzed
in a state of denial?
   
  To survive the chaos and crisis down the road, we can't sustain our
present oil-based, growth-crazy, throwaway economy. We need to redirect the
status quo and retrofit our city. With present thinking, though, this seems
almost beyond possibility.
   
  How does a town like ours rework a national consumer economy based on
waste, heedless devouring of resources, increasing centralization and an
utter disregard for the principal law of ecology - that all waste, toxic
and otherwise, must go somewhere? And if you don't deal with it well, it
goes to places you don't want it to go.
   
  The first task is to remove all obstacles to hope. Hope does not require
optimism. It requires imagination.
   
  Subsidizing small and big farmers, at least as much as we subsidize
developers, is a good place to start. The Rio Grande used to be called the
American Nile. With protection of water rights and by using waste-resistant
scientific irrigation and even hydroponics, it might be again.
   
  We need to increase agricultural production in New Mexico by even more
than we plan to decrease our greenhouse-gas emissions by using renewable
energy.
   
  About 3 percent of our current food supply is locally grown. If food has
to be trucked in by vehicles using increasingly costly fossil fuels, basic
foodstuffs could be priced out of the reach of many people in our state.
   
  We need to get busy. It's clear the status quo could stop working soon
and that the transition between the old and the new economy had better be
short, if we hope to adapt.