Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Interesting but the article leaves some questions. Some points:

"I know it is hard to farm on land worth $50,000 an acre," she says, "but I
just want to see a new generation of farmers. I'm not sure where they will
come from or what will happen to those 20-year-olds out there who want to
farm. And I don't know if this type of farming could ever supply the entire
food needs of all of the Puget Sound area."

And "Some things are more expensive because small farmers "are doing manual
labor rather than machine labor."

After all the problems they point out it's a bit of a mystery how they
expect to achieve more success with local food. I maintain that mechanical
growing is inherently *more* expensive than manual growing - IF sensible
proven organic methods are used in manual growing. Mechanical tillage,
cultivation, planting, and harvesting assume large areas, which means large
capital investment and wholesaling the product to cutthroat middlemen like
Cargill or ADM. Millions of farmers have gone bankrupt with mechanical
farming. Local food is inherently small scale growing with less machinery
and less dependence on fossil fuels.

Obviously, forget starting to farm on land worth $50,000 an acre. Absurd.
There's cheap land all over the country - if you look for small parcels in
out of the way places, land that may not look like farm land at all but can
be made highly productive. Again, with sensible proven organic methods for
soilbuilding. The writer admits he has no clue about where the new farmers
will come from as things are currently done. The startup cost is far too
high that way. 

I walk the walk. With limited past experience and I'm no spring chicken,
I've started up on a shoestring and started market growing successfully
this year. And yes, with only manual labor and sensible proven organic
methods. A few missteps haven't kept me from having enough of the right
stuff to sell consistently at two local markets. And learning from our
first year, we plan to multiply our production (and income) next year on
the same ground. Other have done far better, and some on this list have
produced local food sustainably for years. 

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

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

On 8/23/2007 at 7:54 PM Douglas  Willhite wrote:

>The Bounty Around Us
>>From farmers to families, they hope to fix global by eating local
>by John B. Saul for the Seattle Times 
>
>The food world is catching up with Fred Berman.
>
>The emphasis lately in that changing and often socially conscious world
>has been on eating local foods, organic alone not being enough to cure the
>ills of the world. No pesticides or herbicides, yes, but also no food that
>burns up more calories getting to the dinner plate than it can deliver
>once it's there.
>
>Author Barbara Kingsolver is the latest to discover food doesn't have to
>travel hundreds of miles in a refrigerated truck. She writes about that
>discovery in her new book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food
>Life."
>
>And for their book, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon spent a year eating
>only food that came from within 100 miles of their Vancouver, B.C.,
>apartment.
>
>That's nothing for Berman: Most of the food he and his family ate for more
>than 20 years came from within 500 yards of where they lived. An organic
>farmer for 27 years and a chef for 24, he's glad the books have made more
>people aware of the benefits of eating locally grown food. But he was
>already there.
SNIP