Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

The Coming of Deindustrial Society: A Practical Response
http://www.oilcrisis.com/whatToDo/DeindustrialAge.htm

excerpts

The key to making sense of constructive action in 
a situation of impending industrial collapse is to look at the 
community, rather than the individual or society as a whole, as the 
basic unit. We know from history that local communities can continue 
to flourish while empires fall around them.
...............

An astonishing number of people, especially in the educated 
middle class, have no practical skills whatsoever when it comes to 
growing and preparing food, making clothing, and providing other 
basic necessities. An equally astonishing number are unable to go any 
distance at all by any means that doesn't involve burning fossil 
fuels - and almost no one in the developed world can light a fire 
without matches or a lighter from some distant factory. Survival 
skills such as organic gardening, low-tech medicine, basic hand 
crafts, and the like need to be learned and practiced now, while 
there's time to do so. 
..........

The good news is that this framework already exists; it's called the 
farmers market movement. The last two decades have seen an 
astonishing growth in farmers markets across the country - the latest 
figures I've seen, and they're some years out of date, indicate that 
farmers markets are a $16 billion a year industry, with most of that 
money going to small local farmers. I personally know organic farmers 
who are able to stay in business, and support their families on quite 
small acreages, because they work the farmers markets. Every dollar 
spent on locally grown produce from a farmers market, instead of 
supermarket fare shipped halfway around the world, is thus an 
investment in local sustainability and survival.