Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Dan, even Rodale covered methane digester plans in one edition of their
Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. Maybe there's a place for those things
on some scale. And tractor sharing etc. among small farmers. My own bias is
in favor of no powered machinery, except maybe horsepower. I can't prove
it, but believe more and more that we can feed ourselves very well in most
places with intensive bed gardening or orcharding etc. and without any kind
of fuel, fossil fuel or otherwise. I can't see any way out of wasteful
water use and inefficient land use as long as we stay with row crops and
tractor cultivation and harvesting. All the numbers point to more and more
localized freshwater crises and eventual catastrophic topsoil loss. 

I don't have all the answers (yet!) but with permanent beds, organic soil
improvement and mulch we've cut our irrigation by 75% more or less, cut
down on weeding to once a season, produced more than abundantly without
pest or disease damage, and all without any power except the initial
weedwhacker. First year garden here. True it's very small scale. But if we
can do this millions more can too, and probably better. At this rate we can
easily expand and at least quadruple overall production and selling next
year, and we're not kids with limitless energy anymore. 

There are parts of any operation that still fall back on materials shipped
from who knows where, and use electricity or gasoline. Our rabbit fencing
and greenhouse lumber and UV plastic came from somwhere and it sure wasn't
local or made without fossil fuel. But the actual growing is. 

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

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

On 9/25/2007 at 12:16 PM Dan Conine wrote:
snip
>As it applies to this list, I think the information on biofuels is 
>important because we can find quantitative data to use for designing 
>better small farms. Just as farmers of old had to allow for land to feed 
>their horses, a modern small farmer should be able to decide if they 
>have enough land and time to run machinery. Biofuels should never be 
>considered as a replacement for oil if the oil was being used to 
>entertain people with a nice, long drive to a job that didn't do 
>anything useful. However, if the oil was being used to lift painful 
>burdens or improve lands that otherwise couldn't be improved upon, then 
>biofuels may be worth considering. The Net Creative gain is the 
>important part, I think. In some cases, it is worth growing enough to 
>fuel a tractor for a few hours a year. Small farmers could also look 
>toward tractor sharing, machinery sharing, etc. It wouldn't pay to have 
>a tractor to run it for a few hours on one farm, but the investment 
>could benefit several farms if they work out their timing issues. 
>Farmers like to be independent, also. Those few hours in a few years may 
>not be enough for the individual to justify a tractor, but if the 
>tractor is going to last 50 years or more (as most of mine have), then 
>it can be worth the investment.
>It all comes down to typical business numbers and how long term your 
>business plan works for. Biofuels aren't going to replace petroleum at 
>the scale we have now. SOME biofuel systems (cellulosic, methane 
>collection from manure digesters, corn-burning stoves) are highly 
>efficient and provide a net gain when used properly. Others (corn 
>ethanol, soybean fuel oils, feeding corn mash to cows) are destructive 
>to soils, animals, and the  environment, and they discourage small scale 
>operations.
>
>I think that if things were evaluated on whether they work on a small 
>local scale without large processing facilities, then they are generally 
>useful, and not insignificantly: they can easily be replaced without 
>bureaucratic inertia, and they don't endanger large numbers of people if 
>any one of them fails periodically. It's not the 'most efficient' way to 
>do things, but then, neither is a system that spends so much on 
>advertising how great the system is and how much more you need to buy to 
>keep the system running. If we took the average company's advertising 
>budget and spent it on solar panels and electric cars.....well...you get 
>the picture, but until the stock market fails, the 'leaders' won't.
>
>Dan C.
>Belgium,WI
>
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