Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Douglas Willhite" <drwillhite@earthlink.net>]

Lessons in economic "inevitability"

Gene Logsdon, Organic To Be

Sometimes I believe that all the lessons of life can be learned at home. Just this morning I heard a nationally renowned agricultural economist on the radio make a prediction that I have a hunch will embarrass him greatly if he lives long enough. (Perhaps all our attempts at predicting the future would embarrass us if we lived long enough.) He said that an agriculture of huge grain farms and huge animal factories was “inevitable.” He did not state that observation as his opinion, but as a fact that sentimental old fools like me had better get used to. He also seemed to think that inevitable carried with it the notion of forever.I wonder if he would have made that prediction had he known deeply the history of any one place.

I need look no farther than right here in the fields of home to learn a lesson in not making grand prophecies like that. As long as I can remember - 60 years - the land around me, including my own, has been devoted to grain and livestock farming. But in the mid 1800s, sheep were the principle agricultural commodity. My great-grandfather went to work for one of those sheep ranches, which were then growing in acreage dramatically especially on the native prairie parts of our county, where there were fewer trees to whack off. Had there been agricultural economists in those days, I can imagine them saying with all the pomposity due their royal offices, that huge sheep ranches were “inevitable.”

But economic conditions are more fickle than an April whirlwind. Within a generation, money was finding different pathways to follow.

Obviously, the lesson of history is otherwise. Changing economic conditions make it just as possible that agriculture could revert to small, intensive garden farming coupled with small intensively grazed animal farms.

...Another even more graphic example of how “progress” is not always from forest primeval to farm to strip mall comes from Mississippi. The first officially recorded 300-bushel corn yield was grown in that state, much to the chagrin of the Corn Belt. That was back in 1952 and how well I remember the excitement and the chagrin. How the farm magazine rhetoric flowed at the announcement of that record-smashing yield. Soon of course, 300-bushel corn would be common, said all the idiot economists, and if Mississippi could do it, the Corn Belt with the help of increased fertilizers and chemicals and hybrid vigor, yawn yawn, would soon ring up a 400-bushel yield. The word “inevitable” was flung around very loosely on that occasion too.

Today, forty some years later, the field that grew the first 300-bushel corn is a forest again! Furthermore yields of 300 bushels per acre have been achieved only in three or four more isolated instances. Ironically, it would appear now that if 300-bushel yields are to become commmonplace, as predicted, it will happen on biointensively-managed raised-bed garden plots, not large scale agribusiness farming. There are contrary gardeners doing it now.
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Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio.


UN backs organic farming
Sam Burcher, People and Planet
The organic food movement has received endorsement from the United Nations leading agency on food and agriculture, the FAO. In a new report, it says that organic farming fights hunger, tackles climate change, and is good for farmers, consumers and the environment. ---
The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has come out in favour of organic agriculture. Its report Organic Agriculture and Food Security explicitly states that organic agriculture can address local and global food security challenges.

Organic farming is no longer regarded as a niche market within developed countries, but a vibrant commercial agricultural system practised in 120 countries, covering 31 million hectares (ha) of cultivated land plus 62 million ha of certified wild harvested areas. The organic market was worth US$40 billion in 2006, and expected to reach US$70 billion by 2012.

Nadia Scialabba, an FAO official, defined organic agriculture as: “A holistic production management system that avoids the use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, and genetically modified organisms, minimises pollution of air, soil and water, and optimises the health and productivity of plants, animals and people.”

The strongest benefits of organic agriculture, Scialabba said, are its reliance on fossil fuel independent, locally available resources that incur minimal agro-ecological stresses and are cost effective. She described organic agriculture as a ‘neo-traditional food system’ which combines modern science and indigenous knowledge.'

The FAO report strongly suggests that a worldwide shift to organic agriculture can fight world hunger and at the same time tackle climate change.
(5 October 2007)
The FAO report is online: Organic Agriculture and Food Security (PDF).

Book Review: Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben
by John Marsh
...For Bill McKibben the farmer’s market is more than just a pleasant, ethical convenience, and more than just an alternative to the Kroger’s and Wal-Marts of America. It is, instead, the only sustainable model for a twenty-first century economy; a model for the local production and distribution of everything -- food, energy, communication, democracy -- that people need to survive.

McKibben’s praise for farmer’s markets starts as a sustained critique of the current economy and its monomaniacal emphasis on “growth.” That growth economy, McKibben argues, is unequal, unsustainable, and, perhaps most surprisingly, depressing. It is unequal because, as he puts it, “Though our economy has been growing, most of us have relatively little to show for it. The median wage in the United States is the same as it was thirty years ago. The real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers has declined steadily: they earned $27,600 in real dollars in 1979, $25,600 in 2005.” If the wealth created in the last thirty years has not gone to the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers, where has it gone? The math is fairly obvious: like the latest round of tax cuts, it has gone to the richest 10 percent of Americans.

But inequality is not the fundamental problem of our economy. We could, assuming the political will existed, spread that growth more evenly through a variety of wage and redistribution policies. But that would not solve the problem of sustainability.
(October 2007 issue)