Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>]

I commented somewhere else about this article. It doesn't consider the 
economics of local foods properly, and all of the factors that go with 
centralized management of resources. Local food is basically a long-term 
thinking issue, not an immediate ecological or global economic one 
(which is how we get 'efficiency' experts to take over our food supplies).

In the long term, diversified food supplies and distributed labor forces 
will be necessary as the trucking companies go out of business from the 
high costs of fuels. If we think about switching to train 
transportation, it is better to have local places for people to take 
their products (these used to be called 'towns') for the train to pick 
them up. This whole interstate and massive road system is designed by 
city-based thinking, where everyone is supposed to live in ever-larger 
cities, sucking the life out of the land through a network of roads and 
pipelines.

If you reverse that system, the cities have little to offer the land 
that can be delivered through pipelines or roads, whereas a distributed 
population of people has a lot to offer the land in terms of husbandry.

The local foods movement isn't about the food as much as it is about 
having local people who are valuable to the land, but that's too 
abstract for the news to report.

Dan Conine
Belgium,WI