Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

We're getting down to a critical problem on this, aren't we. If your local
growers are mainly supplying the small stores, they're only getting
wholesale prices, right? In our area the small stores are nonexistent, so
our small local farmers markets are all there are. (I won't even mention
the China-Mart elbowing in.) Wholesale to the middleman is a hopeless way
to try to make a living; wholesale to local stores is somewhat better.
Retail direct gets the whole customer dollar for the grower. So you'd have
to grow and sell twice as much to the stores as you'd have to if you were
selling retail. Twice the land, twice the time and work. 

Here's the bottom line:  if the grower can't justify his/her time and money
spent on it, they won't keep it up long. On the other hand, if growing for
sale locally was quite lucrative, a lot more growers would be getting into
it. It's not that we all have to be focused on the almighty dollar. But the
local grower with a young family, or retiree, or couple struggling to make
ends meet has to make money at it or give it up. And higher income folks
aren't likely to give up their McMansions to learn food growing. 

The practices I've been pushing here can save a lot of time and money and
raise profits. Or make home gardening more worthwhile as the case may be. I
do these things myself. I walk the walk. Permanent beds and aisles, mulch,
no-till, double cropping, season extension techniques, avoiding debt for
machinery, and retailing direct make the most cost efficient combination to
cut costs and raise profits. As well as cutting water waste, building
better soil, and providing healthy food. The benefits of these techniques
have long been demonstrated and documented. These practices are in fact the
only way to make growing vegetables as profitable as possible to entice new
growers. AND they add up to ecologically sound answers to the mess of
industrial farming and unsustainable suburbs in a time of resource decline
and inflation. The answers are not in some fancy new technology or advanced
degrees in crop development. No one's coming to save us. The answers are in
us. 

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

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

On 12/16/2007 at 12:55 PM Liz wrote:

>At 11:35 AM 12/16/2007, you wrote:
>
>>Here's a good listing of farmers markets
>>
>>http://www.localharvest.org/
>>or zoom in on farmers markets, 3484 listings
>>http://www.localharvest.org/search.jsp?&ty=1&nm=
>
>Well, that pretty much bears out what I said. In a 12-county area of 
>southwest Virginia, there are exactly four farmer's markets, all in 
>what passes for major cities out here. But most of the little rural 
>grocery store/gas stations carry locally grown produce. So it still 
>gets widely sold.
>
>My work schedule doesn't permit me to garden as much as I want right 
>now, but I am going to sell herb seedlings this spring at our 
>farmers' market, assuming it's open. The town applied for a grant to 
>develop an old building site that had been razed. After the paving 
>was done, they found out that the grant couldn't be used to build any 
>kind of structure. So it's just a parking lot, which is no 
>problem--the few people who do sell there just open up the back of 
>the pick up truck and do fine. But it means the town isn't 
>advertising and spreading the word about it, because it isn't 
>"official" yet. Sometimes you have to just scratch your head and wonder.
>
>Liz in SW VA
>http://life-as-a-spectator-sport.com  
>
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