Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Good point there, IMHO. They always think in terms of "real" farmers, the 
industrial agribusiness that gets the lion's share of taxpayer subsidies for 
their failures.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

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

On 5/21/2008 at 9:31 PM Liz wrote:

>At 08:39 AM 5/21/2008, you wrote:
>
>>So many clueless columnists, so little time.
>
>I was going to respond in much the same vein, but you said it better.
>
>I did note one thing. The article said that a short term rise in
>prices wouldn't motivate entrepreneurial activity. That might be true
>for large scale farms, but it sure isn't true for individuals and
>small businesses. I stopped to buy tomatoes from the back of a truck
>parked on the shoulder of the road recently. When I asked the elderly
>proprietor where he'd gotten such beautiful tomatoes this time of
>year, he said and his wife had driven to Florida and picked them from
>the fields. He said they loaded up as much as their pickup would
>carry, drove back, sold it all (usually within a couple of days),
>then went back for more. Now this was surely not locally grown, and
>the transportation cost per tomato was probably more than if a
>commercial trucker had brought them from Florida. But he was selling
>a basket of tomatoes for $3.00, and when I weighed them at home, I
>found I had almost 5 pounds of tomatoes. That's half what the grocery
>stores are selling them for, and by buying from him, I was supporting
>local business, if not local farmers. Entrepreneurial activity is
>alive and well.
>
>Liz in SW VA
>http://life-as-a-spectator-sport.com
>
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