Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

And dryland farming exposes the soil to wind and water erosion, which has 
ruined farmland throughout history. Vanished civilizations often owed their 
demise to unsustainable farming methods. Serious stuff. We once lived in an 
area where they dryland farmed pinto beans in the '30s and '40s, but there is 
nothing growing there at all now. I took pains to point out that without 
water the aim of growing organic no-till is out of the question. And even 
conventional dryland growing with little rain and no irrigation is usually 
unprofitable in the first place.

For my part I grow vegetables with little rain and adequate irrigation on a 
small plot. By growing intensively, getting the most production from a small 
plot, the weeding, machinery, mulching, and soil amending is minimal compared 
to the amount of production. Without intensive growing it would take an area 
at least four times as large, and that much larger area would require far 
more weeding, mulching, soil amending, plus machinery and even more water to 
get the same production. Some intensive growers report much higher production 
than I do. Of course if you reach a no-till point then labor drops even more.

This is the crux of the matter. Small plots grown intensively (with adequate 
water) can be far more profitable for market or more worthwhile for home use 
- not to mention sustainable in the long run. By intensive I mean close 
planting in well amended permanent beds, double cropping in the season, and 
season extension methods. Too many growers will go on trying to imitate 
industrial row cropping with wholesale marketing, and go belly up in the 
process. It's too much work for too little profit - if any.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

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

On 7/4/2008 at 2:17 PM Dieter Brand wrote:

>I have tried to stay out of the discussion since it is driven by dogma
>rather than facts.
> 
>Without wanting to repeat my arguments that have been ignored too often, I
>would like to remind everyone that there is no method of no-till farming
>(and I’m talking farming not mulched gardening) for arid or semi-arid
>regions.  Dry-land farming is practiced by millions of farmers in the arid
>regions of the World by ploughing the soil at the onset of the dry season
>so as to produce a dirt mulch that will very effectively conserve
>humidity.  It is not possible to grow crops in these regions without
>ploughing.
> 
>Dieter
>