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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] TxBee Dry Land Farming

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: "mcoldiron" <mcoldiron@crcom.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] TxBee Dry Land Farming
  • Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2008 09:19:12 -0500

For those of you who practice intensive gardening, how do you plant? Do you go along with a stick, make a hole and drop a seed in, or do you grow the plants ahead of time and plant that way. If you use a planter, I just don't see how you do it through the mulch. Also can't see how you plant fields of corn, black eyed peas, okra, oats, rye, wheat, etc..., without a planter. What am I missing?

Thanks

TxBeeFarmer (Mark)
West Texas Zone 7b


----- Original Message ----- From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
To: <diebrand@yahoo.com>; <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Friday, July 04, 2008 10:26 PM
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] TxBee Dry Land Farming



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



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