Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

I'm about to send out the best article I've ever come across. Here are some 
excerpts:


After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other
sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree
about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more
greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as
much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear
land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are
released into the air.

Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue: for every 
Whole Foods shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family of 
evangelicals intent on taking control of its family dinner and diet back from 
the fast-food industry — the culinary equivalent of home schooling.

As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals
off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution —
animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete — and neatly
divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a
pollution problem on the feedlot.

A decentralized food system offers a great many other benefits as
well. Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and
require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be
lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in
resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of
shocks.

Today in America there is soaring demand for local and regional food;
farmers’ markets, of which the U.S.D.A. estimates there are now
4,700, have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the food
market. Community-supported agriculture is booming as well: there are
now nearly 1,500 community-supported farms, to which consumers pay an
annual fee in exchange for a weekly box of produce through the
season. The local-food movement will continue to grow with no help
from the government, especially as high fuel prices make distant and
out-of-season food, as well as feedlot meat, more expensive.
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stay tuned.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net