Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

It's good to see so many varied and intelligent responses to these things.
I don't try to write opinion pieces on a lot of these angles because
honestly I couldn't come up with the variety of reactions and points made
by others. Just one example - when I asked what's wrong with this picture
it didn't occur to me that people reading that article unfortunately get a
slanted impression of living on the land that is hardly encouraging. 

My angle on it was just the profitability issue. Since I grew up in E. TX
myself we saw the problems first hand. My dad ran a country public school
but kept registered herefords on a hundred acres and gave me the pleasure
of fencing it, all by hand in TX summer heat. We pulled cotton in Aug &
Sept (hated it). In those years, small cotton farmers were giving up and
selling or leasing blackland acreage to cattlemen, and big cotton farmers
first began spraying cotton to kill it for machine harvesting. It was a
time of change and depopulation. What struck me was losing old farmers who
couldn't make money any more at it. People were replaced by machines. I
wondered at 16, was that the future? Then off to TX A&M where they had no
answers either. 

My folks didn't know how to garden and blamed it all on that blackland
clay. So I got my start shoveling and breaking up impossible clods and
getting nothing out of all the work in the garden. We didn't know about
amending soil structure and moisture retention. It took me years to find
Rodale methods and use grass clippings etc. to make good growing soil in a
Dallas suburb, and really start growing great backyard tomatoes. It took a
lot more years to learn enough from trial and error and Jeavons and others
before it hit me -- that if you use the right methods for your area and
hold costs to rock bottom you can make good money on a small area  -- while
the people working too hard with row crop mechanization fail. And that it
helps to be younger than I am now ;-(

But still finding out how much I don't know, which is the best reason yet
for this list. Thanks to every one of you.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net


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

On 4/19/2009 at 12:33 PM Liz wrote:

>In addition to what has been said about turning a profit, and being
>overdiversified, I'll add that articles like these give the impression
that
>the only people who can adopt a different lifestyle must have lots of
money
>to begin with, to buy all the things they think they need and to sustain
>them while they try (more or less successfully) to live the old-fashioned
>way.
>
>It isn't impossible to slow down and live differently in the city or in
>suburbia (though the issues you have to deal with may be different ones).
>People seem to see this as an all-or-nothing proposition. Either you
>continue the high-pressure lifestyle or you opt out altogether. I'd love
to
>see more articles about people with community gardens or people who have 
>made a substantial change in lifestyle right in their suburban
>neighborhood. 
>Not that I'm supporting suburbia, but we've got it, and an awful lot of 
>people are living there. It would help if the newspaper articles didn't
>make 
>it sound as though you have to give up your job and buy property in the 
>country in order to live differently.
>
>Liz
>http://life-as-a-spectator-sport.com
>
>
>----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
>To: <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
>Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2009 5:01 PM
>Subject: [Livingontheland] Trading city life for an East Texas farm
>
>
>
>what's wrong with this picture???
>
>
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