Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Exception to my "no army of middlemen" - there was minimal processing and 
transport for flour, sugar, and salt, things that couldn't be produced 
locally. What reminded me was the fact that near us was the Salt Mission 
Trail where wagons hauled salt from salt lakes south of us up to Santa Fe, 
for about three hundred years.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

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On 10/28/2009 at 10:26 AM Tradingpost wrote:

>Fascinating and new to me, Pete, totally. When I took Frontier History I
>never saw anything on the effects of government policy and speculation on
>the land itself.
>
>But Heinberg:
>>The Mechanization Period (1920 to 1970): In this half-century,
>>technological advances issuing from cheap, abundant fossil-fuel energy
>>resulted in a dramatic increase in productivity (output per worker hour).
>>Meanwhile, farm machinery, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation, new hybrid
>>crops, and synthetic fertilizers allowed for the doubling and tripling of
>>crop production.
>
>The huge jump in "productivity" per farmer is huge misleading. Why? Behind
>every corporate farm are hundreds of other people making it possible. It
>leaves out the millions of workers in our industrial food network needed
>to transport, process, distribute and sell food products, and more in the
>manufacture of farm machinery, farm chemicals and fertilizers. Without
>them, nowhere for the production to go, no chemical, mechanized farming in
>the first place. All we see is the guy on the tractor, the rest of them
>are invisible. The farm family of bygone days produced a lot less, but it
>was ready to eat or store right then, right there on the homestead. No
>army of middlemen between the field and the kitchen table.
>
>His second claim is troubling, moreso because it's also unquestioned
>dogma. Does it mean per worker, per acre, or just more land brought into
>production by industrial methods? In fact studies have shown that small
>farms are considerably more productive *per acre* than the large
>megafarms. The machinery, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation, new hybrid
>crops, and synthetic fertilizers have multiplied *overall* production in
>the short term (not per acre) but at terrible cost over time (not even
>getting into the fossil fuel thing). The hybrid grains demand more water
>and fertilizers and deplete aquifers (such as the Ogallah Aquifer
>midwest). The chemicals' cost is enormous and they spike production at the
>cost of tasteless crops with depleted minerals which can never get
>replaced on megafarms. We can all taste the difference in homegrown and
>storebought that's bred and raised for mechanical handling. And the cost
>to the land itself, of plowing and compaction from all those passes
> with heavy machinery and chemicals, may be irreversible for decades.
>Taking the long view, soil depletion has demanded more and more fertilizer
>and pesticide over the years just to keep up declining production.
>
>paul tradingpost@lobo.net
>
>
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>
>On 10/28/2009 at 1:25 AM Pete Vukovich wrote:
>
>