Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

This page is from our list member Harvery Ussery who also writes now and then 
for Backyard Poultry, Mother Earth News, and Countryside & Small Stock 
Journal. His website begins at http://themodernhomestead.us/article/Home.html 
. For anyone who might think we're all doom and gloom, we're actually 
pointing a way to better living by recognizing the urgency and working on it 
in our own backyards. I can't say it better than he does there:

   "Can we hope for a bit of good news? Here it is: local food. Decentralized 
food. Sustainable, nurturing food. Such food is available first and foremost 
in your own backyard. If you are not growing a garden now—even if only a 
patio tub with lettuces, herbs, and scallions—please do so. Plant that seed, 
reconnect with the miracle of life, the promise of each new season, the 
fecundity and bounty of the earth. This is our natural heritage, our precious 
birthright—let us not trade it for the mess of pottage on offer in the 
supermarkets and fast food joints."

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------------------------------

How We Eat…
http://themodernhomestead.us/article/How+We+Eat.+.+..html

I presented the following as a talk at the Fauquier Live Energy Festival, 
September 29, 2007 in Warrenton, Virginia. ~Harvey

We live in an age of crisis unparalleled in our history. Any one of our 
numerous crises would alone pose tremendous danger, but they are rapidly 
converging to create interlocking and cascading effects. We practice an 
enormously destructive agriculture that is ruining some of the best soils in 
the world. Our way of life is polluting and squandering the water we drink, 
and accelerating the loss of natural habitat and wild species. The greenhouse 
gases we spew into the atmosphere have brought on changes in the climate that 
are no longer a future threat, but a terrible, unpredictable reality. These 
immense and rapid changes are related more than anything to our extravagant, 
wasteful use of fossil energies; and until our use of energy changes in 
fundamental ways, there will be no significant change of direction.

It's wonderful to be here today, inspired to believe there is yet hope that 
we can make the profound changes that are required, and to commit ourselves 
to being agents of that change. But I see two great obstacles as we strive to 
make a meaningful difference.

The colossal magnitude of our problems would dwarf even the most ardent 
efforts our government could make to resolve them—but as a matter of fact, 
our government is doing precious little to remedy them, selling out time and 
again to vested interests, blindly striving to protect “the economy” rather 
than our children's future. Absent meaningful action by government, how can 
we possibly believe that we as individuals can blunt the momentum of 
destructive change in the living systems of the world?

Secondly, while we may have the most passionate commitment to do what is 
right for our ailing planet, it is sadly true that good intentions and virtue 
only get us so far—realistically, we are not likely to make day-to-day 
choices “for the good of the planet” which do not intesect in a profound and 
visceral way with our own most deeply felt needs.

Is there a point of intersection where choosing what will meet our own 
deepest interests, and choosing what will benefit our world, are one and the 
same? I believe there is, encapsulated in a statement by Wendell Berry: “How 
we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.” That 
powerful statement points the finger of accusation, because eating in this 
culture has become a great act of forgetting. Forgetting that good wholesome 
food is the foundation of health, of community, of culture. Forgetting our 
sacred duty to nurture and safeguard our land; and abrogating that 
responsibility to a faceless, rapacious food system with its eye solely on 
the bottom line, blind to its ecological injuries and its prodigal 
squandering of energy resources.

But Wendell Berry's statement also holds out the hand of hope, the promise 
that making informed and caring choices about how we eat, how we value our 
food, what we demand for its growth and processing—will change “how we use 
the world” in profound and revolutionary ways.

Let's think for a moment about our own deepest interests where food is 
concerned. Politicians, bureaucrats, and corporate advertising assure us that 
the American food supply is the safest in the world. If that is true, how is 
it that contamination by E. coli in a single field in California results in 
200 cases of serious illness, and several deaths, in 26 states of this 
nation? How is it that we read weekly about food arriving from China by the 
shipload, some of it contaminated enough to kill, as proved earlier this year 
by the death from canned pet food of thousands of pets and hogs? How is it 
that botulism contamination in a single industrial processing vat leads to 
the emergency recall of hundreds of thousands of cans of meat products from 
the supermarket shelves? Botulin is one of the most toxic substances on 
earth—you could engage in biological warfare using botulin as your weapon. 
Food safety?

What about food quality? Think of sitting at our mama's or grandmama's table, 
eating meals prepared by loving hands from fresh, wholesome, natural foods. 
At those meals, our very souls were nourished by the fundamental goodness of 
sharing such food with those we love. Those who have abandoned that precious 
heritage for hurried meals from supermarkets and fast food restaurants may 
well retain at a deep level an aching void that no amount of empty calories 
or glitzy pseudo-foods will ever fill.

But the question of food quality is foremost about the ability of our food to 
keep our bodies in the glow of good health, and to support the sound and 
vigorous growth of our children. If the food on offer to our citizens is of 
highest quality, why are rates of heart disease and cancer and obesity 
skyrocketing? Why are children suffering degenerative diseases once thought 
to be the exclusive real estate of the very old?

While there are certainly factors, environmental pollution among them, 
causing this decline in our health, none is more critical than the food we 
are eating, and feeding to our children. Much of it is incapable of 
supporting health—grown on depleted and demineralized soils, artificially 
processed to the last degree, and laced with a witch's brew of chemical 
additives and pesticide residues.

As for food security—have you filled your tank at the gas pump lately? The 
price of gasoline has more than doubled in the past couple of years. 
Globally, we are at or near the peak of production of petroleum and natural 
gas. No sector of the economy is more critically dependent on cheap, abundant 
fossil fuels than the industrial food system—from its machine-heavy, 
chemically-intensive production, dependent on fertilizers made from natural 
gas, and pesticides from petroleum—to its high-energy processing of foods—to 
its distribution, which moves every bite of food an average of 1500 miles 
from field to fork. So far the system has absorbed rising fuel costs without 
disruption. At a certain point of exploding energy costs and shrinking global 
supplies, however, it will surely break. Dependence on a complex, 
centralized, fragile system to bring us the one product most vital to our 
survival will then be revealed for what it is—astounding folly.

So much for the bad news. Can we hope for a bit of good news? Here it is: 
local food. Decentralized food. Sustainable, nurturing food. Such food is 
available first and foremost in your own backyard. If you are not growing a 
garden now—even if only a patio tub with lettuces, herbs, and 
scallions—please do so. Plant that seed, reconnect with the miracle of life, 
the promise of each new season, the fecundity and bounty of the earth. This 
is our natural heritage, our precious birthright—let us not trade it for the 
mess of pottage on offer in the supermarkets and fast food joints.

And what you don't grow for yourself, buy locally from small farmers you know 
and trust. Treasure their commitment to making their land and community a 
better place, and to providing you and your family the best food on the 
planet. Visit their farms—your eyes-on inspection of the source of your food 
will be worth more than a thousand government bureaucrats to ensure its 
safety. As for food security, it is far more likely to come from trusted 
neighbors who have your family's personal well-being at heart—than from an 
anonymous, complex industrial system subject to disruption by economic events 
beyond anyone's control. Discover how your food purchases from small farmers 
committed to a nurturing agriculture can help: to enrich soils rather than 
degrading them; to clean and conserve water resources rather than polluting 
and squandering them; to enhance natural habitat and protect species 
diversity; to sequester atmospheric carbon in the soil, rather than adding to 
it and accelerating climate change.

Your local sustainable farm is most of all a working model for the essential 
reordering of our use of energy, in which the driving input is the ultimate 
renewable energy—sunlight.

If how we eat determines how the world is used, we can help heal the world by 
choosing food with a face. Food we intimately and personally know. Food we 
can revere as a sacred gift.
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copyright by Harvey and Ellen Ussery, 2005-2009. Individuals may copy and 
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Ussery.

DISCLAIMER: Information offered on this website is based on decades of 
research and practical experience. However, we are not trained professionals 
in any health, environmental, or other field. We therefore do not offer the 
contents of this website as advice or recommendation for any specific 
practice; nor will we be responsible for the consequences of the application 
of any information or ideas presented on this site. ~Harvey and Ellen Ussery