Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>]

I agree, Paul.
One of the first myths to get rid of is the Myth of the Middle Class.
There are two classes of people: those who have to work to eat and those 
who never have had to. There is a war going on and most of the 
combatants don't even know about this class war. Actually, it's more of 
the aftermath of the class war and almost everyone has lost. Being 
enslaved to a job in order to live is not 'freedom' in any sense. The 
choice between one crappy job and another crappy job, or one crappy 
automobile and another crappy automobile that you are forced to buy to 
get to the crappy job is not a choice at all.
This system is designed to exploit everyone possible for as much 
'production' as possible, just to keep consuming oil which keeps the 
money flowing toward the 1% that never has to lift a finger in order to 
live any way that they desire.
The vast majority don't know or care about the difference between "need" 
and "want". They are simply part of a human swarm, trying to follow the 
faster bugs and trying not to get run over by the bugs all around them.

The idea that we need so many people, or that we need to get jobs for 
them, or that 'efficiency' is even important when it comes to food is 
all part of the System of systems. The money that has been saved with 
Cheap Food has been spent on cupholders, tires, landscaping, and viagra. 
It isn't available to go back to spending it on food. Even if there was 
some magic pot of money(debt/bailouts/deep oil), people aren't going to 
give up chrome testicles that hang from their trailer hitch just to buy 
organic Cheet-ohs instead of poisoned Cheet-ohs.

There is no solution for this problem because humans only have enough 
intelligence to get deeper into the hole, not enough to have stopped 
themselves from crawling into it in the first place. We can only try to 
stay on the fringe and perhaps survive when the lawyers and marketers 
start eating each other.

"But, we have to DO something!!"

No, we don't. Nature has ways of dealing with overconsumption. They 
aren't pretty, but they are effective. The best we can do as growers and 
intelligent human beings is to stay out of the way of "Progress".
We'll know that things are turning around when Americans start building 
slaughterhouses for horses again. That will be when "need" vs. "want" is 
apparent to enough people that it affects their collective actions. 
Meanwhile, beware of anyone that says they have a solution, a god, a 
candidate, or a company that is going to "turn things around". Be 
especially aware if they paint their solution "green". We know what 
green looks like, and it is attached to roots, not wires.
This train has one track, and that track has an end, hidden under the 
mountain of paperwork from its bureaucracy bubble.

Dan C.
Belgium, Wisconsin, the "Badger Me State"

> But with so many out of work and safety nets falling, how do people pay more for food? In other words how do you get from here to there? Will fossil fuels get too expensive for industrial farming and trucking 1500 miles? How can we cut our growing costs to make food affordable and still make a living? Isn't this the #1 challenge of our time? What is more basic than food? As a market grower myself I've worked on this issue and don't have all the answers. 
>
> paul tradingpost@lobo.net
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> The Economics of Organic Farming
>   Published on Sunday, May 9, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
> by Olga Bonfiglio
> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/09-3
>
> Growing local organic food may be the best path toward economic recovery.  It 
> may also be key to building stronger and healthier communities.
>
> "Our [struggling] economy is making a compelling case that we shift toward more local 
> food," said Ken Meter of the Crossroads Resource Center in Minneapolis.  "The 
> current system fails on all counts and it's very efficient at taking wealth out of our 
> communiti