Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Pete Vukovich <pvukovic1@yahoo.com>]

Couldn't agree more, except I don't think its just those 3 industries that 'own' government. I think its anything with artificial wealth, nor do I think its just congress its government in general. Government (as are many people) is attracted to shiny things, substance is not always shiny. Maybe government and most people are crows.

 I also think there's something about the species itself that as a whole cannot or will not limit itself appropriately, and watching the voles in one of our local parks the last few months has made me think were closely related.

Early in the year when we got lots of late rains plants (local grasses and such) went sort of wild, so the voles (most of society) went nuts and bred themselves into a frenzy - food was plentiful and the weather was good. At first you didn't see them since their food was nearby (mainly oat grasses and buckwheats and such I think). As the nearby sources were consumed the voles began at daily mass transit which was truly stunning (this reminded me of our culture of imported agriculture).

Fields became thick with voles at around 5 in the afternoon scurrying around moving farther and farther from their nests. They developed literal vole freeways which you could see when cut back some of the oat grasses. They kept breeding, but food finally was too hard to acquire. Then they started starving. This meant they sat bug eyed in the open almost unable to move, some of them actually tried climbing bunch grasses 6 at a time (we called them vole trees) to get at the last few bits of seed. Others changed their diet going so far as to eat yellow star thistle and medusa head grasses from time to time. Things got worse as the summer drought hit, they tried hiding under cars, they would run up to you and stand on your shoes hoping I think you would drop some food. They would chirp at you , perhaps begging for some sort of help. A few were still strong,you could see because they moved characteristically quickly. Most had become weak. Even though they were rodents it was still tough to watch.

Finally nature took action. Predators sensed this weakness and closed in ( I expect we do this to ourselves with wars and by paying homage to ever expanding industries, and by giving up our freedoms). Suddenly rattlesnakes started appearing in droves, kites began a nightly ritual of descending on them in ever bigger numbers. As of last week hundreds of fat  complacent rattlesnakes, and hawks of all sorts can be found were the vole masses once roamed without fear or concern. But the numbers of voles have dropped staggeringly. What nature will chose to do with the rattlesnakes (who are now starting their little breeding dances themselves) one can only guess. Some voles are still left, but only a fraction of what I saw last month.

Anyway it all reminded me of us and I've been watching it for a while now, so I thought I'd share.

--- On Wed, 8/11/10, Tradingpost <tradingpost@lobo.net> wrote:

From: Tradingpost <tradingpost@lobo.net>
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Lester Brown on rising temperatures
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Date: Wednesday, August 11, 2010, 8:56 PM

IMHO, from all I see going on it's impossible to restrain the powers that be in this economy. Congress is paralyzed and wholly owned by financial, insurance, and real estate (FIRE). So we'll be restrained when mother nature does the restraining - at terrible cost. Some say the tipping points have already been tipped and nothing can be done now anyway; I don't know. But people will always need food and learning better ways of producing it under adverse conditions with low tech is my course.

On the hopeful side a local market we need has been reborn under new management, after flaming out last year. We restarted there today and it was one long day. What drives us growers is hard to pinpoint but maybe it's the personal chemistry between growers and customers - nothing  of the sort in supermarkets of course. Otherwise I can't explain our ridiculously low profit per hour taking into account the months of growing and tending before we ever get to market. It's all uphill in this big ag subsidized economy and cheap, toxic food onslaught.

     "As long as we value healthy food and cooking so much less than doctors and hospitals, we will keep paying more and more for doctors and hospitals."

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

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

On 8/11/2010 at 2:22 PM Pego Rice wrote:

>Hi Paul
>