Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com>]

My grandparents ran a small family farm until the 1950s.  They had about 20 
acres, a horse, 5 cows, pigs, hens, etc.  We grew almost everything we ate 
and my grandfather had a modest monetary income by selling potatoes, wheat, 
milk, eggs and meat.  The money was just enough to pay the taxes and a few 
durables we couldn’t produce ourselves.  The only items of luxury we could 
afford were ONE bicycle, a radio and a pedal-driven sewing machine my 
grandmother used to make most of our clothes.  My grandparents worked very 
hard every day of their lives from 5 a.m. in the morning till dropping dead 
tired into bed late at night.  Today, nobody would be prepared to do hard 
work like that for virtually every waking hour for so little pay.

By the early 1960s industrial production had picked up in Germany to a point 
where everybody could get a good job in a factory.  A neighbor commuted to a 
nearby town to work as an unskilled laborer 8 to 5.  He was soon able to buy 
a car, TV, fridge and take a few weeks of holidays in Italy during the 
summer.  

The consequence of this discrepancy of income between farming and industry is 
not very difficult to imagine.  Our farm, like millions of small other farms 
all over Europe, have been abandoned.  The few remaining farms had to be 
industrialized and subsidized so that farming in industrial countries could 
continue.

It is all very fine to lament the destructions caused by industrial farming, 
but it is futile to look for the causes with the big bad corporations or the 
government.  All of us who are using the products and services of industrial 
society are equally to blame.

I don’t doubt that there are models of sustainability such as small scale 
intensive market gardening.  Nevertheless, these models can at best serve 
niche markets under particularly favorable conditions.  You are hardly going 
to grow wheat or potatoes on raised beds.  And even if one or the other 
intensive market gardener can achieve cost-efficiency by growing a few 
selected vegetables, he still needs the large-scale farmer for producing hay, 
alfa-alfa meal or other biomass inputs.  He also needs to start with 
sufficient funds to be able to buy a plot of land near a city where he will 
find the middle class clientele with good incomes that are prepared to pay 
the local gardener higher prices rather than buy cheap imported food from a 
discount chain.

Such models may work in suburban America but not in most parts of the World.  
Even here in rural Portugal, people would bark at paying more for organic or 
local; on the contrary, industrially grown food produced with chemicals is 
considered modern and advanced while using manure is considered backward.

It is a good thing to develop and discuss models of sustainability, but in 
the end, none of this is going to be of any use if the consumer isn’t 
prepared to pay the price.  In my view, the most important thing is 
COMMUNICATION.  When I try to discuss the destructiveness of modern farming 
and the importance of sustainable farming outside the small alternative 
farming scene, most people will consider me a freak or madman.  People see 
the beautiful displayed fruits and vegetables in the supermarket and cannot 
imagine that the soil is suffering.  Some will answer that organics is a 
rip-off and that we need GMOs to feed a growing World population.  If we 
don’t manage to communicate the importance fertile soil and sustainable 
farming to the public at large all those models of sustainability will be in 
vain.

Dieter Brand
Portugal