Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Interesting. Let me throw out a couple doubts tho. We do see some small scale 
intensive growing; however many such as mine don't serve niche markets but 
ordinary customers just wanting better fruits and vegetables or value added 
items like honey or jams etc. Now those biomass inputs don't actually have to 
come from big farms at all; some on this list just grow their own. I don't 
know about thousands of other areas but where we are thousands of homeowners 
have at least an acre or more already that would be suitable if they have 
their own water. A trip around the country reveals a lot of fallow land no 
one finds profitable for big farming. They're not thinking outside the box 
obviously.

The attitudes you describe in Portugal aren't so different from here. Organic 
still has a very tiny fraction of the fresh market. I think those who pay 
more for ours and others' are concerned about safe food and freshness. We 
just had another massive recall of ground beef over e.coli. To me that's not 
so much a niche market as a spreading fear of grocery store food.

As for communicating the need for sustainable food production, I don't beat 
my head against the wall. The day isn't far off when they'll be forced to 
work and sweat for food just to make ends meet. And they won't know how. As 
for GMOs, nobody can show any evidence that GMOs ever raise production.

However, if people can't imagine that the soil is suffering, maybe they can 
imagine how THEY are suffering. Supermarket food from most soil is nutrient 
deficient and toxic. We have the highest rate of degenerative diseases in the 
world, and by far the highest health care costs per capita. Their typical 
diet is killing them, slowly and painfully, and draining their retirement 
nest eggs.

So that's how the dieoff starts? People who love their addictive, toxic 
"food-like substances" (Pollan's term)? Doesn't have to include us, does it.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net


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

On 8/12/2010 at 2:27 PM Dieter Brand wrote:
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.