Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>]

> 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

There is one other aspect to this Dieter. I got a few articles in during the 
last few weeks that junk food is addictive to rats. Once addicted rats do no 
longer want to eat nutritious, organic food where non addicted rats would 
prefer just that. Addiction can be achieved in a week or so.
And I am quite certain that also goes for humans. I have seen people who 
could not eat free range eggs.
And there are so many misconceptions out there that it would take 
light-years to even start getting to change a fraction of them. We had one 
man come looking for raw goats milk for his children who had some affliction 
or other from commercial cows milk. He had never had much to do with goats 
and he wanted to see ours. At the time the matriarch of our herd was Wieske 
a beautiful clean goat blessed with a beard like a Jewish patriarch, well, 
all white. One look at that beard was enough to put the man off goats milk 
for life. Life is too short to try to change peoples minds. And there are 
sound scientific reasons why that is not possible anyway. Take for instance 
"Festinger's Law" in social psychology.
john