Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Getting the message out is only half the problem. Realistically, even if we 
could get the message out - a big IF - relatively few home growers could 
produce enough to matter for their households, and currently there aren't 
enough capable growers to provide for a modest increase in demand at markets 
and restaurants. Anybody can grow stuff, but those who've never done it find 
out it takes knowledge and practice and time to learn by doing - time they 
won't have if things keep going downhill and they need the food. And 
experienced growers will find that growing for retail or wholesale is a whole 
new game from growing for home use. Without that knowledge and time on the 
job it's a steeper learning curve than home production. Of course if we're 
not concerned with growing as much as possible sustainably with what we have 
to work with, to meet the needs of a community, then this is all moot.

I've learned some of the differences the hard way, by doing it (still 
learning ...). Others on this list likely walked the same ground. You have to 
turn into a seller, deal with the public or wholesale buyers, and lots of 
home growers won't like the shift or make it. But that's the easy part. We 
can grow and sell at a farmers market and waste time and money, but that 
won't feed a lot of people. How much can you grow and market to meet peoples' 
needs? What value added items can you produce realistically? Without timing 
and guessing various crops you get feast or famine - too much of one thing, 
not enough of another, and can't sell all of one when it's ready and lose the 
sales, or don't have it to sell the rest of the season. And what sells is not 
necessarily what you'd grow to eat or store at home, and what sells varies 
from place to place even within the same city. No college or permaculture 
course teaches how to make a success of this. Nothing but learning by doing 
and researching can hope to provide for the masses IF they finally see all 
that's wrong with industrial food - or can't get it anymore. I wish someone 
had the solution to all this - I don't and we sell at two markets.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

When I speak of these two phases of systemic collapse, what I mean is that we 
concern ourselves over whether the waitress will bring the food promptly 
enough, but we omit to ask if there is any food to be brought.
-- Jan Lundberg

How do you move from a system which has built in destruction of the planet 
and built in devastation for local communities and local economies and 
transition back to systems which formerly worked and new environmentally 
sustainable systems? That’s the project of our time.
 - Jerry Mander

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On 8/13/2010 at 9:54 PM John D'hondt wrote:

>This encoded message has been converted to an attachment.