Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

   "... the end of a system that kept shoppers happily supplied with 
strawberries in January promises to usher in a time of food crisis in which a 
system of intensive local production will need to be revived in a hurry... 
The productive potential of intensive gardening, especially under emergency 
conditions, should not be underestimated. A team of researchers at pioneering 
organic-gardening group Ecology Action found, on the basis of extensive 
tests, that it's possible to feed one person year round on a spare but 
adequate vegetarian diet off less than 1000 square feet of intensively 
gardened soil."


TWO AGRICULTURES, NOT ONE, By John Michael Greer
Monday, 20 September 2010
http://carolynbaker.net/content/view/1773/1/

The productive potential of intensive gardening, especially under emergency 
conditions, should not be underestimated. A team of researchers at pioneering 
organic-gardening group Ecology Action found, on the basis of extensive 
tests, that it's possible to feed one person year round on a spare but 
adequate vegetarian diet off less than 1000 square feet of intensively 
gardened soil.

The way we produce food nowadays will be replaced by other ways that don't 
depend on mass infusions of nonrenewable resources. What makes it difficult 
for many people to factor them into a sense of the future is that the 
alternative methods don't look like industrial agriculture at all.

The following article first appeared on The ArchdruidReport.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/08/two-agricultures-not-one.html
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Talking about the future after peak oil is a challenging thing. One of the 
things that makes it most challenging is the extent to which so many people 
seem unable to imagine any way of doing things that isn't business as usual 
in some lightly modified form. This odd blinkering of our collective 
imagination is evident in the current worries in the peak oil blogosphere 
about "peak phosphorus."

It's true, of course, that the rapid depletion of the world's reserves of 
rock phosphate, a key ingredient in chemical fertilizers, is a serious short 
term problem. Today's agricultural systems depend on chemical fertilizers, 
and there aren't any other abundant and highly concentrated sources of 
mineral phosphate available to be dumped into the intake hoppers of 
fertilizer factories. Still, this doesn't mean that we're all going to starve 
to death; it means that the way we produce food nowadays is not long for the 
world, and will be replaced by other ways of producing food that don't depend 
on mass infusions of nonrenewable resources.

Those other ways already exist, and have the benefit of well over a century 
of practical experience and testing. What makes it difficult for many people 
to notice them, or factor them into a sense of the future, is that they don't 
look like industrial agriculture at all. To borrow a metaphor from computer 
technology, they aren't plug-and-play components; they presuppose radically 
different relationships among land, resources, farmers, crops, and consumers; 
and as they expand into the space left blank by today's faltering industrial 
agriculture -- a process already well under way -- the new social forms 
defined by these relationships differ so starkly from existing forms of food 
production and distribution that many people have trouble fitting the new 
possibilities into their view of the future.

Of course this same pattern pervades nearly all current debates about peak 
oil. Consider the endless bickering over the potential of renewable energy. 
Most of that bickering presupposes that the only way a society can or should 
use energy is the way today's industrial nations currently use energy. Thus 
you get one side insisting that wind power, say, can provide the same sort of 
instantly accessible and abundant energy supply we're used to having, using 
some equivalent of the same distribution systems and technologies we're used 
to using, while the other side -- generally with better evidence -- insists 
that it can't.

What nearly always gets missed in these debates is the fact that it's quite 
possible to have a technologically advanced and humane society without, for 
example, having electricity on demand from sockets on every wall across the 
length and breadth of a continent, or mortgaging our future to allow 
individuals to zoom around in hopelessly inefficient personal vehicles on an 
extravagant system of highways. The sooner we start thinking about what kinds 
and forms of energy wind turbines are actually best suited to produce -- 
rather than trying to forcie them onto the Procrustean bed of an electrical 
grid that was designed to exploit the very idiosyncratic kinds of energy you 
get from fossil fuel supplies -- the sooner wind power can be put to use 
building an energy system for the future, rather than propping up a failing 
one from the past. What stands in the way of this recognition, of course, is 
the emotional power of today's ideology of progress, the purblind assumption 
that the way we do things must be the best possible way to do them.

A similar set of blinders blocks the way to a clear sense of our agricultural 
options in the age of peak oil. It's indicative, for example, when people 
insist that there is no way for one family to produce enough compost to 
fertilize a 640-acre wheat farm or the equivalent. In one sense, that sort of 
argument is quite correct; in another, it's completely beside the point, 
because you wouldn't use home brewed compost to fertilize a 640-acre wheat 
farm at all. Composting, especially on a home scale, is aimed at a different 
part of the complex land use pattern of a sustainable agricultural system.

If you hopped into a time machine and went back to visit farm country a 
century ago, to the days when sprawling interstate highway systems and fleets 
of trucks hadn't yet made distance an irrelevance over continental scales, 
you'd notice something about the farms of that time that you won't find in 
most farms today: each farm had, apart from its main acreage for corn or 
wheat or what have you, a kitchen garden, an orchard, a hen house, and a bit 
of pasture for a cow or two. Those had a completely different economic 
function from that of the main acreage, and they were managed in a completely 
different way. Their function was to produce food for the farm family and 
farm hands, where the main acreage was used to produce a cash crop for sale; 
and they were worked intensively, while the main acreage was farmed 
extensively.

The shift in prefixes between these two words defines a nearly total change 
in approach. Extensive farming, as the term suggests, involves significant 
acreage. It maintains soil fertility through crop rotation and fallow 
periods, rather than through fertilizers or soil amendments. The basic tools 
of the trade are a plow and something to draw it -- horses or oxen, when you 
don't have factories to produce tractors and fossil fuels to power them -- 
with add-ons up to and including the huge horse-drawn combines that lumbered 
over American fields in the 1920s. The crops that you can grow with extensive 
farming in temperate regions, in the absence of cheap abundant energy, are 
pretty much limited to grains, dry beans and dry peas, but you can produce 
these in very substantial amounts, and they store and ship well, so they make 
good cash crops even if the only way to get them to market is a wagon to the 
nearest river system and a canal boat from there.

Intensive gardening has to be done on a much smaller scale; among other 
reasons, the labor it requires is too substantial to be applied to acreage of 
any size. It maintains soil fertility by adding whatever soil amendments are 
available -- compost, manure, leaf mold, a fish buried in every corn hill, 
you name it -- and the basic tools of the trade are a hoe and somebody who 
knows how to use it. The crops you can grow in an intensive garden account 
for everything other than grains and dry legumes, from the first spring 
radishes to the leeks you over winter under straw; the chickens, the cow, and 
the fruit from the orchard all belong to this same intensive sector and 
participate in its tight cycles of nutrients. In an age without fossil fuels, 
very little of what can be grown intensively can be transported over any 
distance without spoiling, so intensive growing is always done close to where 
the food will be eaten.

That's why every farm in the America of a century ago had its own intensive 
kitchen garden, orchard and livestock, and it's also why every American city 
a hundred years ago was ringed with market gardens, chicken farms, dairies, 
and the like, to keep the shelves of urban grocers filled with something 
other than grains and dried legumes. It's also why most American urban houses 
from a century ago, even the cramped little row houses that were built for 
factory workers, had a little plot in back that got at least a few hours of 
sunlight a day. That was where the kitchen garden and the hens went; they 
were as much a part of an ordinary urban household as the pantry.

Thus America a century ago had two separate systems of food production. You 
would have seen exactly the same thing in most other countries at the same 
time; if you left your time machine parked in some Iowa barn, hopped the 
train to New York, and booked passage on a tramp steamer headed around the 
world, you could count on finding much the same sort of double system busy at 
work in most of your ports of call. If you caught the train to Paris while 
your ship was taking on cargo in Marseilles, you would find that the market 
gardens around the French capital were using the ancestor of today's deep bed 
intensive gardening to keep their customers supplied with produce; if you had 
time to kill in Kowloon while thecargo from Marseilles was unloaded, you 
could travel inland a bit and see another ancestor of today's organic 
gardening thriving on little patches of land, while the monotonous green of 
rice paddies spread in every direction around them.

The great transformation of American agriculture in the middle decades of the 
twentieth century, which was exported around the world under the banner of 
the "Green Revolution" a few decades later, centered on the abandonment of 
the intensive half of this system, and its replacement by extensive farming 
of all the crops that used to be grown intensively. That transformation was 
only possible because chemical fertilizers could (temporarily) replace the 
nutrients intensive gardening methods put into the soil by other means, and 
because petroleum-powered transport could (just as temporarily) make it 
possible for produce to be shipped across continents and oceans without 
spoiling, either in processed form or more recently in some semblance of its 
fresh condition.

The Green Revolution in particular was surrounded by massive propaganda 
campaigns about feeding the world, but I trust most people by now realize 
that much of its actual agenda focused on turning the rest of the world into 
a source of luxury crops for the industrial nations. The model they used was 
the one pioneered in the early 20th century by American fruit companies in 
Central America, right up to and including the corporate-backed kleptocracies 
that contributed the phrase "banana republic" to the English language. The 
project was a success, in narrowly economic terms; the replacement throughout 
the Third World of small farms growing food for local consumption with big 
farms growing export crops for overseas markets duly followed, as did the 
mass expropriation of land that has flooded Third World cities with 
dispossessed farm families ever since, and the inevitable famines and public 
health crises as well. Recent attempts to turn what foodstuffs are still 
produced in the Third World into automobile fuel for the industrial nations 
are simply one logical outcome of the same process.

Unfortunately for the architects and beneficiaries of this system, though 
perhaps fortunately for a good many others, the whole project depended on 
huge supplies of fertilizer feedstocks and fossil fuels, neither of which 
have turned out to be available indefinitely. For the world's non-industrial 
nations, then, the end of the industrial age thus ushers in a difficult but 
ultimately positive shift in which the mechanisms of foreign export, along 
with the wild distortions of political and economic power they produced, come 
apart at the seams. For the world's industrial nations, on the other hand, 
the end of a system that kept shoppers happily supplied with strawberries in 
January promises to usher in a time of food crisis in which a system of 
intensive local production will need to be revived in a hurry.

It's thus not accidental that much of the last half century or so of research 
and experimentation into organic food growing has focused on exactly this 
sort of intensive production; it doubtless helped that it's a lot easier to 
afford a backyard or two for experimental garden plots than it is to arrange 
for 640 acres or so to use some innovative organic farming method or other -- 
though this has also been done, with good results. Some of my readers may be 
in a position, now or in the future, to try their hand at extensive farming 
using organic methods to produce grains and dry legumes, and a century from 
now maybe half the American population will be making their livings that way, 
but they will also have their own kitchen gardens, hen houses, and so on -- 
and a much larger fraction of readers here and now are in the position to do 
the same thing.

The productive potential of intensive gardening, especially under emergency 
conditions, should not be underestimated. A team of researchers at pioneering 
organic-gardening group Ecology Action found, on the basis of extensive 
tests, that it's possible to feed one person year round on a spare but 
adequate vegetarian diet off less than 1000 square feet of intensively 
gardened soil. (The details are in David Duhon's book, listed in the resource 
section.) In the more troubled parts of the future ahead of us, some of us 
may have to do just that; a great many more of us will need to be able to 
garden in order to pad out potential irregularities in a food supply that's 
desperately vulnerable, over the short term, to fluctuations in the price and 
availability of fertilizer feed stocks and fossil fuels. The victory gardens 
of past wars are likely to be a useful template for the survival gardens of 
the deindustrial future.

A little further down the road, as the resource and energy base for 
conventional farming begins to run noticeably short, the shift toward a more 
sustainable extensive agriculture will have to follow. I don't expect to 
contribute much to that, as I don't have any experience with large acreages; 
green wizards in training who are interested in pursuing extensive organic 
farming thus will have to do a fair bit of their own homework. For the 
moment, though, intensive gardening is the more urgent of the two, and it's 
also the one with which I have some thirty years of hands-on experience in 
one form or another. The habit of abstract speculation about other people's 
knowledge is not as useful as some seem to think; more useful and more 
important just now is teaching what one knows.



Resources

There are plenty of books on small-scale organic intensive gardening 
available these days; every one has their favorites. John Jeavons' How To 
Grow More Vegetables is among the most popular, though there are also plenty 
of people who swear at it rather than by it. Most of these latter seem to 
like Steve Solomon's Gardening When It Counts, so having both of these on 
your shelf may be a good idea. Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening is 
particularly good if you've never grown an edible plant before. Two other 
favorites of mine, out of print but readilyavailable on the used book market, 
are John Seymour's The Self-Sufficient Gardener and Duane Newcomb's The 
Postage Stamp Garden Book.

The claim that intensive organic gardening can feed one person year round on 
less than 1000 square feet is documented in detail in David Duhon's book One 
Circle, out of print and not always easy to find; my copy was purchased at a 
book sale where, to their lasting discredit, an organic farming and gardening 
organization that will go unnamed here was selling off their entire library 
of seventies greenwizardry books for pennies on the dollar. Another book that 
covers some of the same ground, and supports the same claim, is John A 
Freeman's Survival Gardening.