Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

This is probably the main reason that the Viking colonies on Greenland died 
out. They had to go farther and farther to make hay for their cows and sheep 
until it was no longer possible to lay in enough stores for the winter.
In our milder and wet conditions the most important additive to soil is 
carbon in any shape or form. This is food for micro organisms that can take 
their nitrogen straight from the air. Almost any rain here will have some 
minerals from the sea in it especially during storms and micro organisms 
again will capture these and hold on to them. Eventually you get good soil.
Carbon is easy to get from even farther away than the extensively cropped 
fields.
john

> Interesting point. I wonder if anyone has calculated the ratio(s) between 
> the the amount of extensively cropped land and the amount of intensively 
> farmed land required to provide a given level of nutrients available for 
> transport. This of course would vary for different climatic and grazing 
> systems.
>
> It might be more efficient from the point of view of nutrient harvesting 
> to directly compost the extensively grown materials since there is a loss 
> from uncollected urine. Trying to push such a system too far would likely 
> result in degradation of the extensively farmed areas over time as the 
> nutrients would be exported and not replaced. Catch-22?
>
>
> ---- Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > >Thus America a century ago had two separate systems of food production.
>
> These two systems always existed side by side, and still do in many parts 
> of the World, but they are not “separate”, since the intensively farmed 
> kitchen garden depends on the fertility input from the fields, in 
> particular from the grazing land, mostly in form of manure.  Thus the 
> “intensively” farmed kitchen garden is only possible because of the 
> fertility inputs from the “extensively” farmed fields.
>
> Dieter Brand
> Portugal
>
>
>
>
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