Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] Good Things Come in Small Farming Practices

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Good Things Come in Small Farming Practices
  • Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2010 15:11:42 -0700


Good Things Come in Small Farming Practices
Fear and fertility are the two biggest stumbling blocks to Australian farmers
shifting their agricultural model from industrial to artisan, writes Helen
Greenwood.
http://www.theage.com.au/environment/good-things-come-in-small-farming-practices-20101119-180zu.html
by Helen Greenwood on Friday, November 19, 2010 by The Age (Australia)


''AUSTRALIAN farmers are looking for the same thing that American farmers
need, and that is to farm profitably, and build soil and heal the land while
farming.''

Salatin believes: "At the end of the day, it all comes back to the soil. You
and I and every other human being ... depend on literally a couple of inches
of earth for our existence. The most dangerous notion is that we can continue
creating fertile soil out of petrochemicals."

Joel Salatin, hailed by Time magazine for his prize-winning, pioneering
work as a sustainable farmer, is in Sydney to convince farmers that
small-scale food producers can be financially successful and rejuvenate the
environment.

''That's not happening for many farmers,'' Salatin says. ''Many farmers are
going out of business and there's a lot of land degradation. The fact is that
industrial agriculture has destroyed a lot of land and destroyed a lot of the
food and a lot of the health of people around the world.''

Salatin, 53, the patriarch of Polyface farm in the Shenandoah Valley,
Virginia, and well-known for his Oscar-nominated film Food Inc, knows his
message about small farming is up against conventional wisdom and the deep
pockets of international agribusinesses.

''Our conventional farming neighbours [in Virginia] really believe that if we
don't vaccinate and medicate, drug and corn-feed cows we are like Typhoid
Mary, we are going to spread disease that will destroy the planet's food
supply,'' he says. ''They're being fed pseudo science.

''The large corporate global agendas buy the advertising in the media, they
buy positions in parliament and agriculture boards and everything else, and
that message just pummels people every day until people actually believe it.''

Salatin says he understands the problems of local farmers. ''Australian
farmers are facing low commodity prices and a lack of in-house or in-sourced
fertility. In other words, fertility is something you buy from outside rather
than fertility being generated on-site.''

Put simply, farmers are not composting. They are not doing what the rest of
us are being urged to do in our backyards.

''Composting isn't as sexy as applying petrochemicals from a great big
tractor with a boom and wearing a nice HAZMAT suit and gas mask,'' Salatin
says.

More seriously, he says our industrial food system is based on chemical
technology developed for weapons in World War II. ''The reason industrial
food took off is not because we were short of food but because there was
cheap left-over stock-piles of N P and K [nitrogen, potassium and
phosphorous] after World War II, the materials we make bombs out of,'' he
says.

Salatin, who has written seven books, including Everything I Want To Do is
Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front, wants to change fundamental
farming practices. ''Cows should not eat grain,'' he says. ''Yet up to 50 per
cent of the grain grown in the world goes to these herbivores which aren't
supposed to eat grain anyway.

''If you shift herbivores to a natural diet of perennial plants the way
wildebeest on the Serengeti or Cape buffaloes in Botswana graze, not only do
you feed the same amount of animals but you do it in a cyclical fashion. The
electric fence allows us, for the first time in human history, to manage
large herds of herbivores like nature managed them.''

Salatin argues that farmers can build economies of scale in local food
systems and feed the planet while we ''shorten the chain of custody between
field and fork''.

''There is no question that there are other ways to feed people on a mass
scale. We generate plenty of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus and other things
throughout the world to maintain and regenerate soil fertility, and feed
everybody on the planet.

''What happens is that through industrial agriculture, animals are
concentrated in large and small facilities at a scale that their manure,
which should be a blessing to the soil, becomes a liability.''

Despite the heavy opposing guns, this crusading farmer does not see himself
as fighting an unwinnable battle.

''It doesn't matter,'' says Salatin. ''Truth is truth. Whether our side
actually wins or not before the earth is destroyed, I can't answer that and I
don't have a clue. Whether or not people accept it doesn't change the truth
of the message.

''At the end of the day, it all comes back to the soil. You and I and every
other human being ... depend on literally a couple of inches of earth for our
existence. The most dangerous notion is that we can continue creating fertile
soil out of petrochemicals.'




  • [Livingontheland] Good Things Come in Small Farming Practices, Tradingpost, 11/19/2010

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page