Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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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.'