Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Cultivating Our Garden
Biointensive farming uses less water, land, machinery, and fertilizer
- and more human labor
by John Jeavons

One of the articles in A Good Harvest (IC#42)
Fall 1995, Page 34 Copyright (c)1995, 1997 by Context Institute

"They're making people every day,
but they ain't makin' any more dirt."
- Will Rogers

A sustainable community involves a dynamic inter-dependent relationship 
between each of us and the resources that sustain our lives. Rather than 
shirking human labor, trying to reduce the amount of it used or to increase 
its productivity in unsustainable ways, we need to exalt in its proper use 
and the maintenance of the very muscles involved in an effective human life. 
Properly performed, labor is not tedious or enervating, but strengthening and 
rewarding.

Using resources more efficiently - doing more with less - allows us to use 
our personal energy more effectively. The field of electronics was recently 
miniaturized on this basis. In fact, the world is on the verge of a major new 
discovery - that there are major economies of small scale, such as the 
miniaturization of agriculture. The sophisticated low-technology techniques 
and the approaches involved in this kind of food-raising will make possible 
truly sustainable agricultural practices globally.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

   “If economics is reconceived in the service of community, it will begin 
with a concern for agriculture and specifically for the production of food. 
This is because a healthy community will be a relatively self-sufficient one. 
A community’s dependency on outsiders for its mere survival weakens it. It is 
often unable to develop the policies it desires for the sake of its own 
members, since its survival depends on terms dictated by others. The most 
fundamental requirement for survival is food. Hence, how and where food is 
grown is foundational to an economics for community.”
-- Herman Daly and John Cobb, in For the Common Good
http://www.ecobooks.com/books/comgood.htm