Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Emery Mitchamore <emitch@att.net>]

John, didn't you say that you have been planting potatoes in the same area 
for years, to develop a variety well suited to your location?  I believe I 
have read that potatoes should be planted in a different place every year to 
prevent blight.  If I've understood correctly, your experience refutes common 
belief.

E. E. "Mitch" Mitchamore
www.hillcountrynatives.net



On Jan 21, 2011, at 1:24 PM, John D'hondt wrote:

> 
>> *ORGANIC NEWS - ROTATIONS RANT!! [big snips]
>> Over the years a great many dedicated and totally committed people have 
>> spent most of their lives promoting and protecting the integrity of 
>> organics, often at very great personal cost. Now a new breed of  'soft 
>> organic' people seem to be emerging, who think it's more important to be 
>> 'media friendly' than to defend long held basic organic principles. They 
>> even consider some of us people to be 'organic fascists or extremists' - 
>> (which I have often been called!). Organic pioneers like Lawrence Hills, 
>> Lady Eve Balfour and many others must be turning in their graves!
> 
> <<< I am probably getting a reputation of a devils advocate but I can't 
> help it. I am somewhat in doubt that organic pioneers would mind much that 
> rotations are not strictly adhered to if they understood the background for 
> the reason of rotation as much as some of us do today.
> 
> I just a few days ago received a long article about glyphosate/roundup by 
> Jeffrey M. Smith in my inbox that might make some of these reasons clear. 
> The title of the article is : "Monsanto's Roundup Triggers over 40 plant 
> diseases and endangers human and animal health."
> The way roundup triggers disease is by chelating/binding to necessary trace 
> elements in soil. Healthy plants need almost 40 different elements just as 
> we do and if they can't get them they are open to attack by mostly fungal 
> diseases.
> A nice experiment is described in the article of plants grown in completely 
> sterile soil to which roundup is added and they are only slightly stunted 
> compared to plants grown in normal soil without roundup. Plants grown in 
> normal soil, full of soil organisms with roundup die almost instantaniously.
> 
> Plants and especially vegetables are miners for minerals. Some groups will 
> take up more copper and zink and leave manganese and molybdenum mostly 
> alone. And that is the reason for rotation, if we plant vegetables of the 
> same group in the same plot year after year we will get short of copper and 
> zink and the vegetables will get diseased.
> Plant vegetables from another group and they may mine other minerals that 
> are not yet exhausted. And if we have a very rich soil or subsoil the 
> exhausted mineral supply may have become replenished after a few years.
> 
> If we grow vegetables on the same land for a long time we run the risk of 
> terminally exhausting all kinds of minerals and rotations of however long a 
> period will no longer help. Vegetables grown today have on average 50-70% 
> less minerals than 50 years ago, even organic vegetables grown in rotation.
> 
> Things get really weird when chemicals have been applied. Seems that 
> roundup is not at all as biodegradable as Monsanto has always told us. In 
> some soils it has been found to have a half-life (when just half the 
> original amount has been degraded) of 22 years. It has bound minerals and 
> remains like that for a long time. Until for instance a well meaning grower 
> applies phosphate fertilizer or an organic chicken manure when the 
> glyphosate becomes active again and kills the whole new crop.
> Another unpleasant detail is that soil tests can indicate that there are 
> plenty of trace elements in the soil while these are completely 
> inaccessible where glyphosate has been applied even many years before.
> 
> Organic pioneers might indeed turn around in their graves but perhaps for 
> different reasons than that people don't adhere to rotations very strictly.
> john
> 
> 
> 
> 
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