Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>]

Another part of Joel's view could be that if people paid decent money 
for food (at the farm), then more people would be attracted to working 
the land, and economics would be oriented toward local communities. When 
that happens, there are fewer people who can't afford food because those 
growing it can afford to pay their help enough to buy it.

Food costs have gone steadily downward since the 1920's or so (when 
adjusted for inflation and compared to incomes). They have not 
correspondingly gone up for farmers, who are competing for the bottom of 
the price barrel. The money that has been 'saved' has gone toward luxury 
items (cars, big houses, boats, motorcycles, computers, etc) that have 
created jobs making those items; which are fickle at best when it comes 
to job security and resource availability. Our economic benchmarks are 
generally contrived outside the farm economy, so anything that benefits 
farmers will be a red mark against The Consumer Economy in general.

There is a lot more to be said about abandoning the "poor poor 
poverty-stricken people" in the city-based model.
It also relates to population policies and immigration and labor costs. 
We see the way that corporations create jobs mining minerals and 
manufacturing junk in Third World countries: they create the jobs, 
influence the rural people to move to cities and abandon their 
hard-scrabble subsistence farms (which then become hard pan or washed 
out terraces because they depend on people to maintain them), then the 
factory/mine is shut down, leaving high urban populations starving to 
death and requiring "assistance" until they get fed up and turn to 
communism, inviting military action to prevent some imagined Domino Effect.

The direction of the flow of the money and people is going the wrong way 
(from the land instead of toward it). Higher food prices to farmers is 
the key, as well as local support infrastructure (butcher shops, etc).

Modern farming is part of the extraction economics of corporations and 
weak public leadership.

oh well, back to my watering can.

Dan C.
Belgium, WI

On 6/7/2012 11:00 AM, livingontheland-request@lists.ibiblio.org wrote:
> he said at one point (paraphrasing), 'he believed people should pay more for 
> decent food , he wasn't concerned so much with person on food stamps living 
> in the poor section of town, he wasn't out to save them, perhaps (his words) 
> they couldn't be helped or saved'. I believe he was indicating that he felt 
> we'd exceeded carrying capacity, and the appropriate response was to attend 
> to the survival of the wealthier segments of society since in his mind that 
> was a workeable system. Since the audience was largely middle/upper class 
> nobody batted an eye, and nobody thought it was interesting that his dislike 
> of monocultures didn't apply to humans. Just a wierd aside. Still it was a 
> good lecture.
>
> --pete