Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>]

And I can find little fault with what you wrote Dan. That is the way it is.
With just one proviso....what is lost in skills, resistance to adverse 
conditions and body power to do things when people move away from the land 
is not so easy to recover. We have had a few hundred "wwoofers" here over 
the years, mostly young people who dream of living on the land and want a 
taste for a short while (so these should be the motivated good ones) and 
found about 95 % of them incapable of walking the walk and doing the job. 
The 5 % that were good and able usually came from a rural background and had 
a farm at home and just wanted to see how things were done in another place.
john

> 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
>
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