Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

If I had easy access to a big city in Ireland growing and selling high quality produce would work. Locally it does not. Tried it, been there, done that. The locals are not interested. There are 4 regular organic growers selling their fresh produce in the Bantry market every week. They don't sell enough to pay their fee to stand there.

 

And on top of everything else we have a compensation culture here. When I heard of a friend organic grower who had sold a head of broccoli that supposedly had a caterpillar in it and who was fined 14,000 euro as compensation to the buyer I decided to be very careful and stop trying my luck. As a non native (FF'ing foreigner after 26 years here) it is an accident waiting to happen.

 

Then, the locally grown conventional potatoes are sprayed on average once a week and we would not touch them with a ten foot pole. Much of the organic farms are terribly mineral depleted and so their potatoes do not have to be super healthy either. And thus I think it makes a lot of sense to grow our own potatoes (and about 60 other crops).

 

Just thought it would be good to explain that things are not the same here as with you Paul.

 

John

Yeah, do the math. Here we make a point of not growing things for sale that compete with machine grown & harvested crops. Like potatoes. Or crops harvested by batallions of slave labor at cutthroat wages. I know better than to compete on price. We compete on quality like outstanding flavor, & service, with things people want & can't find in every Walmart.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

On 10/16/2013 6:56 PM, John D'hondt wrote:

I could not agree more Pego. I try to do what your uncle should have done. We are still small (70 acres) and we sell as little as possible because everything you sell diminishes fertility. And really there are most things that can be found much cheaper in a super market. I  can buy a metric ton of local potatoes here now for about $35. While if you count our hours we put in we would need $2- 3 per kilo (almost a hundred times more expensive) to make a few $$ per hour. At least our own potatoes are very good and have seen no chemicals. They are not for sale. And if we have a surplus we feed them to our own animals.

I think though that both big and small farmers are being squeezed to dead at the moment. It is a way of life, not a way to make a living. (make big money)

John

: Re: [Livingontheland] Livingontheland Digest, Vol 411, Issue 3

Hi John

 

I dunno about there, but here my family fell prey to this industrization, commoditization  money trap. Taking bigger loans to get into bigger acerage and equipment to manage that acerage and chemps to make up for the total lack of natural inputs, because giants don't have the time and resources to do that ffor giant farms.  After 80-100 years of this shindig all my family have lost their farms.  Every durned one of them.  The last to own were my aunt and uncle and by the end they were working 90hr weeks to keep up and pay all these incredible bills, only to see all their profits roll upstream to the banks and big Ag.  Their kids wouldn't touch the farm with a pole they were so exhausted by the entire thing.  What a loss and sorrow when they sold the land to enjoy the year they had left until they died.   That land was beautiful and bountiful, We litterally harvested morel mushrooms by the bushelful from the hills on it before my uncle let those hills be ripped down for roadfill so that he could have a few more acres of flatland.

 

What did they have for all that in the end?  Educated kids, which is no small thing, a tiny profit margin that turned to loss on bad years and litterally no life left to have with their kids and grandkids or even each other.  When I looked back at the shape of it all what I saw was that this had been a trap for us.  We all were promised profits and a good life for our families.  What we got was the farms turning into poisoned, depleated lands and required additional in leases to grow enough for profits.  Industrial farming isn't really about greater profits, it is about concentration of profits and not usually in the farmer's hands.

 

I think about our beautiful hills and what would have happened if my uncle had drawn a line somewhere in those early days that said. "I will not take more than I can pay for, handle no more than than enough to feed our family, build our futures and enjoy our lives with".  If we had just not stepped onto that ratrace.  Those morels  are valued at $50-60 LB.  An afternoon's work would have been an extra week's pay in season and still left enough for next season and my aunt's gourmet cookery.  All the things needfull to keep the old place running were within reach.  Their old tractor was paid off, their land eventually got there.

I am on this list because there simply has to be a better way of handling the land and of having a real life that isn't basically an indenture to those compnies   You don't need big equipment for small, or many employees.  You don't need expensive inputs and, frankly, nobody needs an expensive life. The more expensive our farms and land is, the less we get out of them

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