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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: tradingpost <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] I think they forgot something
  • Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2014 13:18:19 -0700


Regarding that symposium on access to land:

I went over their page at http://agrariantrust.org/land-access-proven-strategies/ . Predictably, almost all their "success strategies"outlined there are based on all kinds of ideas and legal maneuvers for aspiring farmers to get fairly sizeable amounts of land. They all depend on getting outside financing of some kind. They also include large livestock farming which is well known to be the most inefficient waste of land, fossil fuel inputs, and shrinking water supplies. What they've compromised at Schumacher then is "small is beautiful". They also seem to have missed Diet for a Hot Planet by Anna Lappé (Frances daughter) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pJFLavQH_8

In my view, those approaches are not realistic for the masses of people who will need to be growing food, who often are those with little credit or investment capital, or experience - in a shrinking economy with uncertain climate. Good luck with that. Let's forget "get big or get out". There are also options for the unemployed with free time.

The obvious alternative is to look at how a lot of people can grow a lot more good food on a lot less land, with hand tools and recycled organic waste for fertilizer - bypassing the high cost of land, machinery, and fossil fuel inputs. The methods have been out there for many years. People fed themselves for countless millennia without all that modern stuff. Methods have been refined and demonstrated by Jeavons, the Rodales, and thousands of others. Primarily it starts with a system of permanent beds and aisles that automatically triple or quadruple food production for a given amount of growing space, and conserves inputs by concentrating all inputs on the growing soil instead of walking space. Do the math. Works for me. Compaction is reduced by not walking on growing soil, which means no tiller needed. On that point, people like Ruth Stout and Ken Hargescheimer have long promoted mulch and no-till. Most of our grandparents and those before them had home gardens out of necessity, but this is a realistic and far more productive refinement. It also gives starting farmers a way to start small and get on that learning curve.











  • [Livingontheland] I think they forgot something, tradingpost, 02/23/2014

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