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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Why women in India are farming with diverse plants – and without pesticides

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: "John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Why women in India are farming with diverse plants – and without pesticides
  • Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 21:33:18 +0100

Thanks Paul, this link worked and it still makes a lot of sense to me. We probably grow over 80 different plant species here but more than half of these are perennials.
We have seen some very bad summers here lately where some crops failed miserably. With enough variety we never were short of crops that did do fairly well.
John

Nice catch, John. CS Monitor slipped up! But persistent cuss that I am I
nailed the link
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Bite/2014/0622/Why-women-in-India-are-farming-with-diverse-plants-and-without-pesticides

Good on chemicals. Most growers don't suspect the reason they can't rely
on natural predators to handle bugs. When aphids start appearing in our
spinach & kale, ladybugs just show up from nowhere. No poisons to deter
them. Also we believe poisons affect flavor & resilience by destroying
the microbe populations which of course feed plant roots. Plants evolved
along with those microbes, as did we.

On 6/23/2014 3:17 PM, John D'hondt wrote:
My browser says the page can not be found. But I think the answer is very simple : If those women can do it under India's conditions and I can in cold, wet Ireland then it can not be difficult. My reason for growing crops without poison is simple too. I once in a former life taught a small course in bio- chemistry at a university. So I do know that man made chemicals are radically different from chemicals existing in nature and often extremely persistent in the environment and toxic for a wide variety of organisms. Grasses or insects are bio- chemically not very different from ourselves. It is just that our options for food are much wider than theirs. Spray roundup and you will kill plants, insects, earthworms and frogs. If we had been there at the time of spraying and we had to get all our food from that area completely we would get sick and die quite fast too. But instead our food most often comes from a huge area stretching thousands of miles that have not all been poisoned. So we live a bit longer.

Maybe ten years ago I saw the experiment being done here in Ireland. A farmer round-upted a field of grass and when this turned the typical orangey colour he put two cows with calves at foot on the field to eat the "hay". The calves died within a week but the cows lasted almost a month although they had to be carried of the field. They had trouble standing and looked like skeletons.

Why would you do something like that? There are no safe chemicals!
John

Why women in India are farming with diverse plants – and without
pesticides
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Bite/2014/0622/.U6emDomWIEE.twitter

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