Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

I was thinking today about the unbelievable productivity of non- industrial 
growing. We started a bed (2.5 meters by 5, enough for a double row) of 
mange- tout/sugar peas early April and since mid May we have been picking on 
average 2-3 Lbs per day from this. Every day. Eventually we could not keep 
up with production and now there are a lot of well filled pods going yellow. 
Two dry days in a row and I will be picking and shelling the ripest ones for 
drying. At the same time the plants are still flowering profusely and we 
will be able to harvest fresh green pods for a good while longer too.
Compared with this industrial agriculture is a pathetic joke.
John

> Exactly John. It simply highlights the backwardness and risk of 
> monoculture & industrial farming in general. All your eggs in one basket. 
> No built in resilience.
>
> On 7/20/2014 3:32 PM, John D'hondt wrote:
> > The first thing that struck me when the farmer was complaining about not 
> > being able to go out on the land and give the crops what they need was 
> > that what was actually meant was ; " I can't go out spraying pesticides".
> > And there was I thinking that this might be a good thing.
> > Wetter conditions can be surmounted by planting different crops imo. 
> > There are many pulse species that like wet soils, just not soy beans. The 
> > coloured corn that we have been growing for the last 20 years does quite 
> > well on wet soils. All without spraying anything.
> > Perhaps the most important tactique is to have a wider variety of crops 
> > and get away more from monoculture. There has always been something that 
> > has done right well for us every summer however miserable the weather 
> > was. Hard to predict what that will be next year these days. Crops that 
> > have traditionally done very well may fail completely the next time for a 
> > number of reasons; mostly weather related or because of an exploding 
> > rodent population.
> > John
> >
> > > Grim Harvest: Climate Change Sweeps Iowa Farms (Op-Ed)
> > > http://www.livescience.com/46863-iowa-farms-try-to-cope-with-climate-changes.html
>
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