Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

The regulations here want to get rid of wind breaks. Windbreaks are thought of as non productive areas.
Ireland makes most money from exporting beef and there is a lot of pressure to concentrate of this to the exclusion of anything else. Farmers got paid here to get rid of good orchards and any trees and shrubs and even vegetable gardens so they could grow more grass and sell more beef even below cost.

And yes, to be certified organic you need to rotate crops. I did exactly this in the beginning but in later years almost completely gave up on this.
We noticed that volunteer potatoes, the potatoes that grow in a potato field the year after they were intentionally planted there, the often tiny bits that escaped the human eye when harvesting, and yes they are always there no matter how hard you try to remove every little tuber unless you spray poison to kill them, were always doing extremely well. Often better than the crop planted intentionally.
So I just had to see what would happen if you intentionally grew potatoes on the same land year after year. I found no sign of disease and we always had a good crop except for the year we got flooded 6 times there. Of course I always returned all stalks and leaves to the ground and topped this off after harvest with a layer of compost.
I tried the same with many other crops and saw no problems except maybe for garlic and onions that take a lot of sulphur out of the ground that needs to be replaced.

And my first advice to farm families would be to make absolutely certain they can feed themselves from the land they have or they will have a very big chance of ending up as a modern approximation of share croppers.
John

On 12/02/15 06:03, firekeeper38--- via Livingontheland wrote:

ED187000-04E6-4350-A2A4-DD2BACCA624F@yahoo.com" type="cite">

I hear that all the time about the regs, but the fact is that the first regs to rotate crops and plant wind breaks in the US saved our farms. Our farms were already being lost then as now though the same entities, the banks and the conglomerates they work with, who both have enough $$ in DC to get those ponderous new regs and turn farm families into a modern approximation of share croppers. 
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