pcplantdb

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

Plants For A Future wrote:

> > 6. An idea I had today while visiting a beautiful farm in Santa Cruz,
> > California.  Not that this is necessarily something PIW could take on, at
> > least not in the immediate future, but might be a possibility.  Crop
> > rotation schemes can be very complicated.  Where to plant what when, so
> > that you are alternating plant families in each bed throughout the
> > season, but giving rotation preference to more disease-prone families,
> > not placing overhead-watering plants next to drip plants, etc.
> > Apprentices at the USCS program have to overlay farms maps from the
> > previous 2 years over each other to determine what ought to go where.  So
> > of course I got to thinking about hg.  And about the possibility of a
> > program into which you could enter information ÿÿ crops that must be
> > grown, which families they pertain to, how many beds you have, etc. ÿÿ 
> > and
> > have it help you plan a crop rotation schedule.  I agree that this might
> > not be the best program to write, considering that it replaces human
> > thought/skill with automation, which will never account for all the
> > variables anyway.
>
>
> Sounds good. Just the sort of thing relationships are for.
> The question here is where we could get this sort of data from?

> Lawerence, do any of your contacts have this sort of info.
> What do we know about rotation systems?

I can look around and see. Information resources on crop rotation, disease 
suppression, plant
antagonist/plant companion, plants for intercropping, plants for succession 
cropping,
allelopathic plants and plants affected by them exists in academic 
literature, journals, textbooks,
non-academic literature, websites, discussion forum archives, ftp archives, 
in extension literature
and from extension personnel and probably in many other locations.

With John D'hondt's post in mind, rotation may be largely dependent on how a 
grower manages his farmland or garden soil.
At any rate there are variables that need to be observed when planning crop 
rotations. Use of compost tea,
rock dusts, composts, manures, irrigation and regulation of soil moisture 
have a lot to do with whether rotation is needed.
IOW no need to do it just for its own sake but it is probably a good idea 
anyway across the board most of the time just to be safe.
Seed Savers Exchange has a potato blight problem one time yet John has 
successfully grown potatoes in spite of blight.

Steve Diver would likely know a lot about this and may offer reams of links 
to appropriate resources that we could use.
Data is also what we need so if there are DB's out there with some of the 
data we need, maybe we could access this transparently
from PIW's DB.

I would like to inquire in the permaculture list and especially in Sanet-MG 
where there are real experts. The USDA NAL and AFSIC
may already have resources. If we can come up with lots of text-based data files can hey be sucked into the DB (assuming we can legally do 
this)?

I have my own ideas but could you give me a list of terms and topics to ask 
about?

 >> However, we recently got a letter from the Whole Systems Foundation,
> > replying to our proposal, saying that we need to demonstrate PIWÿÿs
> > applicability to larger-scale agriculture.  Assuming that large-scale
> > Permaculture is even possible and desirable (I know weÿÿve discussed 
> > this,
> > but letÿÿs assume for now), the tool described above would certainly be
> > applicable to large-scale farming.  What do you think?
>
>
> The whole yields question is important. What are the sort of things a
> large scale farmer would interested in? 
> Yields, market posibilities, processing methods...

You hit the nail on the head with these.

Yields - cultural methods for a balance of maximum production, flavor, size,
disease and pest resistance (soil related mostly) and keeping qualities.

Market possibilities - local, regional food production networks using
marketing coops, csa's, direct sales and buying clubs

Processing methods - opens the door to utilizing most or all of that which is 
produces
by converting them to value added products for use by farmer or sale to 
consumers

> Could mention new techniques like ally cropping
> (theres been a great example in Brazil). It is a different ball game to
> the sort of thing we provide.

There are all kinds of innovative tools and methods that can be used to create
successful and sustainable agricultural systems for use by growers small to 
large.
Many of these are documented on the web, many are projects underway in 3rd 
world developing nations.
All are prime examples of applied permaculture.

LL
--
L.F.London
lfl@intrex.net
http://market-farming.com
http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech