pcplantdb

[Scott Pittman <pci@permaculture-inst.org>]

Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:

> John Schinnerer wrote:
>
> > Case in point - the only "small" farmers in the USA who are not only 
> > not going broke and losing their farms but actually doing pretty well 
> > are the Amish.  They keep it small; they keep it relatively low-tech; 
> > they choose not to farm more than they can handle with some (locally 
> > sustainable) draft animals and their own community resources; they 
> > produce top-quality products that fetch premium prices.  And, not 
> > least, they support each other in communal ways that the rest of us 
> > have mostly abandoned.
>
>
> I really hope noone paid any attention to what you wrote here. You 
> have no clue to
> what is actually going on in small to medium scale agriculture im the 
> US, what those farmers are doing
> and their hopes and aspirations for the future. Do you work for a 
> living? Do you do anything ag-related?
> I didn't think so. I wish you would quit trying to jack this project 
> around with your negativism and apathy
> about uses for PIW in the field of farming and gardening, topics you 
> obviously know little or nothing about
> and have even less interest in. Stick to the contributions you offered 
> to make toward software development.
>
> LL

Whoaa there nellie!!!

I don't see anything in John's email that is that offensive or 
incorrect.  I agree that a lot of small to medium (100 -200 acre) farms 
are doing well through CSA structures, farmer's market, and direct 
market.  What I referred to in my email was that large (500+ acres) 
farms are always extractive not sustainable.  It doesn't matter if you 
are organic, biodynamic, or baptist just because you are those things 
doesn't mean that the agriculture you practice is sustainable.
The larger you are the more concerned you are with efficiency and 
cutting costs, while increasing the market share.  In order to do this 
your methodology is to decrease human labor, increase mechanical (petro 
based) technology.  More compaction, more equipment to ease compaction, 
soil erosion, more inputs to replace lost nutrient (doesn't matter that 
those inputs are imported from fisheries around the world, or phosphate 
mining in Florida and Idaho) and away we go with another industrial 
model except this one is certified organic.  Just as I think that Bill 
Gates is an obscenity of hoarding the commons in his bank account, 
because of scale, so do I think that, because of scale the mega farmer 
is looting the commons, and both are depriving the majority of a chance 
to earn a decent living either in the software world or the ag. world.  
I would love for someone to show me a human ag. system that is 
sustainable over twenty years that is more than five hundred acres. 

True sustainable farming must be a messy conglomerate of perennial and 
annual cultivation which does not always conform to the height, width, 
length demands of mechanical technology.  Why is it that studies have 
shown that the small family run farm is far more productive and 
sustainable than the mega-farms that are displacing them??  I think it 
is because they are stewards and connected to the land rather than their 
bank account.

Speaking of crop rotation, this is pretty much a phenomena of annual 
cropping, are we identifying guilds of the annuals as well as the 
perennials?  This increases the task geometrically!  Never the less it 
occurs to me that our guild just got extended to the micro organisms.  
What are the root associates that keep a plant free of nematodes, fungi, 
and other disease?  Going from the mega to the micro and searching the 
micro for those guild characteristics is a very exciting, if daunting 
task.  Gil Carandang has some wonderful techniques for collecting and 
multiplying the beneficial micro organisms that are indigenous to the 
site where they are collected

I think it is wistful thinking that we can continue our industrial model 
of agriculture if we only change the inputs and incorporate no-till as 
part of our farming regimine.  The system is flawed from the beginning, 
from step one, as is our transportation system, marketing system, and 
etc. ad nauseum..

Scott