pcplantdb

[Stephanie Gerson <sgerson@stanfordalumni.org>]

Hmm...I don't know about this GIS business (refer to Lawrence's post 
below).

This seems too complicated for its own sake.  Do you use GIS, Lawrence?

Just curious, what do others think?

eh?
*Stephanie

------ Original Message ------
Received: 10:09 PM PST, 12/05/2004
From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>
To: Permaculture Plant Database <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] synthesis[29][12.04.04]  Eureka....

I am keeping some quoted replies to keep everying in context.
-=-=-=-=-=-
Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:

> 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.

Amazing Grasp of the Obvious Dept.:

To deal effectively with rotations/antagonists/companions/etc. as 
described above,
a farmer/gardener/grower will need to consider his crop plants, the 
condition
of the soil in all growing locations as well as growing bed/row location/
exposure/fertility & tilth, slope and weed seed bank.
When keeping track of where his crops are planted each season he will 
need to log all this other information too.
This means doing it on paper or with computer-based record keeping. The 
best way to accurately measure and log data is
with a GIS. Expensive but very effective. Maybe a community-owned system 
or marketing coop-owned one.
A lenghty walkabout on one's farm with laptop and gis transmitter plus 
access to receiving/recording equipment to
put gathered data on a cd or dvd is all it would take to glean vital data 
needed to combine with crop plant data
for a complete picture of one's farming system. Plug this data into a 
(PIW) database, containing a vast array of
universal crop/rotation/plant compatibility/etc. data, and output your 
plan for next season's plantings.

Yowzah, as my BBS friend Shark was wont to say on extra special 
occasions! PIW FE:

Considering that a farmer/gardener using this system will be tracking 
materials added to his growing beds as well as the
health, tilth and fertility of those beds plus a lot of other factors 
related to formulating his planting plan, who do you think would
be the most likely to use such a system? The organic gardeners and 
farmers. I mean the USDA or EU Certified growers,
those needing to be, are already and need to continue to be, certified.

This represents a serious and possibly lucrative commercial use for PIW 
or at least a way to get big grant bucks. The PIW Farm Edition would 
contain the basic PIW dataset, with incremental update supplements 
availble for a fee or by subscription, and all its functionality plus 
bells and whistles, kotos, sitars and bouzoukis. Farmer installs PIW FE 
on his computer then loads this season's farm growing bed dataset 
acquired by GIS then manually enters the list of plants to be grown that 
season. PIW will output several files, a text or rtf document 
listing plants and their appointed planting location for the season plus 
a pdf providing a graphical representation of his farm showing bed 
locations using GIS-acquired data and what will be planted in them. Maybe 
some other graphical format can be generated to send to a plotter 
for easier reading or at least to a color laserjet printer.

LL
-- 
L.F.London
lfl@intrex.net
http://market-farming.com
http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech
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+++++++++++++++
Stephanie Gerson
sgerson@stanfordalumni.org
(c) 415.871.5683


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