permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

on 9/19/00 1:31 PM, georg parlow at georg@email-me.at wrote:

> in the traditional olive growing
> countries like greece or italy olive growing is a usually a small family
> business, often combined with goats and/or vegies, figs, raisins...  spain
> is a bit different, but even there are no industrial olive mega farms like
> you know them from the states.

I'm glad to hear this. Most of the better olive oils in the US are imported;
industrial grade comes from California. So I'll relax a bit.

The impression we get here in the US is that our industrial methods have
been adopted wholesale in Europe; I was afraid that to compete with the big
boys they had torn out all the diverse little farms. Does this mean that
small farms in (Southern) Europe are still using manure more than chemical
fertilizers? Hope so, because I've seen small farms in Asia where they use
pesticides like water (and then use the empty cans to carry drinking water).

Toby