permaculture

[sean forde <sforde@gmail.com>]

In Blake Hurst's article, "The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the
Agri-intellectuals" he complains that planting clover to produce nitrogen
had an unwanted side effect - bugs - and that forced him to use an
insecticide. Does anyone have any real world experience to help him out?

Here is an excerpt from the article (
http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/the-omnivore2019s-delusion-against-the-agri-intellectuals
)

"A few other problems come to mind. The last time I planted a cover crop,
the clover provided a perfect habitat in early spring for bugs, bugs that I
had to kill with an insecticide. We do not normally apply insecticides, but
we did that year. Of course, you can provide nitrogen with legumes by using
a longer crop rotation, growing clover one year and corn the next. But that
uses twice as much water to produce a corn crop, and takes twice as much
land to produce the same number of bushels. We are producing twice the food
we did in 1960 on less land, and commercial nitrogen is one of the main
reasons why. It may be that we decide we would rather spend land and water
than energy, but Pollan never mentions that we are faced with that choice."