permaculture

[venaurafarm <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>]

My original reply with typos corrected:

MP:
    that if the Dacha gardeners grew 41% of Russia's food, that 49% is 
grown by Russia's state agriculture.  What was missed in this equation 
is that Russia is one of the world's largest food importing countries. 
Russia imports a lot of its food.  This means that it's agricultural 
sector isn't doing very good.

LL:

And there is no excuse for that.

Russia has some of the best farmland in the world.
Russia HAD some of the best farmers in the world and they knew how to 
work that prime farmland. Soviet Stalinism changed the face of 
traditional Russian farming.
They converted all farming operations to collective farms generating 
food to ship to the party elite well away from where it was grown, 
leaving farmers, their families and relatives, communities and villlages 
living and working in a state of near poverty or thereabouts, otherwise 
not fairly compensated for their labors. The Russian farmers of old, 
called Kulaks (as far as I know) were the experts carrying forward the 
best traditions of Russian agriculture. The Kulaks were not happy with 
the changeover. Their displeasure did not go unnoticed in the ceners of 
political control so they were either exiled to Siberia or exterminated. 
Russia was left with no new generation who knew how to work those 
magnificent lands (Black Earth Region stretching from Ukraine to 
Siberia). That's what you have now, no new national agricultural 
infrastructure serving the Russian people at large. Just oligarchs and 
their schemes, one of which is to sell or lease some of that Black Earth 
region.  But you have dacha gardeners and community and village gardens 
with larger farms distributing food throughout their regions. You will 
like this: I met a Krishna follower in Whole Foods one evening years ago 
and struck up a conversation asking him about organic agriculture there. 
He replied that after the Soviets left their traditional farming resumed 
without missing a beat. Most of their farms were small family units with 
some medium large with all food sold locally or distributed within the 
immediate region, if they were one of the few larger commercial 
operations. It was an assumed fact that the food sold at markets was 
organically grown. If a grower tried to sell food produced using methods 
involving pesticides, it became known rapidly and that vendor was shut 
out of the marketplace.

MP:

    This should be a fact that should sober up the USA and other 
western countries who rely on agribusiness agriculture to feed people. 
Agribusiness and agriculture suffer mightily when empires crash.

LL:

People in the US need to wake up to the fact that they need clean 
nutritious food in order to live a normal healthy life and that food 
needs to be grown using natural methods and materials and produced 
within a reasonable proximity to consumers.

MP:

    The US does not have a counterpart to Russia's dacha food 
production.  In case of a collapse, the US will be in a tough spot for 
food.

LL:

They can begin now to create one. It would be really fine if we had 
Russian dacha gardeners and American cottage gardeners here together in 
this mailing list. What would it take to get that ball rolling? a 
special permaculture or PDC event or events focusing on that, for starters.

LL




On 5/19/2013 2:36 PM, Lawrence London wrote:
> On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 3:34 AM, <dwoodard@becon.org> wrote:
>
> >    Ioffe, Nefedova and Zaslavsky quote Vladimir Kagansky in a Russian
> >   magazine article of 2003: "In Bashkiriya [Bashkortostan, a Muslim Tatar
> >   area east of the Volga near Kazan], the traditional countryside is
> >   alive, a true village is still around....In rural Bashkiriya, they work
> >   a great deal, build a lot, and drink rarely - this alone makes the rural
> >   Bashkirian hinterland amazing beyond belief."
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashkirs
>
> >   They go on to comment "Large families, widespread mutual assistance and
> >   coordination between rural households, and incomparably less heavy
> >   drinking (or no drinking at all) distinguish rural communities in Muslim
> >   republics."

This sounds like a dream and long as there is religious tolerance.