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| Greetings all:
I live in the Great Plains, surrounded in all directions for many 10's of thousands of acres, by agronomic crops and pasture. You could literally drive in any direction at 60 mph for many hours on end and still be seeing grain fields on both sides of the road. Yep, this country produces an enormous amount of grain which we in the US consume and the rest of the world relies on too. For decades, all of this grain production has been accomplished with synthetic fertilizers that supplied the N, P and K needs of the crops. sometimes I wonder, aware of this vast grain producing area if it would be possible to produce anywhere near as much grain using state of the art organic (for the soil part) methods. It seems there isn't any where near enough organic material to do the job even with cover cropping and manure additions. A great many animals are raised here on pasture and finished in feed lots yet the amount of manure they produce is tiny compared to the amount of land that surrounds them. It would require an enormous amount of energy to truck in and apply organics to all this ground out here. So, where is the organic supply of just the N, P and K supposed to come from? I suppose we could simply not produce nearly as much grain and allow land to lay fallow and/or cover cropped for years on end, that would help the soil but not produce much grain. Some say we need to increase the organic content of the soil, calculate out how much organic material it would take to raise the %O.M. of 1000 acres and you'll find out real quick the sort of dilemma I'm contemplating. One thousand acres of land out here is chump change, so to speak. It is not at all my intent here to rag on organic production, just point out the corner we have backed ourselves into as a species...keep going with the current farming methods that got us here or, it seems to me, shrink the world population way back and switch to organic. It would be a wonderful thing if everybody had their own garden but there again, I have to scrounge for enough O.M. from the trees around here just to keep my garden going and those leaves can no longer blow into the creek bottoms and other good places for them to be. I can get manure from a friends feed lot which is great for me but now there is less for his fields. In short, there is only so much O.M. to go around and no excess it seems to me, so, what are we to do in addition to cover cropping? |
Follow-Up Postings:
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| It is well documented that the world produces plenty of food to feed everyone right now. Continuing to use synthetic agricultural methods has been touted as the solution to the problem, but it has yet to solve the problem, because the dominant thinking, which you seem to share, is that the way to feed people is to keep adding more outside material. By your own description you are surrounded by thousands of acres of grain, but I will wager that a large percentage of those crops are used for meat production, which is a poor conversion of energy to nutrients, and biofuels. The farmers of the mid-west, in large part, are responsible for causing food shortages, as opposed to addressing them, because the buy into an agronomic system that depends on unsustainable methods for largely political and economic reasons. This is not sustainable in areas like yours where the failed practice of soil nutrient mining and monoculture have rendered the soil incapable of self-regeneration. The reason you can't find OM is because instead of creating it yourself, which takes years, you are continuing to follow the practice that created the problem in the first place. The great plains were a sustainable ecology producing enormous amounts of food energy before benighted farming practices took over, and the fertility that resulted created the rich topsoils that we have been mining for almost 200 years, with no regard for re-investing in the real wealth of the land, which was its' high nutrient content and biodiversity. There are some progressive farmers who are restoring the tall grass prairie, re-introducing bison, and learning how to restore biological and economic sustainability, but for the most part, the mind-set, like yours, is to continue to find or create barriers to doing what is sustainable, and choosing quick-fix solutions and immediate gratification and keep forestalling responsibility to be addressed by future generations. The solution is to stop subsidizing excess production, encourage high-diversity small-acreage farms to supply local markets, and return major pieces of land to natural ecosystems so that the replenishment of native soils can begin. Americans think we are the only way to feed the world. That propaganda has been spouted by midwestern farmers and the benefactors of big agriculture and political interests since the 1950s. The truth is that there are huge areas in Russia and China and South America that could quickly and easily replace our production. The belief persists because of political and economic influences, not agronomic realities. Our failure as a nation to co-operate with those alternatives has contributed to food shortages and starvation, but has kept a select few fat and happy and willing to disregard the long-term consequences of continuing to do the same thing everyone else does. |
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| "so, what are we to do in addition to cover cropping? I don't know. I am in the same boat as you. I see the situation about like you do. Sure, there are some who point out how Joe Salatin does it with his setup. That is great, but not everyone has his zeal and energy and chutpatz. Cover crops and some more diversity are the only answers I see. I do not believe in the Big Brother coercion some might believe in. |
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| Anyone who has been around the forums for the past few years sees these come up pretty regularly with amazingly similar posts. Rather than rehash them again I'll post the links... I Am A Bit Surprised At The OG Practices I See In Old Literature I'm sure there are others but these are the two I can recall off the top of my head. Lloyd P.S. The link to the hydrogen powered tractor is broken but a person can google it, there are many articles. |
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| there are more than 6,000 ghost towns in the State of Kansas alone (according to Kansas historian Daniel Fitzgerald) |
Here is a link that might be useful: restoring wasteland
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| I think that if we let China, Russia, or Brazil grow more food and us less just transfers the prob;em elsewhere. We see how our trade deficit grows and then China just belches out the pollution with few safeguards for man or earth. It may sound pessimistic, but we are dealing with billions of measures of apathy, selfishness, ignorance, poverty, personal freedom and preferences, indebtedness and sickness...let alone the Kim Jongs and Ayatollahs. |
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| Michael, I hear your concern, but it seems to me that the situation and problem is so much vaster (no pun intended) than the fields you're looking at. Are US farmers still paid NOT to grow? I've read (in Secrets of the Soil by Tompkins and Bird) about places like Australia where the land had become marginal and the plots way too big to have enough manure to bring them back. Biodynamic sprays (sprayed from aircraft) have done wonders to bring back soil health and humus content. The authors suggest this as a remedy for the American mid west. It takes very little manure to make the biodynamic preps, which on a biological level seem to me to be basically manure tea, filled with living organisms who immediately go to work repairing ailing soil. |
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| Are US farmers still paid NOT to grow? Are tons of grain still rotting and being consumed by rats in silos in the US because we have an excess? elisa, I don't think that there is as much being paid out in conservation set asides these days. I see lots of newer grain bins on farms these days that are likely much better for grain storage than previously. That talk about bio-dynamic spraying is interesting. Is it really practical after being critiqued? |
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| we can teach & do one garden at a time. |
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| Wayne, sorry for the quick and dirty Wikipedia reference, but I found this: "A 2009/2011 review found that biodynamically cultivated fields achieve lower absolute yields but better energy efficiency of production; impact the environment positively, including increased biodiversity; had greater earthworm populations and biomass than conventional farms; maintained or slightly improved organic carbon levels, while both organic and conventional farming techniques resulted in a loss of organic carbon; had higher microbial biomass carbon and dehydrogenase activity than those of either organically or conventionally farmed fields." (see Wiki for references) Most of the criticism I saw centered on the fact that there was no appreciable difference between the benefits of biodynamic and organic compost additions. BUT if the goal is to treat large areas of land with much less inputs, and you can treat an acre with an ounce of biodynamically prepared manure, then biodynamics seems like an interesting method to look at. |
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| And from what I've read, 80% of the grain grown in the US goes to feeding animals. Is that so we can eat more fast food and gain even more weight? If you don't buy much processed food, you don't need much grain to make it. So if we don't need all that land to grow grain, then we can grow grass and feed the animals that. Just remember most of that land used to be the Great American Prairie where millions of acres of grasses grew and millions of ruminates used to graze. You fix the land slowly.....just like Mother Nature does. |
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- Posted by organic_popeye (My Page) on Wed, Feb 15, 12 at 2:17
| bi1 1me, I REALLY enjoyed your post. From my chair, right on the money, in fact all of the posts showed deep concern for the rape of the earth's soils by vested interests interested in nothing other than their selfish bottom line. Chemical ag is basically bust, heavily dependent on natural gas and petrol based toxic rescue chemistry. Simply not sustainable. Returning to natural growing processes with new findings is the only way out. As some of you know, I am a broken record for Mycorrhizae and reestablishing them to our soils. It is no accident that the prairie soils that shebear refers to were built by mycorrhizae because they are the most intense with grass roots, more so than with any other plants. Virgin prairie grasslands had around 30% humus and it was the mycorrhizae that did it. With the new organic tech in tow, growers are growing highly nutritious food for man and beast and are equaling and exceeding 'conventional agriculture' yield. (I hate that term - Mother Nature is conventional and she has only been growing plants for millions of years) The data from the field is coming in each season to prove it. My own personal growing experience has proved it to me. It can be done, but not with traditional organic methods. Here is a link you might want to take a look at. Blessings to us all. |
Here is a link that might be useful: The Soil Secrets Blog
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| For the most part, I think the Native Americans had it right. They understood the complexity of the system, the interdependence of all its' parts, without any of our technological understanding, and they had a sustainable way of life that was in harmony with their ecosystem. The conflicts they had were social, not environmental. To me that is what we should be working towards with our agricultural efforts - to provide for ourselves and our community in a way that does no harm to our ability for those efforts to continue for generations. When we try to feed a community that is too large - selling wheat to India, for instance - the demands on the system are too great, and we lose sustainability. I'm all for redistributing wealth by creating a product and selling it - that is the model my farm is based on - but every year at least 25% of my productive land is being rejuvenated by fallowing, green manure, or sheet composting, in order to create and maintain sustainability without an over-dependence on off-farm inputs. Not everyone has the space to quadruple the size of their garden to incorporate a significant portion in cover crop rotation every year, but that is part of what it takes to eliminate the extractive nature of gardening by the methods that people currently use - always locked into the system of needing to get more OM, or buy more products, from off-farm sources. |
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- Posted by jonhughes So.Oregon (jonehughes@hotmail.com) on Wed, Feb 15, 12 at 11:36
| Hi Michael357, You took a real beatdown on this thing, that is weird because,when I read your post it made sense and resonated as true, I thought ,yeah , we are doing the best we can with the resources we have at hand. Then the other posts started filtering in, and WOW, it was: Proverbs 18:17 The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him. You all know I have only been gardening for 3 years and its a on a very small plot, so definitely, I have A LOT to learn, keep teaching me, I'm peddling as fast as I can. |
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| I may have been a bit harsh on Michael357, for which I apologize. The situation he is in, though, is very troubling to me, and it is the fault of the generations of farmers who have nearly ruined the land around him more than anything else. It is a national tragedy that we have taken what was likely the best agricultural land in the world and flushed half of it into the Gulf of Mexico, poisoned much of the rest so that it can no longer sustain adequate levels of humus and organic matter, allowed the farms to be co-opted by large corporate concerns who dictate what to grow and how to do it with the primary focus on shareholders and not farmers, and, to top it off, KNOW that these are problems but do very little to change things. The solution has to be a return to sustainable practices without sacrificing all of the gains that technology has brought us. Every crop should be underplanted to a nurse crop of some kind - harvest the corn, but let the vetch or peas that were seeded at the same time continue to grow, adding biomass and fixing nitrogen. Incorporate multi-year, complex rotations, including pasturing and green manures, for which the returns come not until subsequent crops are harvested. Restore autonomy to land owners, to break the boom and bust cycle that processors and seed companies have created. It is ridiculous that people who live in the middle of these vast fertile fields have to drive for miles to get decent produce, because they grow so much of so few things, in a way that takes but gives little of value back. It is exactly the same mindset that you see in banks that charge 18% interest on credit cards and pay .5% on savings accounts, and I can assure you those same farmers resent that practice. Michael357, I do apologize. It gets me riled, and I know it's not your fault. |
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| I have learned in a couple of different climate/soil paradigms that appropriate crops in a highly mixed culture can be produced with a tiny fraction of the inputs that are used for conventional staple crop production. The huge caveat is that these kinds of arrangements do not lend themselves to really any level of mechanization. There is the rub: yes, we can maintain the current pop without synthetic frets, but only with a truly immense increase in human labor input. |
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| As long as we're talking about creative solutions, what about biochar? I heard a lecture on it last year and immediately wanted to start burning things at high heat. |
Here is a link that might be useful: biochar
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| The sources of synthetic N, P, and K are finite, so what will be done when those resources are no longer available? The problem, today, is not quantity of food but distribution. Even when tons of food stuffs are delivered to many places suffering famine that food soes not reach those it is intended for. |
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| Biochar has basically zero nutrients. It is an excellent matrix for holding minerals and fungi. |
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| kimm has raised an excellent point here. Even when tons of food stuffs are delivered to many places suffering famine that food soes not reach those it is intended for. I also wonder why the people are so unable to help themselves more. Oftentimes there is a warlord or dictator political situation...like in Somalia or Mugabe. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Too often there has not been enough of the Lord in these places. I certainly covet my liberty when it comes to my own choices for health and want no Washington warlords imposing things like Codex Alimentarius. |
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| Not to touch off an esoteric debate, but I will say that I think it is not an absence of piety that is the cause of malnourishment in various parts of the world. There is no shortage of catholics and evangelicals in brazil, for instance, and yet malnourishment - "fome" - certainly exists. Shall we discuss the connection between the Inquisition and destitution and starvation? Or that without those heathen crops of Maize and Potato most christian europeans would have died of want during the 17th century? |
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- Posted by michael357 5b KS (My Page) on Thu, Feb 16, 12 at 15:14
| Bi11me: aint no thang. One thing unique to this area and others is the low annual precipitation. Soil moisture must be managed. If one cover crops (I am a big proponent of them) they take water from the soil that will not be there for a subsequent food crop. some may think that is not a problem but in economical terms it means that fewer food crops can be grown commercially. So, if one is farming to make a living one must be able to not grow as many crops. That would be economically unfeasible to many if not all farmers out here without somebody carrying the financial burden. Having spoken over the years with many grain farmers around here, I can assure you that NOBODY is telling any of these guys what, where or when to grow anything. these guys make their decisions to plant in advance of planting season based on what they think the markets for their grain will be in the future (a real crap shoot), where they are in their rotations, what they think the costs of outputs will be, the possibilities of whether or not they may be able to rent a particular field or not existing soil moisture, etc., etc., etc.. They don't give a damn what their neighbor thinks, let alone what Mansanto et. al. think. As far as the O.M. goes, of course there ways to create it in situ and, as you point out, it takes time. How is a farmer supposed to grow grain crops out here in this soil as it is and make a living? Nobody is willing or able to do it and take huge losses while the O.M. builds up or is maintained, we are where we are. When the millions of people in the US and abroad completely stop eating poultry, beef and pork, maybe there will be time for the soil to recover with cover cropping, etc.. Till then, I really don't understand how the soil can improved significantly without imported organic inputs and no cropping. Lloyd: I saw a guy on TV the other day with a wood fired pickup truck, it was pretty neat! Of course, the guy was an engineer and built the thing himself. shebear: oops, forgot about all the grass fed beef, one of my neighbors is a big producer of that and sheep. Them critters haven't had anything but grass all their lives. Popeye: agreed, the petrochemical age will come to an end at some point, most likely because of economics(to darned expensive for people to afford petrochemical derived stuff). I'm just thinking down the road in time and wondering if it is feasible to get the world off the conventional, sorry, way of growing crops and onto others while not starving anybody to death in the mean time, the task is gargantuan. I AM NOT saying it is impossible, just that it is difficult to envision on such a scale. bi11me: "Not everyone has the space to quadruple the size of their garden to incorporate a significant portion in cover crop rotation every year, but that is part of what it takes to eliminate the extractive nature of gardening by the methods that people currently use - always locked into the system of needing to get more OM, or buy more products, from off-farm sources." Well put, boy do I yearn for more garden space for the reasons you pointed out. The best I can do is to plant oats in August every year after the garden is done. Rotating would be a great addition. Guess I could just idlw my garden 3 or 4 out of every 5 years but the pantry would be awful bare most of the time. jonhughes: thanks for the kind words, I didn't feel beat down cause I don't take this stuff personally the vast majority of the time and folks here don't make personal attacks hardly ever it seems to me. I do enjoy spirited debate though as long as the shouting is left out. By all means, keep paddling! Wayne_5: Washington Warlords, I about peed my pants laughing at that one, thanks! Oh, I know, one of these days I should look up one of the outfits that is currently producing organic wheat commercially to see how they are doing it. |
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| "Or that without those heathen crops of Maize and Potato most christian europeans would have died of want during the 17th century?." Huh? Pat, I wasn't aware that there was much maize and potatoes in Europe in the 1600s. |
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| Yes, should have said 18th century, though the potato was already common by the mid- 1600's. By the mid-19th any problem with the potato supply meant massive malnourishment for the massively-ballooned populations, as per the Famine in ireland and later in russia. Billme, you are surely right about having enough fallowing space in one's food production system. Which, writ large means ultimately less population. |
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- Posted by organic_popeye (My Page) on Fri, Feb 17, 12 at 2:44
| Ya'll there is so much good stuff here on your posts. Again, when talking of OM, we must learn that HUMUS is the way out of our dilemma, not OM. Om is Soil Food Web food, not a source of humus, new research findings. Mycorrhizae produce humus, approximately 98% in grassland and mixed herbage. Forests and non mycorrhizal plants have much less humus in their soils. Organic matter and compost contribute 1 maybe 2% at the most. Not much. Roger on warlords and political BS. I have been to Mogadishu and Berbera, Somalia (1983 and 1984 while aircrew in the Navy) and what I observed there was obscene. Man's inhumanity to man. We can do better with our own problems here in the U.S. |
Here is a link that might be useful: Soil Secrets Blog
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- Posted by michael357 5b KS (My Page) on Fri, Feb 17, 12 at 12:42
| Ok Popeye, I started looking into the humus briefly and came up with this site below, whaddya think of it? |
Here is a link that might be useful: The Theory Behind Humates
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- Posted by Coconut_Head none (My Page) on Fri, Feb 17, 12 at 14:26
| I'll do a quick math problem. According to Ohio State Univ. A raised bed can produce 1.25 Lbs of food per year per square foot. I think that's rediculously low. I would be interested in how much John Huges produces per square foot in his setup. But, let's use it for arguments sake. An average human needs to consume roughly 800 Lbs of food per year. So dividing 800 into 1.25 gives us 640 square feet to produce roughly enough food to feed a human for 1 year. I'm not counting meat, I'm just saying if people ate a plant based diet (which they could survive off and be healthy). So in one acre there is 43,560 square feet, if we divid that by 640 (the space required to produce enough to feed one human), we get 68. Lets assume we can't use the full square footage of the acre of land for growing, we do need paths and maybe a structure or two for housing and processing. Cut the acerage in half, and we can still feed 34 people annually on one acre of land. In just NY state (I am using it because I live here) there are 35 Million acres of land. Again assuming we can use only half of that, we could feed 595 Million people annually. The entire US population is 313 Million. So just on a pure calorie basis, we could feed nearly double the entire population of the US on 50% of the land in NY and only utilizing 50% of that space as raised bed gardening. |
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| Based on my experience, which is pretty extensive regarding mixed crops grown in various labor-intensive arrangements, 1.25 lbs per square foot per year is very optimistic. Due to the fact, as pointed out earlier, that ground must be fallowed and allowed to grow biomass quite regularly. Even with non-organic mineral inputs for most soil/climate situations that figure will not hold, certainly not if those pounds of food are calorie-dense. |
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| The math is good, but some basic assumptions skew the results. 1) Not all of the land is arable. But the concept, and the reality, once we move a bit further out from the NY limits, is that it is possible to produce enough. The more people take responsibility for producing at least some portion of their own food, the more becomes available to those who can't. |
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| Not to mention that the idea of 1/4 the surface area of NY state in raised beds is an ecological disaster on a Chinese scale. The concept of 'gardening' is useful on a small scale. For really large areas to be food-productive sustainably, we have to think of permaculture. Very low intensity, reliant on perennial and naturalized crops as forbs, bushes and trees rather than massive inputs of energy and fertilizer to annual plants only. |
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| I am quite often amused when the 'theoretically' issues come up. Theoretically, if we stop consuming meat, One of the main reasons 'western' civilizations were able to achieve what we have achieved is because people were able to devote less time to hunting/gathering/growing and more time to industrialization. I wonder how many people would be willing to go back to subsistence living? Lloyd |
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- Posted by michael357 5b KS (My Page) on Fri, Feb 17, 12 at 19:03
| Hi Lloyd: in addition to your list - if all that was harvested was eaten. |
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| Isn't one acre considered the amount of good land needed to provide for 25 CSA members? That would be the veggie portion of their calories, anyway. I'm still thinking about the "heathen" crops of maize and potatoes. Add tobacco to that list, and think of those friendly Natives with gratitude the next time you're at the County Fair eatin' corn dogs and french fries and smokin' a cigar. :) |
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- Posted by jonhughes So.Oregon (jonehughes@hotmail.com) on Fri, Feb 17, 12 at 21:51
| Since you asked ;-) I have 1379 square feet of growing beds I donated 9173 lbs of Vegetables to the Food Bank last year. Here is the timing and harvesting breakdown: 15 lbs of Onions����..� 4-18-2011 67 lbs of Cucumbers��������������������ï
¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½8-25-2011 Harvest Totals for Season: All was donated to the FoodBank. |
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| Anyway you slice it that is a lot of produce. If you remove the water, I would roughly guess you removed 1200 pounds of dry matter. That means you need a lot of replacement material. I wish Garden Web would let us use more of the simple HTML characters....they used to. |
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| PS, Quite a bit of that material comes from the air. Still there might be what?...150 pounds of minerals? |
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- Posted by jonhughes So.Oregon (jonehughes@hotmail.com) on Fri, Feb 17, 12 at 22:59
| I don't know anything about that ,but I top off my beds with 9 yards of homemade compost, that is pretty heavy, even though it is finished and I have never put any fertilizers in. Thinking about trying some this year though ,at least experimenting ;-)
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| That's 6.65 lbs/sq. ft. which is more like what I would expect. It just looks like more with all that punctuation ;^) |
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| Like any good farmer I have to ask what were the inputs required to produce this. Include equipment, structures, man hours/salaries, fuel and all the other costs. Then we can calculate the cost per pound as well. Lloyd |
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| It's clear that there was a lot of initial expense in the infrastructure, which to my mind is good thinking. Well designed system, accessible beds, a continual building of soil. No doubt there is no small amount of labor, either, both in the initial construction and operation. Given the final destination though, obviously a labor of love. |
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| "The projected cost of the 3-acre rooftop farm is $2.5 million." Out of my league. Lloyd |
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- Posted by jonhughes So.Oregon (jonehughes@hotmail.com) on Sat, Feb 18, 12 at 10:35
| Hi Lloyd, The Food Bank Garden (just acquired last year)produced 50,000lbs and had hundreds of volunteers ,planting, harvesting etc. My Garden: 9173 lbs...ME ;-) I did all of the Planting and Harvesting all by my lonesome (even my wife won't come out and help ;-( But... it isn't done for them anyway. God said in Deuteronomy 15:11 For the poor will never cease to be in the land; therefore I command you, saying, You shall freely open your hand to your brother, to your needy and poor in your land. I'm just doing my share ;-)
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| Massive inputs for that kind of production are required of course. Still, intensive high-input gardening serves a useful purpose, namely making hand labor very effective on the cultivation of the crop. Making large amounts of compost by taking advantage of large machines (haying equipment, bucket-loaders, etc) makes the system a lot more feasible than otherwise. |
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| The answer to the question, "is it possible to grow enough food", is no doubt yes. However without analyzing how to accomplish this goal, we don't know if it is realistically feasible. It has been my experience that people attempting to start up a market garden mostly underestimate the amount of time/labour, costs and overall difficulties. IOW, it sounds good on paper. I have to admit my experience with my fruit orchard was similar. Lloyd |
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| I like your shirt Jon. You surely have invested a lot of time, dollars, and hauling miles in that ministry. Not a drop will fall to the ground unnoticed and unblessed by our Heavenly Father. |
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- Posted by jonhughes So.Oregon (jonehughes@hotmail.com) on Sat, Feb 18, 12 at 15:32
| Hopefully I fixed that stupid HTML character problem. 15 lbs of Onions------------------------------------------- 4-18-2011 67 lbs of Cucumbers--------------------------------------------------------8-25-
2011 Harvest Totals for Season: All was donated to the FoodBank. |
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- Posted by organic_popeye (My Page) on Sun, Feb 19, 12 at 4:24
| Michael357, I am not a big fan of humates (salts of humic acids) because some are more effective than others and I have had mixed success in years past. More importantly, many of their claims are not backed up by research, in short, they can't prove how effective their product really is or what it contains. However, your reference had a lot of good info in it. Here again I would visit soilsecrets.com and their blog, soilsecretsblog.com for some great articles on humus. This thread has some great posts and most of the problems have been well addressed. A lot of agribusiness production is exported to other countries and we don't benefit. I have never felt that it is America's job to feed the world. I would rather see us teaching other countries how to feed themselves but unfortunately they are only being taught heavy chemical input agriculture which they can neither afford or do sustainably. Hopefully this will change. |
Here is a link that might be useful: Soil Secrets Blog
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| Jon has an unusually fabulous soil/climate combo, I have always suspected. Either that or he is a genius. |
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- Posted by jonhughes So.Oregon (jonehughes@hotmail.com) on Sun, Feb 19, 12 at 17:27
| Well, If those are the only two options, I'm going with soil/climate ;-) |
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- Posted by Coconut_Head none (My Page) on Mon, Feb 20, 12 at 12:01
| Thanks for the info John. You're always an inspiration, both on a personal level and a gardening level. |
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- Posted by michael357 5b KS (My Page) on Mon, Feb 20, 12 at 19:19
| Popeye: I read through the "Soil Secrets" link and found it to have some interesting information in it, unfortunately it seems to be focused on selling a product rather heavily. Of note... the testimonials are useless in and of themselves, where is the research they talk about on more than one occasion. I'd love to see some actual research results from the field. |
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| I would say that it is fairly certain that the forest environment is highly dependent on fungal growth to break down the leaves, twigs, and sparse annual vegetation. Micorrhizal associations tend to abound. When it comes to annual garden crops, bacteria play probably the dominant part. I read a comment on one micorrhizal site that noted, "Where there is moist soil and good soil fertility, the micorrhizal need is not so important."...the plants can fend for themselves. If this is so, and I don't claim to know that extent, just where is the micorrhizal association best manifested? In a few short words, Is this a subject to get worked up about? |
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| In the book "ecofarming", C. Walters talks about mycos at some length. For instance, he says one reason some weeds are so prolific in gardens and farms is that they are adapted to thrive without the mycos, which are typically absent in frequently tilled and under-nourished soils, whereas most cultivated crops need them. |
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| pnbrown, If many of the cultivated crops "need them", why is this so? Would it be that the root system is weak or lacking? |
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- Posted by Coconut_Head none (My Page) on Tue, Feb 21, 12 at 15:22
| I am pretty interested in the soil secrets info as well. I did some searching on youtube and the web at large and "absorbed" some info on Humus or Humic acids, seems interesting and seems to fit pertty nicely within the no till camps ideology. I will be researching this thouroughly, and I enjoy capatalism, so have no problems with someone selling something, but that site does read pretty mich like a late night TV ad. |
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| Speaking of no-till.....the field around me is no-till. Years ago we tilled a lot. With a row crop we traversed the fields perhaps 8 times in a season. These traverses were with relatively narrow width equipment too. Now there are 3 or 4 passes with wide equipment....20 to 90 feet wide. If you don't cultivate [bad for mycorrhizae?] for weeds in row crops, you gotta spray.....gottcha either way? |
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| You could always weed by hand Wayne. ;-) Lloyd |
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| LLoyd says, "You could always weed by hand Wayne. ;-) Yeah, why didn't I think of that. We only had about 150 acres then in row crops. |
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| My parents' philosophy was "if you can't have slaves, have kids." |
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| "We only had about 150 acres then in row crops." I don't see the problem. 1/4 acre per day, per person, you'd only need 85 people to get it weeded in a week. Pay these people ten bucks an hour for an eight hour day and you're only looking at sixty eight hundred bucks. (Hopefully you won't have to do this too often during a season though, it could get expensive.) ;-) Lloyd |
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| There are two crops that would make this worthwhile. One doesn't grow in Indiana. Both are illegal. |
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| Helicopters are frequent here...even in winter. |
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| Have you folks ever listened to the Survival Podcast? It can be pretty interesting, even to city folks like me. This episode is an interview with someone who, with his wife and 5 kids, runs a farm in Texas which is pretty much sustainable. They grow their own vegetables, raise some farm animals, obtain their milk from their own cows, make their own butter, cheese, and yogurt- pretty interesting stuff. My favorite line "If we go to the grocery store, it's pretty much because we want potato chips" Karen |
Here is a link that might be useful: Survival podcast
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- Posted by TheMasterGardener1 none (My Page) on Mon, Feb 27, 12 at 1:24
| Is it possible to grow enough food? Well, stated by jonhughes: "I have 1379 square feet of growing beds I donated 9173 lbs of Vegetables to the Food Bank last year. He gives away 9,000+ lbs of produce and he grows all of it him self!!!! Then Yes is the answer.
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| Michael, regarding your OP, specifically, could the OM percentage of much of the world's arable lands feasibly be raised. One way that it might be feasible is to apply the lacking minerals to such lands in the form of powdered rocks. Albrecht's teaching is that if the macros are balanced properly crops produce more proteinacious matter which should over time raise humus levels of soil, and rock powders can also raise the deficient traces at the same time. For fields that have existing irrigations systems applying micronized rock powered through the water could be very effective. Non irrigated situations would need specialized spreaders that can handle 200 mesh powder. This way we could use the already in-place photosynthetic engines, whatever they are (forage grasses, grains, orchards, etc) to raise the OM and thus the CEC and productivity of soils. |
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