Its crazy, were turning back from industrial agriculture but most lay people wont understand it. Others of us hope its not too late. I grew up on a small farm on the Minnesota River Bluff just south of Minneapolis. We were not cash-croppers but they covered the prairies all around us. Eventually, between suburban sprawl and the new chemical farming we became inundated. Still, while we lasted, we raised ducks and geese and chickens (500), and vegetable crops, and fruit. We had a diversified orchard. And we sold sweet corn and eggs from a stand in front. Every fall we applied loads of clean dairy manure. We recycled everything. We were organic. Our soil grew rich and wonderful. What was there to understand? We had it all! Now, somehow, its thought to be a discovery. But it really isnt. Some folks were just slow to catch on. I knew about soil before nearly anything else. The key is, as a boy before the city grew out to smother us, I roomed the countryside with my horse and dog, for miles and miles across prairie bluffs and wetland. And every year in fall, the grassland vegetation burned. And every spring the marshland flooded. It had been doing so for thousands of years. There were birds of every kind, and beaver and deer, coons and fox, even eagles. And there were over 2,000 native forbes and grasses and sedges in the wet and dry prairie mix, and on the bluffs, and under a rich oak savanna. As a result, the soil before it was irresponsibly scrapped off, was some of the deepest and richest in the world. From the time of the glaciers, the fire and flood prepared the seed beds. The natural biodiversity of the system was beyond our modern ability to comprehend. Somehow, our industrial age cheated us of this bountiful heritage. Now we are beginning to wake up, to see that corporations like Monsanto have rapped us, that synthetic engineering and chemicals are not the way to farm. We are slow to do it but we are now looking back. There is a better way. We are calling it the new alternative agro-ecology. But its not new. Its been here all along. Only we have been misguided and it isnt until now that when everything is failing, our possessed USDA and a few courageous academics are turning around.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 18:50:11 +0000
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