Re: Useful weeds...AND microorganisms

Spud,

Please excuse me if I add more opinion to your excellent post.

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The quote below from 'The Fatal Harvest' says it all.



"Industrial agriculture is devastating our land, water, and air, and is now threatening the sustainability of the biosphere. Its massive chemical and biological inputs cause widespread environmental havoc as well as human disease and death. Its monoculturing reduces the diversity of our plants and animals. Its habitat destruction endangers wildlife. Its factory farming practices cause untold animal suffering. Its centralized corporate ownership destroys farm communities around the world, leading to mass poverty and hunger. The industrial agriculture system is clearly unsustainable. It has truly become a fatal harvest."
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I'd like to talk about the microorganisms in the soil, which break down rock, in water, and carry the nutrients to plant roots.

Without microorganisms there is no life...period.


For example:

Years ago I read that there are some 400 beneficial microbes in human digestive systems, to break down our foods.

Our digestive microorganisms come from wholesome and raw fruit and vegetables. I wonder how many there are today.

Heat kills microorganisms...and not only heat from cooking. Heat from the sun kills microorganisms, too...if the soil is tilled and exposed.

We think we must till and all the other things we do with machines...exposing the soil, and killing the microorganisms. (Look at the dust thrown up by marching machinery.)

Great swaths of our growing soils, 'worked' by machines, lose their ability to grow health-giving plants more and more as we think we can 'do it ourselves'.

A microbe can only run so fast, trying to escape to untilled land. Exposed to the elements, particularly the sun, they die, by the billions and trillions and gazillions.



In about 1968 I heard that it would take 75 bowls of 1968 spinach to equal the nutrients in one bowl of 1930's spinach.

When was it that we allowed machines on our growing soil? In the 1930's?



One so-called 'farmer' told me that he was sure that a 'turf' builds up on growing soil, preventing other plants from growing.

I say that the roots of hardy plants penetrate any 'turf' and till soil beautifully.



I also agree that weeds are wonderfully useful. Mr. Nasser of Brazil proved that by hand-transplanting clumps of weeds and grasses from the surrounding area to 10 hectares of spoiled land. It took him 12 years to restore health to the soil.

(Please look him up at Ashoka.com. He was one of their Fellows.)



Wherever you can, get machines off the land. Instead, create small communities of workers and their families...and see what can be done by scattering hardy seeds of basic vegetables in the wild.

Study the groundwater, too...and preserve it. Machines lose groundwater to dehydration, too.

My best,

Fledgling

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