Sustainable Agriculture & Reduced inputs

SilliamWhale said:

How can you be absolutely certain all these old writers are being totally truthful. We all see what we want to see....

Just saying its healthy to be sceptical of everyone.

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SilliamWhale said:

Just saying its healthy to be sceptical of everyone.

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Kiwi Pete said:

This is dead right.
Fortunately, now that we have a century of hindsight in our favour, it appears that the problems they were alarmed about in 1912 are just as, if not more pronounced than they were.
Agriculture (by and large) simply spent a century developing ever-stronger tape to put over the cracks, pushing the problems along for the next generation... but there isn't an escape from our fate, til we think again.

Technology isn't the right tool to fix this one.

So long as monocultures are the standard method of crop production, there will never be enough effective "actives" - nature thought around that before great-grandpappy ever tried it.
Anyone heard of blackgrass?
It isn't the tools, it is the model that is the faulty part of the puzzle - the world will simply burn up all it's stored energy battling things that belonged in the first place.
Whether it is multiple farming forums, weeds in your crops, or worms in the ewes.... the solution is to embrace diversity, go with it, don't try to fight it.... selecting for resistance is all that has ever achieved.

The last century has been the greatest failure of human history, because all of this was known, yet ignored.

That same message has been around since Abe Lincoln was a lad... he was incredibly distraught about the area under monoculture.
"Suddenly" biodiversity is re-revealed, again, as the concept that can reverse all the harm done to our land - very inconvenient for specialists that have been spurred on the wrong path by successive government, and corporate interests.

(Like you, and the rest, I am sceptical... but you just can't not see things that work, when they always have done.)

Nature will fill every niche, that we don't.

Now it is up to us to develop new harvesting methods that can deal with diversity - whether it is strip-till style wide-row cropping, successive cropping, canopy cropping... it is possible to do, everwhere.
(Polyculture cropping is just up the road from here, impossible to grow viable crops the way you guys do, as monocultures).

Too weather dependent, unreliable margins.... I must get some pictures of "the future", before Jeff puts his cattle on it.

It is only down to farmers unlearning the lovely sight of "a good clean crop of ......." and remembering what it will look like long we've gone: a tangled mess of good food, grown without any "inputs".

Sorry if it sounds "hippy", that is the truth you sought.

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Kevtherev said:

What variety is it Holwell court?

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Kiwi Pete said:

Thanks lads

tried to have a sabbatical - but I missed you all a bit too much

We have to start getting in tune with nature more - thats all there is left.

There are clues everywhere -

Thistles? - plant chicory, lucerne etc
Gorse? - plant tree lucerne, alder

just mimic what is there, with the nearest possible thing that is "food-able"... I don't eat gorse, but oats loves the nitrogen.
Cows love oats, we eat cows.
Money in gorse

It isn't food production that is costing us so much as maintaining emptiness
and if that isn't a waste of time, effort, and valuable resources, then what is??

Farming is about growing covers.

Not celebrating effective kills.

It really comes down to two main factors - the apparent effectiveness of chemicals to prevent food producers from learning their craft as well as they could have...
secondly, money... in all ways, shapes and forms, if (sorry Steve) IF money hadn't been used as a tool against farmers for a long long time, it would just be common sense... something eats everything, or it doesn't exist in nature.

"Oh, the shiticale has sprouted, we'll just put the cattle on it and try to get the barley" said no farmer in his right mind, ever - it is, and has been, a money making ruse.

Well, its my turn for some and they aren't going to pay more, we have to get wise to that fact too.

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SilliamWhale said:

How can you be absolutely certain all these old writers are being totally truthful. We all see what we want to see....

Just saying its healthy to be sceptical of everyone.

Click to expand...

holwellcourtfarm said:

Careful Pete, you'll have the Ag supply industry quaking in its boots and mounting disinformation campaigns against you, perhaps even joining up with the vegans

You are right though.

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Kevtherev said:

@Kiwi Pete

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Blaithin said:

I think skepticism is ingrained in people. Cynicism, negativity... we never want to believe something if we were taught it second. We are far less likely to question something taught us first and by our family. Our grandfathers farmed this way.... that's the right way! Helped along by the fact that majority of people are farming this way and the majority must be right, right?

But what do you think they're lying about? I find some of the claims of higher yield a bit far fetched, but that's because despite what I want to learn and do, I am in monoculture crop world. Claims of one crop yielding higher don't seem feasible to me. Claims of each acre yielding higher in the variety of crops is much more plausible to me. I also find the idea of land turning around so quickly hard to believe, but that could be because many of the books are based in more moderate climates than mine. What can be 3 or 4 growths in some of these areas is lucky if it translates to 1 good growth here.

But what doesn't lie to me and what do I trust equivocally? Nature.

Go walk through even a badly managed pasture, what do you see? Multitude species of grasses, wildflowers, bushes, trees, birds, insects, rodents... even bigger animals. They all live there.

Go walk through the middle of a "well managed" arable mono crop field, what do you see? One plant. The odd weed. A few insects and you hope they aren't the kind that wipe out your crop. Animals don't live in arable fields, they visit them.

Now consider inputs. Many pastures receive very little inputs so you're putting very little money into them. In comparison, an arable field has tremendous inputs to do all sorts of things. Firstly to help the seeds grow, secondly to stop sh!t from eating them, thirdly to prevent other plants from stealing their nutrients.

Why does one support so much life with so little input while the other supports very few organisms but requires so much?

Have you ever, in a natural setting, seen a plant growing in straight lines, separated an equal distance from all other plants with only bare dirt around it in order to grow the best it can? No, because that's not how plants have evolved. Just as sheep and cattle and horses eat different parts of the plants and birds eat different food sources and species differ regionally based on what's available, so do plants. Not all plants require the same nutrients, not all plants require the same water, not all plants require the same sunlight. They aren't all in competition. That's us telling ourselves that all plants are competing for the same food. It'd be like me saying I can't keep my dog in the same field as my cows because one of them would outcompete the other and starve it.

Be skeptical of authors, they're only human and thus as open to their personal interpretations and opinions as we are. But I think if you want to learn, read them, read modern methodology, think on them and then go sit in the middle of an untouched meadow and look at what Mother Earth has done.

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Blaithin said:

I think skepticism is ingrained in people. Cynicism, negativity... we never want to believe something if we were taught it second. We are far less likely to question something taught us first and by our family. Our grandfathers farmed this way.... that's the right way! Helped along by the fact that majority of people are farming this way and the majority must be right, right?

But what do you think they're lying about? I find some of the claims of higher yield a bit far fetched, but that's because despite what I want to learn and do, I am in monoculture crop world. Claims of one crop yielding higher don't seem feasible to me. Claims of each acre yielding higher in the variety of crops is much more plausible to me. I also find the idea of land turning around so quickly hard to believe, but that could be because many of the books are based in more moderate climates than mine. What can be 3 or 4 growths in some of these areas is lucky if it translates to 1 good growth here.

But what doesn't lie to me and what do I trust equivocally? Nature.

Go walk through even a badly managed pasture, what do you see? Multitude species of grasses, wildflowers, bushes, trees, birds, insects, rodents... even bigger animals. They all live there.

Go walk through the middle of a "well managed" arable mono crop field, what do you see? One plant. The odd weed. A few insects and you hope they aren't the kind that wipe out your crop. Animals don't live in arable fields, they visit them.

Now consider inputs. Many pastures receive very little inputs so you're putting very little money into them. In comparison, an arable field has tremendous inputs to do all sorts of things. Firstly to help the seeds grow, secondly to stop sh!t from eating them, thirdly to prevent other plants from stealing their nutrients.

Why does one support so much life with so little input while the other supports very few organisms but requires so much?

Have you ever, in a natural setting, seen a plant growing in straight lines, separated an equal distance from all other plants with only bare dirt around it in order to grow the best it can? No, because that's not how plants have evolved. Just as sheep and cattle and horses eat different parts of the plants and birds eat different food sources and species differ regionally based on what's available, so do plants. Not all plants require the same nutrients, not all plants require the same water, not all plants require the same sunlight. They aren't all in competition. That's us telling ourselves that all plants are competing for the same food. It'd be like me saying I can't keep my dog in the same field as my cows because one of them would outcompete the other and starve it.

Be skeptical of authors, they're only human and thus as open to their personal interpretations and opinions as we are. But I think if you want to learn, read them, read modern methodology, think on them and then go sit in the middle of an untouched meadow and look at what Mother Earth has done.

Click to expand...