Agriculture Needs a Fundamental Rethink in the 21st Century

82 posts yesterday. I'd guess we all eat.  But the site is quite empty this morning - Do we have any agriculturists at this table?  The measure of my own distance is probably pretty common: In my family, it's three generations ago.  So, I daydream about growing my own hazelnuts. As much as I am convinced that the "rethink" is needed, it seems such a puny effort to just change my own purchasing patterns and compost my kitchen waste.  Olivia gave us a great gift yesterday - perhaps someone in this field will take her example. 

I have a lot to say on this subject but I going to Asheville to visit my mother for the day.  You all will be spared my comments this mornig.

Have a great day all.

Re yesterday : thank you all for making me feel welcome.

And Cynthia aka agent 57 : the park, the bench, usual time - changed password in cryptic crossword clue of the Times.

I am a metropolis bunny and as such have opinions on agriculture but zero experience, the latter being confined to matters horticultural as well as vegetable growing.

In the UK farming is sharply divided into large, virtually industrial complexes and minute farms that hardly make a living ( the Welsh hill farmers spring to mind ).

Urbanites are going back 'to the land' - how many of them actually manage to make a living from it remains to be seen.

I would be interested to know if in the US there is also an unstoppable wave of young people who are farming organically and are quite successful once they have found their niche market. They are to be admired in my opinion for their perseverance and unshakeable belief that the soil needs to be treated with respect
( have read somewhere that the American Indians are quite devoted to that idea ).

My only first-hand knowledge comes from my grandfather who had a large farm and yes, holidays were a dream, lying under cows being milked with my cousins and fighting for who would get the first taste of the heavenly nectar that is non-pasteurised milk, freezing bedrooms and eiderdowns you could disappear in [ ehm, where was I ? ah, yes grandfather ] He encouraged all of us to study hard because we wouldn't want to be farmers. Full stop. Too much relentless hard work.

Hope you have a weekend full of smiles and laughter

Olivia,

It took me awhile to connect theses two events:

A not young woman who once cut my hair at Cost Cutters told how her dad had always taken frozen breakfast shakes to her mother in a home.

Everything liquid in them he had made using a juicer, added frozen fruit,blended it and carried it over. He left little six ounce cups in the public areas for the other residents in that quad and they liked it.

When he died, there was a big effort to get at what was in it and how he had done it. The irony being that he would have been tickled to share if they had asked.

I make something similiar for our oldest daughter who works in my wife's family business. She thinks of it as important and you might approve.

She doesn't do dairy so a soy product like yogurt is used in orange juice along with bananas, frozen peaches; cherrie; apples; blueberries and the addition of concentrated cherry juice and a powder called "Veggies & Things." No sugar.

It blends up purple and one batch is good for three days. It takes five minutes to do five to clean up and goes through a blender in just a few weeks after its guarantee is up.

Thought of as a commercial product, the cost would be too high. Thought of as something that gets your day going in the right direction, it is cheap.

I have written it down and put it in the recipe box- just in case.

I hate it when that happens!

There was an area near Schuyler Nebraska that we often hunted: a very small wet ditch or stream running through soil bank grassland.

If we hunted from the road, along the watercourse, toward a barbed wire fence the sky would fill with pheasants and quail.

The vast acreage on the other side of the fence looked exactly the same but never held birds.

What made one field of grass appealing and the other a dead zone? The same water continued to flow and the lay of the land was the same as well. A mystery.

More or less on topic, and inspired by Stoney, I'd like to mention the noble Bobwhite quail, practically gone in the wild from these parts.  Red O are you familiar with pheasant shooting in the UK?  I believe one of the methods of stocking quail is similar to the way gamekeepers do pheasants there. That would be raising them from chicks in a sheletered environment, gradually turning them out, but always looking over their shoulder, lest some other death than the gun get them.  Another form of stocking is to release more or less grown birds and to hope they will adapt, knowing that early on several will fall prey to assorted dangers. The third ( and this is the least desirable, but the most easily managed) is to "put out" mature birds the same day you plan to shoot them. There are various means to confuse the birds briefly and insure they will remain in place until they can be hunted by dogs, but these birds have no knowledge of feeding themselves and if they aren't shot or eaten by predators ( tastes AND acts just like chicken)  they will likely starve.

Stoney will immediately recognize this as a long-winded introduction to the change in farming practices .  The little bits and edges around fields were prime quail habitat. Nobody is sure whether the change to planting-to-the-edge caused the decline in quail population or simply coincided with it. Ditto DDT, Ditto a dozen other theories, including hybridizing with imported quail.  All we know is the quail are mostly gone.

 As far as I know, nobody has ever tried Shoot and release.

WT

A warden in Nebraska told us that he was in favor of a late opening time, say nine a.m. to prevent hunters from watching birds covey up at sunset and then being at that spot one half hour before sunrise to roust them. It didn't happen.

The first time I was exposed to quail, the guys, thinking that they were doing me a favor- and they were- sent me shuffling right into a bunched up covey that exploded right in mt face. I think one got up between me and the gun. I didn't get any but a lot of derision came my way: "You know they don't bite-dontcha?"

Our part of Wisconsin that used to be really good pheasant habitat, has so few birds that you could almost say none.

We've got a very large flock (murder? covey? cabal?) of quail on our mountainside. They stay low on the hill near water during the day, and then in the afternoon walk up the hillside past my house, around my kids' playset, through the yard, and up to their Evening Residences. I often think of dinner, but my sweetie forbids it.

In a timely enough manner, and assuming the weather (it's raining) doesn't deter him, I've got a nice fellow with a small earthmover coming today to fill in my garden with a load of dirt that was delivered yesterday. Of course, first I have to get my lazy arse outside and move the garden wall (just fencing, not boulders) for him, so he can drive his little bobcat-looking thingy into the garden and move all the dirt around.

I don't wanna. It's cold and wet out there and my library is warm and dry and there's a crackling fire going. Bleh.

Stoney - In light of today's topic, both things you said...yesterday - about talking to your friends and relatives who are still around because they know things that you don't or they can at least add to what you know; and today - about writing down how to make your daughter's drink and putting it in the recipe box...made me think of all the vegetable gardening tips, tricks, and practices that our families may have used in the past but are often lost to us now.

How many of our relatives, both in the US and UK, had Victory Gardens? What did they grow? How did they grow it? What techniques could they have passed on to us? They ate fresh produce from their own gardens, canned and preserved the surplus for later use. I maintain these activities brought people many benefits - from less reliance on the government and on technology, to the knowledge of how to grow your own food, to a greater understanding of nutrition...not to mention the fresh air and exercise!

We are so far removed from our food it's no wonder we don't know what or how to eat.  As Olivia said, just yesterday: "We're taught that food that's good for us can't taste good, but that's just another lie. It tastes like life, and life is good."

Perhaps, if we all learned to grow some of our own food again, like our ancestors, we would then truly know just how good it should taste.

Isles,

That red flannel shirt will empower you to do what needs to be done.

Kindlee,

The funny thing is that it seems that the people without a lot of assets in our neighborhood ate better than those who had some money- we grew a lot of our own fresh food.

Clandestinely, my mom and I would pick half grown wax beans, steam them up and go crazy. They seemed to cry out for a little black pepper.

We did all cheer, however, when a jar of Mrs. Horn's vegetable chowder blew up in the basement.(Please, God, don't let that be peaches) Giant, bitter carrots, turnips, rutabagas and onions- things that she couldn't quite throw away and evidently did not want to keep for herself. Cases of the stuff. When we learned to mash it all up and cover it with gravy, it was pretty good.

We had elderly relatives nearby who depended on our garden and would make little deals: "If you will bring over a basket of your wonderful tomatoes, we'll make BLTs." We did... fast.

Stoney - I have a real weakness for sugar snap peas. They rarely make it from the garden to the table.

"I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Wt,

Maybe the best way to get quail is to trade books for them like we do. They come split, flat and frozen and grill up nice.

This article is right, industrial ag is not sustainable and I wonder when we'll finally wake up and start demanding change more forcefully. The current Secretary of Ag is from Iowa and part of the same old, same old industrial ag machine.

Michael Pollan is the new spokesman for our generation about this and his book Omnivore's Dilemma is must reading, in my opinion.

And the documentary King Corn is must viewing (Netflix has it). We've becoming slavishly dependent on corn and it's sickening (both literally and figuratively).

As for buying locally, I buy our beef from a local farmer that is not only grass fed, it is grass-finished (sometimes grass-fed cows are finished on grain to speed up their growth, but this farmer doesn't operate that way). They usually tells us a farm story or two while we make our purchase and sometimes the farm wife even gives us a hug. The beef is much healthier than the corn fed variety, and has enzymes that are actually good for the heart, and there are no e. coli worries either.

The trend toward metropolitan farming is encouraging (http://www.metrofarm.com/index.php)

“according to a recent Census of Agriculture, the most productive farmland in the United States is in the Borough of the Bronx! The second most productive farmland is in the City of San Francisco! You can earn up to eight times the average personal income on as little as one acre of land.”

And it's pretty cool how this family earns a living growing food on their tiny city lot in Pasadena, CA: http://urbanhomestead.org/journal/2008/04/24/ny-times-video-life-mostly-off-the-grid/

Stoney, if you are eating Manchester Farms quail, you are getting them from my neck of the woods.  At one time Man Farms had a tremendous share of the squab market. I have no idea if there even IS a squab market these days. No need to worry about biting down on  a piece of shot with those ready packed quail.

Don't worry- your quail won't complain if you add a strip of bacon before putting them on the grill.

I didn't get to hunt / shoot growing up, but have attempted to make up for it in middle age. What I do remember from my childhood is hearing those birds when I sat on my grandparents' porch around dusk. bob...white.

A popular sticker around here reads
WILL DUCK HUNT FOR FOOD.

And, while I expect the game doesn't see it  as quite the same pastoral bond gardeners enjoy. hunters usually have a much closer relationship with their food than mere consumers.   Even if cleaning and dressing temporarily dulls the appetite, the overall effect is one of improving the process.  Participatory carnivorousness, if you will. Carnivoracity?

Sadly, (freshwater) fishermen  can't  always count on sidestepping chemicals by dangling a hook. Sometimes around here we have mercury concentrating in fish-that-eat-fish and that ain't good. 

The world would be a lot better place with 20 percent of the number of humans that inhabitants now...  since exponential growth curves inevitably either become S-curvea, normal curves, or in some other way cease to be exponential, it's not a question of whether human populations will ever decrease, but simply a question of when and how...mercifully, I hope to be dead when the most likely solutions to over-population begin to bite.

I wish there were another 'Norman Borlaug' waiting in the wings to save us from ourselves, but I'm doubtful.... (cf: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug)

Sadly, I fear my grandsons will not be lucky enough to die before everything begins to disintegrate.... still, life is usually better lived (though always ending in death) than never lived....

And then there's always the possibility that we'll experience a miracle and be saved from our collective irresponsibility...

Very minimal contribution to this subject, but my only experience with a quail was when I was 13.  My Dad took me quail hunting!  He was in denial and never fully embraced the fact that I was a girl.  But I loved sharing time with my Dad, no matter what we were doing so I went.  It was a bleak day in search of quail. We were about to leave for home.  Hark...in the heavily wooded area was a slight rustle.  My Dad reached over my shoulder and helping me, together we pulled the trigger of this huge thing, I think it was a gun of some sort (?), but he was elated...we got one!  We went to pick it up and it was a DOVE!  I cried and cried for hours.  I saw myself as a "little bird murderer"!  Have always had a diversion to eating any kind of bird since.  Now as for gardening, my Dad had a backyard garden that Martha Stewart would have killed for.  Big wooden boxes of all sizes held the most luscious beefsteak tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, beans, corn, peppers, cucumber, squash, and watermelon hills, sage, garlic. mint, and much more.  He loved it all!  Unfortunately I did not inherit his love for gardening. I love to eat it, but am totally lost as how to grow anything.  Heck... I am still wondering what kind of flowers to plant in my yard.  No fear of me ever becoming a horticulturist.  My Mom canned, froze, and made apple butter and preserves by the tons  Uh oh..am getting a little too nostalgic.  The tears are streaming...I am missing my Dad.  Gotta go.  I am going to the Opera House this evening to see Ruben Studdard in Ain't Misbehavin'.  That should snap me out of this funk! 

Happy weekend guys and dolls!      

One of the reasons game of all sorts avoid cultivated fields is that these fields are regularly doused with noxious chemicals. Even birds and rabbits learn, eventually, to stay away from such horrors. Those that don't can't reproduce, as the chemicals break down into ELCs (estrogen-like compounds) and interfere with the reproductive process the same way birth control pills (and the same ELCs) interfere with human reproduction. Just FYI: male sperm counts in 'developed' countries that use lots of agricultural chemicals and other chemicals such as sodium hypochlorite (bleach, which breaks down in water solution to the second most toxic compound we know of-after plutonium-dioxin) have been plummeting for decades now, to the point where countries in western Europe are doing everything they can think of to promote fertility and babymaking. There are billboards which say "France a besoin des enfants!", or France needs children! by the road, paid parental leave for pregnancy (maternal AND paternal) was up to a year in most countries, last I checked, but are they identifying the root cause? I don't read that they are promoting the decrease in agricultural, cleaning, and industrial chemicals. We certainly are not doing so here in the US. We are a chemical culture. None of the crap you're sold to clean your house is necessary. You can clean anything at home with vinegar and water, or baking soda. Don't mix them-it'll get quite exciting if you do, just like science class volcanoes. Actually, if you pour them both down your drain and seal the drain (quick!), you can break up a clog. You can make your own cleaning solution with a spoon of dish soap, another of lemon juice, and a quart of water. Works better than toxic chemicals.

What did our recent ancestors do before Dow Corning and Monsanto etc created Toxic World during and after World War Two? How did we get so sold on soaking our environment and our bodies with dangerous chemicals? It's worth thinking about.

The graphs of rise in asthma, exotic cancers, especially in children, allergies, breast cancer, and several other horrors, can be overlaid with the graph indicating the rise in commercial and domestic use of synthetic chemicals, since WW2, and they are scarily congruent. Why is this not discussed in public? Bad for business...

Drugs are dangerous, concentrated chemicals. ALL drugs have perilous side effects, including OTC drugs (over the counter, such as acetaminophen, or Tylenol, which can destroy your liver in short order). Pharmaceutical companies are on a relentless campaign to get as many Americans as possible hooked on lifetime drugs, or drugs you're supposed to take forever. That's job security! Most are unnecessary. Prescription drugs are the most abused category of drugs now, FAR more than pot or coke, or even meth.

Drugs are ubiquitous in modern agriculture, especially animals in America, the only country on the planet where a farmer can give a food animal a drug without a prescription. Meat is an industrial product now, soaked in aspirin (makes the animal bleed internally, so the meat is unnaturally red. Not red enough? Dose it with Red 40, a known carcinogen. Next time you're at the supermarket, notice that even the BONES are red. This is NOT NORMAL.), estrogen (Female sex hormones make them fat. Given just before market and slaughter, muscle tissue is flooded with it. Recent research points to this practice, along with ELCs, to the insane rise in breast cancer since WW2. Even men are getting breast cancer now. Haven't heard about that? Wonder why...again, bad for business. There's also studies showing that all that estrogen is interfering with normal male sexual development. Some little boys in Puerto Rico, where astounding quantities of estrogen are injected into cows, grow breasts and only tiny peepees, some girls begin puberty at SIX YEARS OLD; there's lots more I could say here.), antibiotics (feedlot crowding and living in their own feces makes food animals sick, very sick, so they're dosed with huge amounts of antibiotics. Ever heard of MRSA? VRSA? E. Coli 0157:H7? Salmonella? Enterobacter? Campylobacter? And many other formerly innocent gut flora that have mutated to develop antibiotic resistance and become virulent killers of meat consumers. You don't hear much about it in the popular media, just the occasional recall. Tomatoes, spinach, and peanut butter? They're contaminated with improperly managed manure. These bugs don't live on plants, they like animals, like YOU. Ever heard of the stomach flu? The 24 hour virus? There's no such thing. You had FOOD POISONING, which happens in the US far more often than is reported in our business-oriented, heavily censored media. Every hamburger, especially fast-food burgers, are a roll of the dice...), rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone-that last word should scare you, unless you're a former dairy CEO now running the FDA), which was approved by the FDA without studies on its effect on humans, especially children. It makes the cows sick, but they produce more milk, which is already a glut on the market. What do sick cows include in their milk? We don't know, the FDA won't do studies. Anthrax antibodies? Other alien protein antibodies? Probably. Lots of cow hormones. Are these good for us? For our kids? Every independent study says no. Meat and dairy industry leaders airily dismiss concerns, in eerily similar fashion to the tobacco CEOs of a generation ago. There are many more things in your meat and dairy-again, I could go on and on-I've just scratched the surface. Fifty KNOWN carcinogens in tobacco smoke. How many in industrial meat and dairy and genetically modified agricultural products? How does irradiation change cellular function in living and nonliving plant and animal tissue meant for food? We don't know. People riot in the streets in Europe against GMOs and irradiation. Here, we're sedated by a media that tells us one thing one week, the opposite the next week, until people throw up their hands and go back to their pork rinds. Is this just coincidental? You here are all smart enough to decide for yourselves.

Every human being on this planet-you, me, all of us-has measurable amounts of Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane (DDT), dioxin (see above for toxicity), and plutonium (from atmospheric nuclear testing) in our fat tissue. These substances are cumulative, they never go away. How to protect oneself? One's loved ones? *sigh* Read my post yesterday, make a list of those books, change your life for the better in baby steps-don't try to do it all at once. The changes have to be permanent. It gets easier and easier, though, as you feel better and better, and your body learns to enjoy being healthy, and rejects high-fat high-sugar high-salt foods. The stuff that's killing you will start tasting awful, and you'll start craving your daily walk. Remember how you felt when you were eight years old? You'd wake up, bound out of bed, cram some breakfast down you and run outside. You'd play all day, have to be threatened to make you come in when it gets dark, for dinner. Scarf that and read or do something fun, sleep wonderfully, and start all over again the next day. Full of energy, full of life. Remember? That's how you're SUPPOSED to feel, even now. And you can, you can recapture that. That's NORMAL GOOD HEALTH, and most Americans have become habituated to a low level of illness, such that we forget what it is to be energetic, to have a body that will respond efficiently when we call upon it for exertion, for activity, for sexual function.

A little-known bit of datum from 9/11: Many people died unnecessarily because they were too big or too out of shape to get down the stairs. Ask yourself how you'd feel if your life, or the life of a loved one, depended on your fitness, your reflexes, your mental alertness, and when you need to respond, to save them, to save yourself, you just...can't. To me, that's an ultimate horror, a nightmare. It makes it easier for me to skip that cupcake and go for a walk.

After my first century, when the time comes, and I hope I'll know it, when I'm no longer having fun, no longer functional, I hope I still have the strength to wander off into the blizzard and go to sleep. A good life, and a good death, are not so hard. We've lost much, but it's not lost forever. It's in our genes, in our hearts, in the memory of our fundamental selves. We have to work to reclaim it.

It's good work.

Stoney, you were right. One red flannel Peterman shirt, a little cowboy-up, and that wall section popped right off like it wanted to. And then Bobcat Guy didn't show. Loser. But still, he had two loads of dirt delivered (unpaid) yesterday so I have a strong feeling he'll be arriving sometime soon.

Being full of vim and vigor I also opened the wall between my garage and a "build up" area under the house. I don't need a big door from one to the other. The access is off the stairs, as you drop into the garage from the main floor, and opening just a little companion-way will allow me to create a Cold/Root Cellar under the house and store lots of stuff in there. I'm so excited to be building a secret door that leads to a genuine, honest to goodness Man Cave under the house.

I'll stuff the Man Cave with everything we grow that needs storage in there (we already have a monster freezer - big enough for MILs), and while I'm at it I think I'll brick in the space. Add an antique table, some library chairs, a few racks for wine, some lights, and by goodness I think I'll have myself quite the little place for meetings with the Godfather... "Why have you come to me on the day of my daughter's wedding?" Except, of course, that it'll be ME as the Godfather. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

Olivia, I could read your posts all day, and I have taken to sending links to friends with "SEE?!? SEE?!? THIS IS WHAT I MEANT TO SAY!!!" as the subject line. Write frequently and voluminously, as I am your eager pupil.

My students call this 'ranting'. I can't express how much it means to me that I can share with you, and not be ridiculed or ignored. It's gravy, of the best sort.

Just to add my two cents worth.....antibiotic resistance has been with us since penicillin was invented.  It was known to scientists at least as early as 1945.  Bacteria are like cockroaches...indeed anything that reproduces that quickly will adapt to its situation. But the industrial feedlots, who use WAY TOO MANY chemicals to grow freak creatures for us to eat have created a dangerous situation for us.  And yet, antibiotics are not normally recommended for salmonella and many other intestinal infections.  Best just to flush 'em out naturally.

As for stomach flu.....what you most likely had for 24 hours is norovirus.  Rapid onset, makes you want to kill yourself, and then is gone just as quickly. 

We really need to get back to respecting our earth and ourselves. 

Olivia,

"You are a dear treasue indeed" say Peter Lake as he takes a knee before her.  "One could never get enough Olivia" he says.  "Why, I'd bring you an apple every day and soak up every word as I sat at my desk, totally focused, in a state of awe.".

Olivia,

You are, as John says, "a dear treasure indeed." I learn, I learn, I learn from you and shall never get enough Olivia.  Besides the practical gifts you own, on apparently every subject, I sense you retain, in marvelous addition, the magic some of us hang onto. Perfect marriage.

...had I not just had knee surgery, I'd switch roles and, myself, bend a knee to such wisdom.

forgive me a third word: it just struck me, you are as an exaltation of larks

Am reading Pollan's "Omnivore" now, and am amazed. But somehow not surprised.  He makes it all make sense.  It's just the proportion of it all that is so stunning.  (Aren't Saturdays lovely?  Thank you, RedO, for the good wishes.  They worked!)

Shandonista-Thanks, norovirus and rotavirus indeed cause up to 50% of episodes of gastroenteritis, from faecal contamination of food (more food poisoning) and other faecal-oral routes. These are a couple I just didnt get to mention, since I'm trying not to write a textbook here (and failing). But they are important, and can be life-threatening to children, older people, and immunosuppressed individuals such as those in treatment for surgical or cancer or HIV disorders.

Alexander Fleming (discoverer of penicillin...his lab assistants, like many office workers, would bring their sandwiches into the lab, forget about them, and they'd get moldy. When the mold spores landed in the bacteria cultures they were studying, they'd be ruined. Eventually the light came on...) himself wrote in one of his first papers that bacteria would rapidly develop resistance to antibiotics. The first resistant organisms were identified in the early 1960s. It took nearly 20 years for the first resistance to be observed. More antibiotics were developed, and resistance was seen in a shorter time. Resistance to the newest groups, the quinolones, oxazolidinones, and quinupristins, introduced in the 1990s, was documented within two years of use in the general population. Overuse of antibiotics in food animals, and overprescription for viral infections (They don't work on viruses, but when we go to the doctor, we're conditioned to expect a prescription. And the doctors are conditioned to write them. Both behaviours have to change.) and other questionable purposes have assisted bacteria in developing resistance. Recent microbiological studies have shown some scary stuff-bacteria SHARING DNA to pass along resistance.  

Pharmaceutical companies have shown a disturbing resistance to spending R & D money on developing new antibiotics, preferring to focus instead on new 'me-too' drugs that duplicate the activities of useful drugs we already have plenty of-antidepressants, antihypertensives, statins, and others. They make a lot of money. Which reminds me-did you know that men get osteoporosis just as much as women do? Ever see any advertising about it? NO. There are no good (ie expensive, profitable) drugs developed yet to treat male osteoporosis effectively. The ones prescribed for women don't work very well either, but they make a lot of money and don't kill too many poor little old ladies (How many is too many? Enough to alert our somnolent media?). Resistance exercise (lifting weights) works better in every study. Also lots of green leafy vegetables, and NO DAIRY and minimal animal products.

Keeping kids indoors, freaking out when they eat dirt and put everything in their mouths, hyper-cleanliness, overprotective parents-these are not good for immune system development. We need to be part of our world, not separated from it. How else will we learn to protect ourselves on the most fundamental of levels-cellular, humoral, microbiological? 

Go out and play. All of you-NOW!

It is a strange thing for people not to know where their food comes from.  It is even stranger that the most valuble growing lands aren't used for human foods.  Miles and miles of corn is grown to feed cattle.  If all of the farm ground were switched to growing more human consumables and the world would never run out of food.  Grow wheat, or grind the corn into meal, switch over to veggies or orchards . . . and cutting down a bit on the amount of beef might lead to healthier people.

Or we could just grow wine grapes.

John, Jonathan-my blushes, Sirs! I endeavour to cultivate those rarely visited corners of the field where few labour, for there is much there of value to be had, and to share what I glean with those I care for, those who would hear me.

And Eve-you are all too kind.

Mike-spot on, dude-word up!

NL_G, just came back from Borders looking Michael Pollans books, and spelling it wrong in my search, but picked up Mark Bittman's Food Matters.  The garden is covered with a foot of snow but the dog is faithfully fertilzing it.  I use some horse manure on it but worry about the antibiotics.  I should probably be more worried about the Chem Lawn with the condo complex hires. 

Something I found earlier and had to share:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/growing-food-on-the-white-house-lawn/

Pretty cool and why not.

Hello one and all! The area we call home is where the Jolly Green Giant lives. More green beans are grown here than you can image - all go to Stokleys. Also farmed professionally are squash and cucumbers. These commercial farms are family owned with most all being organic and use crop rotation to keep fields from ‘dying.' Locals ‘pick' the squash and cucumbers along side migrant farmers throughout the season on these family farms. Many of theses farms have been in their respective families for over 150 years; just as the family farm I grew up on (beans and corn) alas it is no longer farmed. The family farmers in this area I have talked to know you have to care for the soil, no pesticides - just as my grandparents taught me. You have to watch the manure you compost as commercial beef, pork and poultry growers add steroids and lots of antibiotics, it all processes into the poo. (I refer back to Olivia - AMEN! PREACH ON! LOVE YOU!!!)

With the rise of boutique vegetable shops, small organic farmers do quite well. Documentation of soil, soil and water testing all come into play. Once you get in the grove it is hard to keep up. We do not aspire to that height but if I can barter or sell some - go me! (We are doing very will with our free range hen fruit by the way.)

I love that the Victory Garden was mentioned: I have been a member of Kitchen Gardeners International for years. Roger, the founder, is asking for a Victory Garden at the White House along with a website about said White House Victory Garden to help people ‘round the world organically grow some if not all their own vegetables and herbs. Fact is there as always been some type of vegetable/herb garden at the White House. There is a lot of good kitchen garden information on the site:

http://www.kitchengardeners.org/  

If you have a small or no area to grow vegetables container growing is the way to go. Clean and easy, saves on water too. I mentioned Pat Lanza on yesterdays post. She has two wonderful books and is in the process of writing a third.

For a small area:
Lasagna Gardening: A New Layering System for Bountiful Gardens: No Digging, No Tilling,No Weeding, No Kidding!

http://www.amazon.com/Lasagna-Gardening-Layering-Bountiful-Gardens/dp/0875967957  

For a patio/balcony/sun room:

Lasagna Gardening for Small Spaces: A Layering System for Big Results in Small Gardens and Containers  

http://www.amazon.com/Lasagna-Gardening-Small-Spaces-Containers/dp/0875968864  

Burpee Seed and Gurney Seed offer container vegetable seed.

Find an organic gardener in your area (start at the Farmers Market) and pick their brain, they are more than happy to share info, help with layout of your garden, the best heirloom vegetable seeds/plants to grow in your area, probably more helpful that you would really want!

As some may have noticed I'm an information sponge... Olivia has helped me organize a lot of my bits and pieces of knowledge and experience regards topics of health into new 'gestalts'.  In plain English, she's my jigsaw puzzle guru (honey, why not put all the blue pieces together and all the pieces with the two parallel white lines together in another pile and then try to piece them together first....).  

Slightly (but only slightly) off topic is the satellite radio show, 'Reach MD: Satellite Radio for Medical Professionals'.  I listen to it daily (as I drive) and it's not only the information per se that's interesting...  Equally fascinating is the way medical issues are approached, 'the business of medicine', 'promising areas', etc.  (And sometimes unintentional humor, like the time I discovered I'm 'chronologically gifted', aka no spring chicken!)  Medicine is in a period of incredible growth, but it's also obvious that doctors only know (and admit they only know!) tiny bits of the enormity of what's to be known about 'how we work'.  

Having just re-read Albert Camus' novel 'The Plague', and having daily contact with folks associated with the Houston medical center hospitals (they move about....) I'm struck at the CULTURE of medicine.  It's an entire civilization with a lot of 'understoods' which 'outsiders' don't see.  (If you socialize with MD's or nurses, you also glimpse this world, as you do watching Diagnosis X or other 'medical science' TV shows...)

Thanks, Olivia...  I appreciate your long essays!  I learn from them.... and that's a big compliment!

P.S. As some know I've known Olivia online for awhile (and once actually met her! She makes great spaghetti!).  She's the reason I came here... I have a habit of following my gurus, which has served me well over the years! 

Though I'm not 'a believer', I think even humanists and secularists like me need 'prophets' and 'prophetesses' to make us uncomfortable -- and to make us reeexamine basics.   There aren't many able to do that... 

Ranting is a gift! (Heh, heh, heh).

I helped my Daddy in the vegetable garden, and a little with his honeybees, for many years.  The first year after he died, I had to plant the garden by myself.  I gathered all my books and studied up on the subject.  I planted my corn and interspaced squash in between.  Big mistake!!!  If all that squash had put on, we would have been buried alive.  There is still a man in my town that asked me every spring if I "planted plenty of squash this year?"  We have a good laugh.  I wish I had been more attentive, but I never thought that I would have to do it on my own. 

 We still have bobwhites around my home.  I love to hear their calls.  Sends me back to spring/summer, sitting on the porch swing (because it was HOT in the house) before bedtime and singing songs with my Mother and sister. 

Let me add; I agree with the article Mr. P linked. Most industrial growers are not in it for the long haul.

Have said it here before will say it again: People put the most outrageous food/drink in their system without a seconds worth of consideration. And they don't care as long as it is easy to get and cook and is cheap.

Also in the article: cooking the food properly. When vegetables are grown in good healthy soil they have so much more and better taste than other vegetables (don't believe me - try a home grown, vine ripened tomato vs. a hydroponic grown tomato.) People over cook their vegetable, but you kinda have too if you get them in a chain grocery store, got to kill all the junk attached. (I, once again, refer back to Olivia. Amen and Amen.)

One more thing: liquor should be ingested without soda. Won't kill you in moderation, but the soda will. A good wine or beer - also in moderation - I'm all for it.

Olivia, you rock.  Every word.  Thank you.

Cynthia, my father in law put in a patch of potatos with layers of leaves and plastic this year.  I havent had a chance to ask him about it, since most of my crops feed the local rabbits and deer, I know his yields are much better than mine.  I live by Eliot Coleman and his New Organic Grower books.  Now to find the land again.

Unhinged,
Leaves would be great to grow potatoes. We grow potatoes in straw on top of the ground; grew them once in a garbage can with straw. It's easy and they are so clean, going to try it this year with sweet potatoes.

Give this a look:

http://www.bigthink.com/blog/2008/07/31/vertical-farm-plans-keeps-growing/  

A word of warning for gardeners....  Several instances here in Houston of subdivisions being built over or next to contaminated areas (chemical disposal pits, pre-OSHA factories, equipment storage areas, etc).  One cannot assume that growing stuff in one's backyard is (necessarily) safer than purchasing food in a grocery store.  Like everything else in modern life, one has to research a lot and take risk even after having done that.... 

The good news is that the biggest source of poisons in our environment is still living plants (which use 'chemical warfare' to protect themselves against herbivores and omnivores.)  Good news?  Well, humans have co-evolved along with many plants to make positive use of poisons....  The knowledge base is still evolving, so the word poison is still a relative term.  (If that seems confusing, chocololate-- benign in humans, lethal in dogs...).

Oh, just because something is natural does not mean it's good to eat.  Consider the fly amanita mushroom (called the death cap for good reason!).  And more than one settler crossing the Great Basin died a horrible death from water untouched by microbe or human -- but containing lethal elements in solution.  (There's nothing more natural than the element arsenic.... NOT a good idea to eat this 'natural' substance!) 

As someone who worked a summer job in the 1960s cutting asbestos insulation on a bandsaw at Johns-Manville Corporation, let me remind you all that asbestos is NATURAL....  it comes right out of the ground just like potatoes.

Cynthia, laughing and thinking about being in vegas a couple of years ago at a casino/mall which had fake weather (thunder and lightning).  It was a middle eastern theme and being renovated into something else.  But can see vertical farms in vegas.  I actually cherish the idea being in the glass business.  Now have you seen the tomatos which grow upside down?

http://www.leevalley.com/garden/page.aspx?c=2&p=51544&cat=2,51603&ap=3

My new garden fork is in the garage waiting for spring.  BTW, Lee Valley is an excellent source for all kinds of tools.

Doc, when looking at vacant land to build on (in a previous life) I watched for those being inflicted with Atrazine, a popular herbicide used for growing corn.  If the plot had been treated with Atrazine for more than two years you probably couldnt get a lawn to even start for 5.  I was looking for a place to grow vegetables, out of the question.  And that was before you tested the well water.

Been reading bittman, 40 calories of corn to produce 1 calorie of beef.  I love my beef but in moderation.

Doc Nolan,
In lasagna gardening you put a layer of newspaper or cardboard down on top of the ground without breaking it. You put layers of leaves and compost then plant never tilling the soil - also called sheet composting. You never till the soil, you make your own soil on top of the sod.  I would still have the soil tested by the local extension service.

Here is a link on how to lasagna garden that is free:

http://www.thriftyfun.com/tf582744.tip.html

unhinged,

I bought that and grew tomatoes in it - it works!

Cynthia, I have wanted to try it with cucumbers.  This year.  I had a friend who filled old tires with manure and grew potatos.  Will add my favorite pots for growing thyme and small leaf basil, the heads from rookes pottery

http://www.rookespottery.co.uk/products.html

Wish I knew an eighteenth of what everyone else at The Eye knows. Pared down from my beloved two-story (1936, as JP folk who pack, send out wonders would guess)  into an old but OK-if-too-small-I-can't-BREATHE! ('48) apartment complex, no outdoor space to call my own, but the tiny rectangle in front I've filled with BIG rocks (I'm addicted, always have them -- and steal moss to hang on my trees. Lest you worry, Forestry Service assures me it does no damage to trees. "Look on the riverbank," said The Man.), rosemary, asparagus fern, more rosemary, some inedibles-but-pretty beside a front door, plan to add more herbs in spring, am babying more rosemary inside; hereabouts, if you dn't like the weather, wait five minutes. On windowsill three containers of ivy (propagated from one) thrive, as do two (like ones) of savory; oregano next... in order of what I most use in cooking.... I, too, make a mean spaghetti.  My tiny best, and perhaps it'll grow as I learn what works.  I told y'all of my friend with magnificent garden, animal habitat; she and I remember Victory Gardens; planted ours. Attempting to copy Cynthia's words for her, I learn the computer won't copy just hers, but the whole, so my friend gets today entire -- essay included. (She doesn't have e.mail.) 

I am proud as a peacock of The Community of Curious Minds and, as ever, leave with thoughts darting about, connecting to others, creating still others....  Anyone recall the BBC comedy 'Good Neighbors,' superb actors all, wherein a young couple right in the middle of town aspire to (and for the most part, do) return to the land? Netflix probably has it. Olivia, Stoney, WT, all you with knowledge and wit to share, keep sharing....

JIsles, your vignette of putting your son to bed resonates.  And John, naturally you modestly describe yourself as "...the one sitting on the bench, feeding pigeons and talking to himself in the third person," ah, but what words, what a dear kind spirit...winsomeness-in-the-best-sense, that few possess

Gerogia,

I love that show, hadn't thought of it in years!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlnkxzjFGCw  

Cynthia: You simply can't imagine the effect of your words: lasagna gardening.  Especially since I'm an Italian-American kid who grew up loving Roma tomatoes and lasagna... It wasn't until the third reading I 'got it' (a layered garden).  My first mental images were folks planting tomato seedlings in beds of interlaced pasta strips and tomato sauce -- very, very strange kind of gardening!

DPR, darlin'. I can only hope you find this...I'll try again. I'd responded to your wonder about dinnertime talk, then got carried away as 'm wont to do, with Jerry Hdley, Candide's final glorious chorus, opera chorus members and how they differ from 'opera singers' (which I'm not; a mere second alto); in the way of conversations between like-minded souls I'd written on and on and on and suddenly -- poof! no Genie, but it was all gone.  it's too late, I too weary to do justice to you now. I wouldn't know where to put a new attempt...I must get up early.  Eve