100 Pounds of Food/Year From a 12 Square Foot Plot?

This is interesting, to say the least, and bears out what many of us are discovering and know.... that healthy soil and organic methods

*can* provide more food than "they" say is possible.

Another section talks about the nutrient density and makeup of organic compared to factory farmed food.

Biotic means organic, in this article.

Posted to aus.gardens also as David was asking about perma/polyculture and sustainability recently, and because those of you in Oz seem to be a bit ahead of us here in the US........in regard to this matter, at least. ;-)

Charlie

Full article at:

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excerpt:

Another Agriculture is Possible

Many well-substantiated studies show that intensive biotic polyculture

-- that is, the cultivation of many species of food plants in a small footprint, using biotic soil amendments and nutrient recycling -- produces far more food per hectare than factory farming; uses far less water; and builds, rather than destroying, topsoil.

Although more human ingenuity, care, and attention are required, the adoption of permaculture principles and techniques reduces the drudgery of food production considerably; the permaculturist is assisting food to grow rather than forcing it to grow (or more hubristically, "growing" it), which is much less work all round than our cartoon cultural memory of dawn-to-dusk backbreaking peasant labor (which became backbreaking to pay "tribute" and debts to people with weapons and ledgers, not survive).

What intensive biotic polyculture does not do is maximise money profits, minimise labour inputs, or facilitate large-scale extractive cash-cropping.

For these reasons -- not for any failure to produce food for eating -- it is derided by industrial agribiz "experts" as impractical, inefficient, inadequate, etc. In fact, poly/permaculture's abundant success in producing food for eating is one of the things that makes it a frightening prospect for those who control people by controlling people's access to food.

What they don't want us to know is that it works. Eisenia hortensis -- the European nightcrawler (earthworm) -- under ideal worm-farming (vermiculture) conditions double their volume through reproduction every 90 days. Each individual worm can eat approximately half its body weight each day. A pound of E. hortensis, then, can consume a half-pound of non-oily, vegetable kitchen scraps each day. The majority of that mass is excreted as an extremely high quality compost, with a bit of fluid (worm tea) left over (considered by many to be the organic uber-fertilizer). So, potentially, one pound of worms can convert around 180 pounds of kitchen scraps each year into the highest quality organic soil additive. Every five pounds of worm-castings can convert one-square surface-foot of soil into a super-producer for a four months. So one pound of worms can sustain 12 square surface-feet of garden throughout the year for the highest levels of productivity.

My own [Stan's] anecdotal evidence, without using worm castings but using simply composting mulch on organic compost over non-compacted soil, is that in 12 square surface-feet, one can grow three species of food, with six plants each... producing okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, bush beans, etc. Mixing them, and adding a couple of marigolds and aromatics (like mint or parilla) seems to keep the little critters from taking more than their share. Last summer I had one cucumber vine that produced around 50 mature cucumbers, totalling well over 20 pounds of food, for around three months. By rotating seasonals, it is easily conceivable to take a 12 square-foot plot in a temperate zone and raise 100 pounds of food a year... being very conservative. Neither Syngenta, nor Cargill, nor Archer-Daniels-Midland want you to know this.

They want to sell you mass-produced food, for money... which you have to work for. Let us not forget that Enclosure (forcing people off the land, or separating them from their land) was the method used to compel people into the monetized industrial economy in the first place. A

12-foot garden bed is three-feet by four-feet. How many of these can you build on a half an acre? The key is always in the design.
Reply to
Charlie
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Sorry, I was also reading this article and became cornfused about what I was reading and where I was reading it! Not an uncommon occurrence.

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Viva la Revolución Jardín Charlie

Reply to
Charlie

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Interesting, but not surprising. I am trying to remember how some of the measurements for organic vs inorganic food is done. I seem to remember brix and baume but that is all that comes to mind.

And one has to wonder why kids these day seem to have so many diseases that were rare when I was a child. People of my age were relatively lucky because we were raised in an era when the production of food was organic, or only beginning on the inorganic track. Kids when I was young were considered to be rather defective if they had things like Asthma, psoriasis, allergies etc, because they were incredibly rare. Now they seem to be almost the norm rather than the exception. Something has sure changed since I was a kid.

Reply to
FarmI

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As the referenced articles point out, this is a labor intensive way of producing food. I come from a part of America where that type of practice was still common in my chidhood. Know, however, 95%+ of the population is not dedicated to sunsistence farming, but rather lives in urban environments. One real big change is this chamge in demographics, which makes locally produced food (some organically grown) much scarcer in most places here.

Reply to
Rick

In article , Rick wrote:

I didn't see any reference in the article to organic farming being more labor intensive. Perhaps it is with weeding, but then it is a trade-off between paying for poison to pour on the ground or having healthy food.

Since I seem to be ripping-off authors today let's take another look at "Omnivore's Dilemma".

Corn adapted brilliantly; to the new industrial regime, consuming prodigious quantities of fossil fuel energy and turning out ever more prodigious quantities of food energy. More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen made today is applied to corn, whose hybrid strains can make better use of it than any other plant. Growing corn, which from a bio- logical perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn it into food, has in no small measure become a process of convert- ing fossil fuels into food. This shift explains the color of the land: The reason Greene County is no longer green for half the year is because the farmer who can buy synthetic fertility no longer needs cover crops to capture a whole year's worth of sunlight; he has plugged himself into a new source of energy. When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it--or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a'calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every calorie of energy invested. From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it's too bad we can't simply drink the petroleum directly.

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People moved off the land, peoples can move back. In part, this was due to the idea that economies of scale required that a farmer only grow one crop and then sell that crop to a middle man. The new (old) paradigm is to grow multiple crops and sell directly to the consumer. In this manner, the family farmer who lives near an urban center may have a chance. Otherwise, we should return to the old system of crop guarantees, where the government supported the price of a commodity by loaning the value of the crop to the farmer. If he couldn't sell it, he kept the money and the government kept the crop, which was used to feed the hungry of this country.

As far as the scarcity of organic crops, it is the fastest growing segment of food production. As people know more about the food they eat and how it is being produced, they are asking for better.

Reply to
Billy

Fair question. I hope someone can answer it. Another fair question is does the out break of some of these diseases have any thing to do with the "Body Burden"?

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All those unnatural chemicals that our environment seems to be awash in these days. (DDT in Antarctica? When did they have trouble with insects? We live in a closed biosphere. What goes up in one place in the world, comes down in another.) Is it just a coincidence that type II diabetes began to spread after the introduction of high-fructose-corn syrup? It seems reasonable to question what appears a correlation between the introduction of a new farming paradigm and food production and the sudden concurent onset of health problems.

Reply to
Billy

Contains

Historical Summaries of Notifiable Diseases in the United States

1975--2006

Not an easy read :))

Bill

Reply to
Bill

Heh heh......we often have young folks organizing chicken pox parties to avoid the vaccine. Who ever though chicken pox vaccine was a good idea!

Charlie

Reply to
Charlie

To find one near you, amongst other things.....

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Reply to
Charlie

Yes! Superb! But I don't think that many people have ever had the opportunity to eat fresh parsnip

Reply to
FarmI

Profoundly stupid thing to say.

Spread to Europe by the late 1340s. It is thought to have returned to Europe every generation with varying virulence and mortalities until the

1700s.

Begining in 1492.

Louis Pasture demonstrated in 1859 that the fermentation process is caused by the growth of microorganisms . . . Along with his contemporary, Robert Koch, Pasteur was an early advocate of the germ theory of disease. Koch finally proved the germ theory, for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1905. (!!!, How far we have come in so short a time.)

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arrived in Britain for the first time in the autumn of

1831. The fourth outbreak occurred in 1854, when thirty thousand died in London alone. From looking at London maps, it became apparent that people who got their household water from the Thames up stream from sewage discharges had few cases of cholera than those who received water down stream from the sewer discharges.
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would have guessed drinking shit would have made you sick? It would be another five years before Pasture proposed that micro-organisms could affect health.

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Cleanliness Becomes Too Clean

As a child, I can remember my mother always saying that a little dirt wouldn¹t hurt me. Now, it seems that this really may be true. Our obsession with cleanliness may be the cause of even more cases of allergies and asthma being found.New York - The ³Hygiene Hypothesis² is what the doctors are saying is the root of more allergic diseases. This means that the cleaner we become, the more we remove necessary bacteria that would help bolster our immune systems against disease.

Dr. Joseph Flanagan, an Allergist says,

³You need some exposure to some bacteria to train the immune system. If our environment is too clean and antiseptic we may not get the chance to have that proper training of the immune system.²

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Hygiene hypothesis

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The same holds true for milk. Pasteurized milk (ironic, eh?) is defenseless against infectious organisms, whereas raw milk contains lactobacillus, which will lower milks pH, and protects it against bacterial infection.

So ignorance is only bliss, when it is folly to be wise, and knowledge still requires judgement.

It would appear J. that somewhere between imbibing infectious organisms, and wiping every surface in your house down with Lysol, there lies a desired middle ground.

I hope I have helped you;-)

Reply to
Billy

I'd hazard a guess that homes that do not reflect the outside temperature has a similar detrimental immune effect. My wife got me into sleeping in the winter time with the window open partial. In summer no air until above 90 F and never more than 10 degree difference.

Bill

Reply to
Bill

well when you put it that way it's not much :-) however, it's obviously not a large space either, so that makes sense.

well, i've been surprised so far! next summer will be the third year.

i have a few (practical) issues with them, but since i'm still a member i apparently haven't hit the wall yet.

imo the best thing about them is they are clear that ordinary suburban gardens & ordinary gardeners are a real way forward. almost everyone has some sort of garden area, & digger's puts a lot of value on this (because it has a lot of value). the way forward usually lies in small actions by a lot of different people, so they're absolutely right! they then inform & encourage all those people on practical things to do.

when it comes to stuffing up my orders and getting the wrong seed into packets, i am much less pleased. :-/ kylie

Reply to
0tterbot

the irony!!

try "the most urbanised nation on earth" and your first sentence here would look slightly less ridiculous. kylie

Reply to
0tterbot

... whilst keeping in mind that a certain (rather large!) amount of organic produce isn't certified because the cost & hassle can be prohibitive & it's not necessarily ever going to be worth it to gain & keep certification (pay, pay, pay...)

in big cities, you simply are never going to get the best of organic produce unless you grow it yourself - same as any veg. it's mostly eaten locally where it's grown either with or without certification. the further something must travel, the less point to it all around, for everyone. lots of people in my town eat local food & i don't know of any which is actually officially certified (although that could be my ignorance) !!

naturally, bureaucracy and commodification ruin everything.

i'm pretty damn certain my veg is organic, but i'm not certified. i sell some stuff to another family, & they don't badger me for certification. which is just as well.

in other words, certification isn't _exactly_ the thing you're looking for. kylie

Reply to
0tterbot

The population density of Australia is 235th out of 241 according to the UN. If you think that Australia is "the most urbanized nation on earth" you really need to get out more.

Reply to
J. Clarke

You could just write down how you grow you food and sign it. Then the buyer would know what they had. Lie and your customers could nickel and dime you to death for false advertising or misrepresentation. Don't need no stinkin' certification;-)

Reply to
Billy

urbanisation relates to the proportion of the populace which live in cities, rather than in the rural areas. it's not related to population density.

population density can be measured according to number of people related to actual land mass, however, to get meaningful information you would measure population density for a particular area. in our cities population density is probably average, in rural areas quite low indeed... due to the urbanisation of the populace, most of whom live in the cities. kylie

Reply to
0tterbot

yeah, of course. but, those people know me. hence no problem. :-)

chookie means to be aware of things labelled "organic" (etc) with no proof (certification) & no way to find out. which is a valid point in scurrilous, money-grubbing times where you have no idea who grew the product you're buying; but i was pointing out that NO certification doesn't necessarily mean it's NOT organic, iyswim. rather than the other way around :-) all the home-organic people would avoid the same soil additives etc that the certified organic people do - just haven't organised & paid for inspection, certification, etc.

but as i said, she's in the city. she doesn't eat our local food here (presumably!) which tends to come from someone you know or someone you know knows (or whatever), rather than all officially-certified & whatnot.

i wouldn't describe my hens' eggs as "organic", for example, because even though their veggies are organic (grown by me) their layer pellets aren't certified organic, so therefore presumably aren't, so therefore the eggs don't meet the criteria, so i wouldn't bother making that claim. (people who buy the eggs would probably know it's an unrealistic claim, anyway!!). kylie

Reply to
0tterbot

ah you've got me there!

i said corn syrup is rare (not "nonexistent" :-) you would most likely find it in imported processed things from time to time i think, but i can't comment because i don't buy that sort of thing much - i think it's in nutella for example, is it not?

processed australian food has cane sugar in it, as a rule (i buy as locally as is reasonable, so i do know that! ... is this a bad time to confess i've been known to buy french mustard & french jam? ;-)

i believe that fast food companies are obliged to supply a nutritional breakdown on their products (or in the store?), but i'm really not sure if that means the classic ingredients list by proportion _as well_. i have no idea about this because we never go to mcdonalds ever, & only to hungry jack's (as burger king is called) pretty rarely. because i feel quietly confident that hungry jack's is probably pretty much filth, i've never bothered to find out the exact contents (i just don't want to know ;-)

i'm under the impression that big fast-food enterprises tend to use local ingredients for most of their stuff (you couldn't possibly justify importing buns, lettuce, meat, etc for example) but when it comes to that scary snot-like substance they make thickshakes out of, i just don't know.

we don't grow much corn here at all, commercially. that which is grown is either sold fresh or canned or frozen afaik. in the north-east, there is A LOT of sugar cane grown. the whole ethanol thing was going to revolve around sugar cane here, rather than corn. (now that everyone worldwide is shocked at the really quite bad idea of giving up food-land to make bio-fuels instead, i am not sure what is happening there, but that wasn't your question anyway.) kylie

Reply to
0tterbot

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