Yah, organic standards are silly.
Sprinkle some Imazamox or Glyphosate on genetically modified food and you'll have a very healthy dish. And don't worry about soil nutrient depletion, that's just propaganda from the health nuts.
+1
If I wanted to teach the kids I would fill several of the 5 gallon bucket with his dirt then...
#1. plant seeds, water regularly
#2. plant seeds, sprinkle a little time release fertilizer on top, water regularly
#3. stir in peat moss, plant seeds, water regularly
#4. same as #3 + time release fertilizer
etc.
me either, not since the gov't messed up the term. natural methods are good enough.
if you are using less inputs and can still get results eventually it should result in lower cost produce, but the demand is great enough at present that the price/premium is holding.
i don't sell the stuff we grow here, but often give it away. that's as low cost as it gets...
yep, and sustainability over the long-haul. is your topsoil improving each year or at least holding up? or are you farming subsoil?
when i look around here most farmers have taken prime topsoil and over the years turned it back into subsoil. where i grow my veggies now used to be climax forest for our area (150 years ago) and there would have been about a foot of prime topsoil. all gone, farmed away and back to clay. it's fertile if you treat it right. used to be a christmas tree farm here and then farmed again for a while, then fallow for a few years before we bought it.
i've been doing experiments around the place since i've been here (about 10 years of the 20 years total we've owned this plot). i now have a great example of a green manure patch which puts out more nitrogen than the rest of my gardens could ever use. when i started back there the topsoil was gone, the subsoil was compacted and there was no support for much of anything, even weeds struggled back there with all topsoil and organic matter being washed away in any heavy rains.
first thing i did was level it (tilled a few inches and then leveled). there were no worms or night crawlers in there. then i seeded it with a mix of birdsfoot trefoil and alfalfa and kept it weeded so those were the dominant plants. they are nitrogen fixers. after the second season i started chopping them back once or twice a growing season. which increases the rate of nutrient cycling and increases organic matter.
after six years the previously uniform clay subsoil layer has changed into about a foot of noticeably darker soil. the worms and night- crawlers are now all through there and i can still harvest a few hundred lbs of good green manure for use in other gardens if they need a nitrogen boost.
i'm now increasing the complexity in the area by adding other plants (strawberries, turnips, radishes, beets, buckwheat, etc.) and so the space is going to become even more productive now that there is good topsoil. i've already taken several hundred pounds of garlic out of there too. which would take over if i let it. but i'm trying to remove it as getting garlic out of heavy clay in the middle of summer is not very easy... i like eating it as green garlic and the worms love it if i pull it out and let it dry out on the surface.
so, um, yeah, let's keep on growing and learning what we can, but simple biology and knowing about ecology will trump the narrow views of chemistry any time. it's nice to know what is happening with the chemistry of the soils, but as i've found out over the years it's completely not needed if you know how to farm for the diversity of the soil community and soil organic matter drives that.
the simple chemistry approach ignores that. if you go by strictly looking at NPK you're missing
95% of what is important.having the examples of the surrounding farm fields i don't need to see any more examples of their practices.
songbird
We started off many years ago doing organic gardening, which for us meant putting natural stuff into the soil.
I try to buy food that hasn't been processed, which means nothing in a box or in a jar or in a can, etc.
For example, I buy eggs instead of mayonnaise in a jar (the only hard part about making mayonnaise is getting the technique right). Likewise, I use tomatoes to make ketchup and oh, how I love to add horseradish to make shrimp sauce!
It's hard to find horseradish outside of a jar, so, sometimes jars are required - but I try to get the original food instead of the processed food.
I never buy the meats flavored with "up to 14% saline", simply because I'd rather not pay meat-prices-per-pound for salt water. So I buy the entire pork loin from Costco, for example, and then I slice the yard-long meat into separate inch-thick pork chops.
In the dairy section, I buy the Costco cream, and, along with Trader Joe's milk and eggs (Costco sells them in too-large a quantity), I can make ice cream for the grandkids using any flavoring agent I like (although the kids love oreo cookies in the ice cream - I try to use the mixed nuts instead).
I used to use "real" vanilla fertilized in Madagascar, but now I use the fake stuff that Costco sells after I exhaustively looked up the difference.
Likewise, I used to buy the 25-pound bag of brown sugar from Costco, until I realized that, in ice cream anyway, there's no taste difference between it and the white sugar when mixed in with coffee and/or chocolate.
It's infeasible to start with cocoa beans, but even when I buy cocoa for the chocolate ice cream, I never buy anything but *pure* cocoa, in that if it's watered down with sugar or dextrose, I don't get it at any price.
I even stopped buying the fake sugar at Costco in those large yellow bags (sucralose is the chemical name) simply because they cut it by more than half with dextrose (I don't like buying things where half is mere filler).
An "organic" sticker is nearly meaningless (IMHO).
Just because a chemical has a horrid sounding name doesn't mean that it's bad for you (or good for you either).
The chemical name is meaningless other than what it actually does to either the soil, the food itself, or to the human.
We'd have to take each one on a case-by-case basis - but just putting a label with a pretty green sticker saying "organic" isn't that solution.
It's just not that simple.
I can't market horrid sounding dihydrogen oxide but I can sell crystal clear natural water for twice the price, as long as I put a sticker on it that says "organic".
Ya gotta add stuff! "
Be warned about growing horseradish: where ever you plant it, there it will always be, forever and ever amen. It is impossible to completely eradicate that stuff. If that might be a problem, plant it in a pot.
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