Julie Rock : If we wanted to know something about the condition of the soils in the Fertile Crescent at the point where Hunter-Gatherers became Farmers our look backward machine
would take us to sections of virgin prairie that still exist in places on our Great American Plains ! Here the Humus layers of the soil are often a foot or more deep and the rich black
'Top Soil' goes down for several feet ! This is due to Tens if not Hundreds of Millennials of generations of grass plants . Then came the humans - and goats ! today much of the old
Fertile Crescent is bare rock and dead soils.
Our present day work with Hugelculture mounds is merely an attempt to approximate within a short while what natural grasslands took Ages to transform themselves into ! Having
had personal
experience with old beaver Dams, I can report that this Hugelculture like structure if left in place long
enough 20 +yrs, will producesome of the richest Black top soil I
have ever worked with !
Hunter-Gatherers used
local conditions to transform themselves into farmers in many different places on the planet, there were many nearly simultaneous eruptions of Farming
Communities in many places on the planet, nearly all growing locally evolved grasses with 'heads of Grain'.
White Western Europeans often attempted to control the local populations by controlling or destroying locally harvested
native grains and animals. Two often mentioned examples
are mostly successful attempts to prevent and or interfere with local harvest and storage of Amaranth in "Old Mexico'' and of course the wholesale killing of the American Bison or
Buffalowithin the borders of our own country ! Of Course this is just my personal opinion, and you are welcome to your opinion too ! For the good of the Crafts ! BIG AL
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