i also think this is relevant to this topic.
Dry
land farming with multicropping
A working model to reverse desertification, end drought, grow
enough food to
feed everyone, and allow farmers to make a good living.
As I was traveling in India my eyes were opened to a way of agriculture that I had not known in the U.S.
1. Dry land farming with no fertilizer and no irrigation added, no pesticides, and no herbicides produced better than chemical yields.
2. The carbon holding capacity of the soil on large acreages could be drastically increased with microbe inoculation.
a. This increases the water holding capacity exponentially to allow the soil to hold water for many months to grow plants effectively without irrigation.
b. The microbes allow the minerals in the soil to become available and thus lead to fertility and increased production with no added fertilizer.
3. I saw the results of the green revolution where thousands of acres of forests and diverse orchards were replaced by monoculture. The farmers had borrowed money for equipment, irrigation, fertilizer and seeds. for several years their yields would go up and then they would drop down to below where they had been before all of their investments. This
led to many farmers losing their farms and hundreds of thousands of farmer suicides. There were still traditional systems in place with which I could compare these monocropping systems.
4. Chemicals require 4 – 5 times the amount of water used for non-fertilized plants. In a place like India where there are wall to wall farms this meant the ground water was seriously depleted. This is happening in the U.S. as well.
All of these things I could have learned in the U.S. Gabe Brown is farming in North Dakota with 15 inches of rain a year with no irrigation and no fertilizer. He has a mob grazing practice, which means he has a lot of animals involved. The system we are demonstrating is a diverse food forest system with nut, fruit and timber trees, herbs, berry bushes, as well as annual and perennial vegetables, legumes and grains.
I have been practicing
permaculture for 25 years. I led an organization called Victory Gardens For All which helped folks in the Eugene, Oregon area put in 650 gardens. One of the focal points was putting on microbial innoculations. Most folks got great gardens the first year.
I did not understand before going to India how these techniques could be used to work on depleted soils while getting good yields on broad acre applications. Or I could say that I was in a fog due to having plenty of food to eat and did not understand the real problem until I went to India where my fog was lifted.
I see now that such people as
Geoff Lawton, a well know permaculturist, head the
Permaculture Research Institute,
http://permaculturenews.org/author/geofflawton/ recommends what he calls
compost tea, which is a form of microbial tea, be applied to broad acres where compost is not feasible. I was part of a farm where we made compost for 15 acres. it took a full time person with a
tractor. Many
permaculture practices such as
hugelkultur, dry mulching, sometimes composting are a tremendous amount of work for the practioner, Many people want their sand, clay or other problematic soils to be friable soil before they put in their crops I have put these microbes on all kinds of soil and planted at the same time. The soils change within months to friable soils. Broad acre permaculture without using microbe inoculation is too expensive to be doable by most practioners. Even in your back
yard, many people cannot do this much work. Increasing the carbon in the soil with microbe innoculations on broad acre applications is a matter of survival. I also see in videos that Elaine Ingham who is a soil scientist, who is applying her science to help farmers, describes scientifically why these microbial inoculation practices work, very succinctly in her video The Roots of Your Profits
I have returned to the U.S. and have started Terra Lingua farm to demonstrate how with 8-14 inches of rain a year we can
1. Interplant fruit, nut,
wood, fiber, vegetable, and fodder trees with
medicinal herbs, vegetables, fruits and cereals, pulses, and oil seeds
2. Planting all of the above along key lines along with ponds, contour trenches, green mulch etc.
Please check out details of our demonstration farm on our web site.
There is a link on the right hand side to an interview with Narsanna Koppula with Aranya Alternative Agriculture who has a 17 year old dry land food forest which has never been watered or fertilized except with rain and mulch, like in a forest.
The cropping system we have posted in the buttons on the top is a major contribution from traditional Indian agriculture.
