J Youngman wrote:Permaculture would work very well. Look into the "greening the desert" projects.
I haven't read "greening the desert". But I suppose one thing that Fukuoka had not addressed is the presence of critters and other destructive animals as a result of an imbalanced ecosystem created by humans. Say in Oregon, there are too many deer, wild turkeys, gophers, voles, moles, .. I bought this 2 acres of almost barren land in Oregon with 1 acre covered only by some low nondrought tolerant ornamental trees, ornamental shrubs, some roses, some mostly damaged (by gophers, voles, moles, previous owner's chemicals) low growing lawn grass and 1 acre of barren land covered only by ANNUAL rye grass cause the previous owner lent it to a grass grower.
Fukuoka's seed ball will not work cause there will be animals killing anything that is green. Even if they don't eat the green plants, they will dig up dirt to kill them. I have gophers that will kill grass after eating dandelions cause of the dirt they dig up. Moles will eat worms and insect larvae. But the dirt they dig up will kill almost all plants. Over 50% of the trees that I planted were killed by deer, voles, wild rabbits or drought. The reason why we have so many destructive animals is simple. We killed all the predators of these critters. So, in order to green the deserts, we need to reintroduced predators to the ecosystem. This is actually what is happening in some parts of America. They are introducing wolves and coyotes to areas that need to be reforested.
