~SUSTAINABLE LIVING FOR CHALLENGING TIMES

[oo_buck]

Makes me go Hmmmmmmmm

QUOTE:

"The Fundamental Reality that Underlies Fukuoka's Principles

Soil is created by living plants working with microorganisms, and by the plants' residues and the microorganisms' corpses after their death.

Soil is drained of nutrients by cultivation, NOT by plants.

Tilling and cultivation of any sort diminishes the natural fertility of the soil in three ways:

· Mechanical grinding of the soil particles reduces their size and smooths them. This greatly reduces the size and number of micro-cavities between the particles, which are the habitats of balanced bacteria breathing out gases essential to mineral absorption and plants' health.

· Tilling kills vital microorganisms in the soil by exposing them to excessive oxygen in the air.

· And tilling exposes the organic matter in the rhizosphere (soil around the roots) to the atmospheric gases, precipitating the combustion of the humus, turning it into soluble mineralized nutrients . This provides a quick fertilizer for the plants, but at the cost of destroying permanently the texture and tilth of the organic, humic, rich soil, which accelerates erosion as well as contamination of the watertable with nitrates.

Minerals and trace elements, although present in soil, may not be accessible to plants due to the absence of the microorganisms (killed by tilling, pollution, or the use of herbicides or pesticides) that participate in the plant's mineral nutritional process. Just as microflora in our own digestive systems are needed so that our bodies can absorb and use the nutrients of the ingested food, microorganisms in the soil perform the same function for plants.

In crops, if the edible parts of a plant are harvested and the rest left to return to the soil, the organic mass left by the decaying plants will be superior to the volume of nutrients taken from the soil.

A plant gets up to 95% of all the nutrients it needs from the sky (gases and sunlight), NOT the soil. Of the 5% taken from the soil, half of it is the essential nutrient nitrogen, which, if the plant is grown in combination with a legume, can also come from the air.

ONLY 2 1/2% of the total nutrition of a plant IS COMING EXCLUSIVELY FROM THE SOIL in the form of soluble minerals and trace elements.

That is the fundamental reality that underlies and supports Fukuoka's principles of: No tilling, No fertilizer, No weeding, and No pesticides or herbicides. Natural agriculture refutes and disproves the foundation of current agronomical logic, and because it does it is seen as heresy by most of the agronomic community.

Fukuoka proposes, and supports with evidence, the first fundamental agronomic reform since agriculture was invented."

-- Emilia Hazelip"

UNQUOTE

(Emilia was Catalan, but had spent part of her youth in the US, and was one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters)

Note that 'No fertiliser' INCLUDES no compost! Organic soil foods aren't harmful and will always do good, but according to the Fukuoka/Hazelip practises -- which rapidly produced results year after year as good or better than any more orthodox methods -- neither are they necessary! This is the real eye-opener, and it takes a certain amount of nerve to follow. Fukuoka used to scatter a very small dressing of dried duck droppings on his field once a year -- a great deal less than orthodox practise views as essential to maintain fertility. But then he, like Emilia never ploughed, nor tilled in any other way, never weeded, and never removed any plant foliage or roots from his land, except for just the food component itself: grains, fruit, etc. Everything else stayed, or in the case of straw from his rice and barley crops, was re-scattered onto his fields as mulch after threshing and winnowing of the grains. There's also an explanatory expansion of the 'No weeding' principle in the vid, which tallies closely with my experience on my beds: volunteers are very few, and as you keep mulching, they fade away, and only your planted plants cover the ground. The first year, I could count the individual volunteers which I pulled and then left on the surface to wither and rot back, they were so few; and it's been like that ever since.

After reading the statement above, which is very pertinent to the vid, please watch Emilia's half-hour 'how-to' video about her last holding, in Southern France (she died, untimely, just
a few years ago). Beautiful vid, and a great exposition of how to apply Fukuoka's farming principles on garden- and horticultural-sized plots of land:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2865701754864235132