mother earth news vegetable garden planner

#MOTHER EARTH NEWS VEGETABLE GARDEN PLANNER PATCH#

With one-third of all food wasted and an epidemic of diet-related diseases in the west, questions of yield are often used to obscure the real questions about food quality and distribution.ĭuring the first 10,000 years of agriculture, humans produced food from polycultures, diverse groups of plants growing together, for almost all that time. Yields must be considered over the long term. Farming within nature’s limits may yield less in a year, but it can do so indefinitely. This would not only yield much more in time but would also maintain the habitat on which we depend. The other option is to preserve the forest’s integrity and manage it for timber over the long term. Our current choice is a short-term bumper harvest, leveling the forest and leaving the exposed soil to disappear with the rain. Harvesting our food from the ecosystems that sustain us could be compared to extracting timber from a hillside forest. In 1943, Albert Howard, the godfather of what is now called “regenerative” farming, wrote that “the appearance of a pest should be regarded as a warning from Mother Earth to put our house in order”. As such, it requires a constant battle against nature’s attempts to reintroduce diversity: the ceaseless removal of what we see as weeds, and the killing of insects whose job is to remove unhealthy plant growth, which is what chemically reliant crops are. A single species of plant across a large area is something that never exists in nature because it is incompatible with a healthy ecosystem. To maximize the efficiency of production, the farming landscape has become one of monocultures, with single crops across whole fields, areas or even regions. Short-term yields had their most famous spokesperson in Nixon’s secretary of state for agriculture, Earl Butz, who ordered farmers to “get big or get out”.Ĭato in a tractor. Government-funded research, education and subsidies have been used to drive chemically intensive production over ever-larger acreages. Yet since the mid-20th century, western policy has pushed farmers in the opposite direction. It is inevitably linked to agriculture because farming covers 71% of UK land.ĭone differently, farming has the potential to store carbon, house diverse wildlife and provide ample, nutritious food. Biodiversity loss, most visible on our bug-free windscreens and documented in endless falling graphs of insects, birds and life of all kinds, is a crisis as dramatic as the changing climate. This makes crops prone to drought and increases devastation from flooding for communities downstream. According to the US Department of Agriculture, this loss in carbon can translate to a loss of 800,000 liters per hectare of water storage. Soil carbon is crucial for the retention of water. Since the beginning of agriculture, soil has lost about 8% of its carbon, creating up to 20% of human-made CO2 emissions. Soil is by far the Earth’s biggest carbon store outside the oceans – it holds more than all the world’s plants and forests combined.

Postwar farming practices have played a significant role in getting us here. Farmers feel the effects immediately we are gardening without a hosepipe. The shift in weather patterns over the past decade has been incredible. One replied that there was in fact a meeting that evening about the creation of a Gascon olive oil collective. Looking over the parched valley, veiled in wildfire smoke drifting up from the coast, I made a throwaway remark to some farming friends about planting olive trees to cope with increasingly regular episodes of intense, dry heat. Spring-sown crops, hanging on after very little rainfall and unrelenting sun, will, for many, not be worth harvesting. After 12 years in the agricultural school of hard knocks, what we learned there is now being applied on a National Trust farm near Swindon for which we were awarded the tenancy last year.īack in France during last month’s heat waves, the effect on the landscape was devastating. This quickly escalated, and I ended up selling the rights to my songs with Groove Armada to buy a farm nearby.

#MOTHER EARTH NEWS VEGETABLE GARDEN PLANNER PATCH#

It made for sobering reading, and ended by saying: “If you don’t like the system, don’t depend on it.” I was inspired to transform our garden in France into a vegetable patch in a quest for self-sufficiency. He n the way back from a gig 15 years ago, I read an article on the environmental consequences of food production.

Mother earth news vegetable garden planner