Eco-Farm: An Acres U.S.A. Primer — Foreword
This is an excerpt from Charles Walters’ Eco-Farm — An Acres U.S.A. Primer, available from the Acres U.S.A. bookstore at bookstore.acresusa.com. Read more excerpts from this book using the category “Eco-Farm.”
A primer is a first reader.
Eco-Farm — An Acres U.S.A. Primer is a first reader in eco-agriculture.
The objective here is to take it all apart and put it back together again, and to do this so that all can understand.
Accordingly, this book contains nothing that runs beyond the comprehension of a person blessed with average intelligence and a fair education. It assumes no great knowledge of chemistry, botany, entomology or soil physics. It may be that readers will have to look up a few words in the glossary now and then, and handle a few new concepts—transpiration, translocation, cation exchange capacity, biological energy, cellular equilibrium—but these things are also explained adequately in the context of their usage.
Having mastered the several lessons in this primer, the student of eco-agriculture will then be able to read the lines—and between the lines—of articles and books with superb comprehension. Should a passage or chapter prove a bit difficult, the reader is urged to proceed anyway. The overview sought here will come together in any case sooner or later.
This primer takes issue with the National Association of Science Writers, a cautious group that has made the following a part of the organization’s code of ethics. “Science editors are incapable of judging the facts of phenomena involved in medical and scientific discovery. Therefore, they only report discoveries approved by authorities, or those presented before a body of scientific peers.”
Metro farm editors and editors serving industrially owned farm papers obey this injunction and handle no new technology unless it is first blessed by the land grant colleges.
This is scholasticism, the last stage in the decay of the simple and obvious system called the scientific method. It seems to say that those who are trained by the universities are not competent to do what they have been trained to do. A measure of self respect requires us to reject this outrageous summary.
In a way, it is fitting that this primer challenge those who would hide behind the complexities of their craft. The economist Clarence Ayres once said it all: “It is easy to maintain sacred fictions in a community to whom every letter is an occult symbol; in a community to whom the printed word has become a common tool, no fiction is shielded from the scrutiny of the people, not even the divinity which hedges kings.”
There is nothing occult about science. And we add, there is nothing occult about the rationales constructed by the grant receivers to protect the commerce of their patrons. Indeed, a primer can handle almost everything we need to discuss. And as these lessons unfold, certain principles will emerge, each dazzling in the purity of its challenge. We can state these now and set the stage for proofs in the pages that follow.
1. Simplistic nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (N, P and K) fertilization means malnutrition for plants, animals and men because either a shortage or marked imbalance of plant nutrients prevent balanced plant health and therefore animal and human health.
2. Plants in touch with exchangeable soil nutrients needed to develop proper fertility loads, structure, and stabilized internal hormone and enzyme potentials, provide their own protection against insect, bacterial and fungal attack.
3. Insects and nature’s predators are a disposal crew. They are summoned when they are needed, and they are repelled when they are not needed.
4. Weeds are an index of the character of the soil. It is therefore a mistake to rely on herbicides to eradicate them, since these things deal with effect, not cause.
5. Crop losses in dry weather, or during mild cold snaps, are not so much the result of drought and cold as nutrient deficiency.
6. Toxic rescue chemistry hopes to salvage crop production that is not fit to live so that animals and men might eat it, always with consequences for present and future generations of plants, animals and men.
7. Man made molecules of toxic rescue chemistry do not exist in nature’s blueprints for living organisms. Since they have no counterpart in nature, they will not likely break down biologically in a time frame suitable to the head of the biotic pyramid, namely man. Carcinogenic, mutagenic and teratogenic molecules of toxic rescue chemistry have no safe level and no tolerance level.
The summary stacks up like any college syllogism. NPK formulas as legislated (and enforced by state departments of agriculture) mean malnutrition, insect, bacterial and fungal attack, toxic rescue chemistry, weed takeover, crop loss in dry weather, and general loss of mental acuity—plus degenerative metabolic disease—among the population, all when people use thus fertilized and protected food crops. Therefore the answer to pest crop destroyers is sound fertility management in terms of exchange capacity, pH modification, and scientific farming principles that USDA, Extension and Land Grant colleges have refused to teach ever since the great discovery was made that fossil fuel companies have grant money.
Young people today do not understand this profound philosophy. They turn to the farmer for answers, but most farmers no longer understand. They may still remember that nature created life, but they think the test tube and fossil fuel factory have vacated nature’s rhythm of life and death.
The authors of this book have worked in agriculture for more than a quarter of a century. And if you ask us. What does a farmer do?, we will answer quite differently from most. In agribusiness they say a farmer produces com, wheat, cattle or swine, or perhaps one of a hundred other crops, and this may be correct as far as it goes. But we and a few farmers see the final product of the farm as human bodies with minds capable of thought and reason.
True, the farming profession requires farmers to bargain with his fellow men for dollars according to some few economic laws. These laws have been covered in Unforgiven. Still, there is a more subtle message in Unforgiven, and it states that the farmer must also bargain with nature to get human food according to the laws of life and death. This primer tells how.
After reading Eco-Farm, you’ll be ready for a postgraduate course, one available monthly in the pages of Acres U.S.A. and in a few select book titles that can be recommended as being in tune with nature.
