Soil, not oil, holds the future for humanity.
Left alone, the earth maintains its own fertility, in accordance with the orderly cycle of plant and animal life.
A sustainable agriculture is one which depletes neither the people nor the land.
He who eats the fruit should at least plant the seed; ay, if possible, a better seed than that whose fruit he has enjoyed.
A Sustainable Agriculture does not deplete soils or people.
Unless people can become natural people, there can be neither natural farming nor natural food.
My real emphasis is on the farmers who are taking care of the land, the farmers who are really thinking about our nourishment.
From my earliest memories, I loved the farm. My grandfather was a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine and had a huge, well kept garden with an octagonal chicken house in the corner.
A farmer does not grow something in the sense that he or she creates it. That human is only a small part of the whole process by which nature expresses its being.
You can't chemical your way out of soil infertility
The way you support farmers is by shopping and buying raw ingredients.
We must find our way back to true nature. We must set ourselves to the task of revitalizing the earth. Regreening the earth, sowing seeds in the desert--that is the path society must follow.
Although natural farming - since it can teach people to cultivate a deep understanding of nature - may lead to spiritual insight, it's not strictly a spiritual practice.
With wrong farming methods, we turn fertile land into desert. Unless we go back to organic farming and save the soil, there is no future.
If a farmer does abandon his or her "tame" fields completely to nature, mistakes and destruction are inevitable.
Adopting big-business practices is one thing, and adopting agribusiness practices that would dilute the meaning of 'organic' is another. On the whole, I think we're doing a pretty good job of preserving the integrity of organic foods.
When a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity"-to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to-he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.
I know that organic farms can be industrial and just as large and impersonal as conventional farms. Sometimes the free-range chickens aren't even allowed outside, and so they cluck-walk packed tight in a dim lit barn. But organic farms use fewer chemicals.
The pig is not just pork chops and bacon and ham to us. The pig is a co-laborer in this great land-healing ministry.
Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm - which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.
Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.
My whole interest in food grew from my interest in gardens and the question of how we engage with the natural world. To go back even further, I got interested in gardens because I was interested in nature and wilderness and Thoreau and Emerson.
I'm a farmer now, and it's fantastic. My goal is to be totally self-sufficient and grow everything that I eat. There's something about earning your dinner that's cool.
The soil is actually the greatest technology we have for adapting to climate change. And I feel it's our generation's duty to build it back up.
Farmers, young and old, educated and uneducated, have easily taken to the new agronomy. It has been heart-warming to see young college graduates, retired officials, ex-armymen, illiterate peasants and small farmers queuing up to get the new seeds.
