Gordon Couger wrote:

"Brian Sandle" wrote in message
...

What are various types of trees like at extracting water from the ground?

I suppose evergreens keep the sun off the land, but they might shelter
animals from wind.

I am thinking that the surface area of roots in contact with soil is
greater than the area exposed to wind by ploughing. Then the leaves
contact the wind. Also the trees could be a crop.

You could plant several types of trees, each working better in slightly
different conditions. Diversity is much better against troubles. You can
have the diversity within each farm, or else you use the govt to buffer
against loss as with BSE, or both. I hate to think who will bear the brunt
of troubles with the huge GM reduced diversity scheme.

Trees in crop and pasture land are weeds. blocking sun and using water that
grass or crops can use.

Jim has too much water.

Yes, they will block sun, and that can be useful for animals.

Choose trees whose roots go down a bit and they will bring up water which
your `crops' cannot use, as well as trace elements. Then the sun block for
a period of the day can reduce the need of your other crop for
water. Or in Britain where there is not much sunburn of animals
eating toxic substances from umbelliferae, they will be wind
shelter.

GM crops increase the biodiversity by increasing the invertebrates,
microbes, birds and other animals that are not disturbed by repeated
tillage
and toxic sprays.

`No-till' is not only GM.


In my case they reduced my costs for cotton production as a land
lord 50% and the farmers 15%, reduced the chance of wind and water
erosion and let the soil build organic matter at the rate of 1% a
year. www.couger.com/farm

Temporarily Down (for how long?)

shows the different in notil cotton and
conventional till. In this case the notil is my neighbors and
conventional till is mine on an alfalfa hay meadow that is coming
out of hay and into cotton. the other 3/4 of the farm is no till.

What you are calling `no-till' is killing weeds with Roundup on
Roundup-Ready GM crops.

But

URL:
http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/organiccrop/tools5.html
size: 142 lines

[...] Conservation Tillage & Organic Farming

Organic agriculture is often characterized as addicted to
maximum tillagewith growers using every opportunity to lay the
land bare with shovel, plow, or rototiller. This image has been
magnified through the popularity of small-scale organic systems
like the French Intensive and Biointensive Mini Farming models
that espouse double and triple-digging to create deep rooting
beds for highly intensive crop culture. While appropriate to
such intensive circumstances, this degree of cultivation is not
characteristic of organic agriculture in general. It may
surprise some to learn that a large number of organic producers
are not only interested in conservation tillage, but have
adopted it. They will be surprised because it is widely believed
that conservation tillage always requires herbicides.

The interest in conservation tillage among organic producers in
the Cornbelt was well documented in the mid-1970s by Washington
University researchers. They noted that the vast majority of
organic farmers participating in their studies had abandoned the
moldboard plow for chisel plows. Plowing with a chisel implement
is a form of mulch tillage, in which residues are mixed in the
upper layers of the soil and a significant percentage remains on
the soil surface to reduce erosion. Furthermore, a notable
number of organic farmers had gone further to adopt
ridge-tillagea system with even greater potential to reduce
erosion (3). It was especially interesting to note that the use
of these conservation technologies was almost nil among
neighboring conventional farms at this time. Organic growers
were actually pioneers of conservation tillage in their
communities.

Among the more well-known of these pioneers were Dick and Sharon
Thompson of Boone, Iowa. Their experiences with ridge-tillage
and sustainable agriculture became the focus of a series of
publications titled Nature's Ag School. These were published by
the Regenerative Agriculture Associationthe forerunner to the
Rodale Institute. They are now, unfortunately, out of print.

Research continues to open up new possibilities in conservation
tillage for organic farms. New strategies for mechanically
killing winter cover crops and planting or transplanting into
the residue without tillage are being explored by a number of
USDA, land-grant, and farmer researchers. Notable among these is
the work being done by Abdul-Baki and Teasdale at the USDA in
Beltsville, Marylandtransplanting tomato and broccoli crops into
mechanically killed hairy vetch and forage soybeans (27, 28).
There are also the well-publicized efforts of Pennsylvania
farmer Steve Groff, whose no-till system centers on the use of a
rolling stalk chopper to kill cover crops prior to planting
(29). Systems like Groff's and Abdul-Baki's are of particular
interest because close to 100% of crop residue remains on the
soil surfaceproviding all the soil conservation and cultural
benefits of a thick organic mulch.

[...]

Like most of the detractors of modern framing you have no practical
experience faming. I have been at this 46 years and watch crops lost to
blowing sand when there was noting that could be done about it,


Trees would have been an insurace policy ereducing wind velocity.

seen the ditches run a mile with and florescent yellow with
preplant herbicide that was striped from the fields along with 2
or 3 inches of soil in 6 inches of rain that came in and hour. I
have seen a rise come down Red River killing every fish in the
river from one of those same driving rains falling on freshly
sprayed irrigated cotton files and washing the insecticide into the
river and killing fish for 20 miles. I had a neighbor that was
never quite well again after spraying Toxiphene and berating too
much of it.


And insects have been increasing since GM crops have been here, I
think. Maybe the required refuges against resistance development are
producing more.

More pesticides will be required.

I know the real risks of the way you want us to farm and the much
safer and more environmentally friendly way I can farm with GM
crops. I am spending hard money and lots of on irrigation and my
part of the tech fee on the seed. It is some of the best money I
ever spent.

Your yield will be lower, except maybe for large farms growing Bt
cotton, in years when the susceptible insects are infesting.

Go make a living farming with your method and come back and I will
give your views some credit.

Very hard in North America now, since you have to pay the Monsanto
tech fee also, since their GM has polluted everything.

But all you do is spout the same
tired dogma of the ludilits that are starving people to death in
India and Africa.

GM has a lower yield for food crops. The energy of the plant goes to
producing the RR protein.

Dream about them tonight. I have done every
thing I can to provide food for the world

It only takes 1% of us to feed the world these days. That is a
problem with dumping of food into Africa, taking away the income
they used to have selling food, and causing starvation.

while ass holes like you
try to protect what every you think you are protecting and condemn
the third world to death and disease by things like not buying
produce from countries the use DDT in spite of the fact that its
use in homes will go a long way to controlling malaria out breaks.

DDT was used so much, as we have already read on this thread. It
became non-effective. Yes it can be used for some outbreaks, but
that is all.


May the ghosts of the millions that have died and will die haunt
you for your disregard of the world situation that has cause the
break down in the fight against disease in the third world and now
you want to deny them the benefits of modern agriculture as well.


They have already been introduced to modern agriculture with the
cash crops. Then when wwe paid them too little some of them went to
producing food for their own communities. We quickly jumped on this
with dumping, They lost their farms and livelihoods and went to the
city slums to beg abd scavenge the trash heaps.

I know your lot want to buy their farms up cheap.