"Brian Sandle" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger wrote:
My soils aren't quit as old as those in Australia. They are some of the
oldest in North America. Diamoium phosphate was the main sauce we used.
Mixing it with ammonium nitrate, Urea or on the high pH soils ammonium
sulfate to get the ratio of N & P we wanted. Any trace elements would be
added to that. We couldn't get a economic response from potasium in most
cases. Intensely irrigated Bermuda grass would show a response. But
sandy
soils just becomes a hydroponic media for Bermuda grass if you push it
hard
enough.

DAP would not be acceptable to an organic farmer but rock phosphate is.
And
AFIK there is no rule against trace elements if they can use copper in
their
fungicide they should be able to use it in their fertilizer or put on a
heavy treatment of fungicide. It doesn't take much copper.

There is a tremendous amount to learn.

Moosh:] has been relating about varied diets being more healthy for
humans. And varied life on earth seems more healthy.

Currently we have powerful technology and can change the earth in a large
region for the current whim. Well fire has always been a powerful
technology used, but is mused more. The Aboriginal Australians used to use
top fires before the bush got too dense. The resulting fire would not be
so hot. They had learnt over many years and passed on the knowledge. We
need to be doing that now.

The current GM action seems like a big fire going through a rain forest to
open up new land when the nutrients have been taken from the land cleared
the year or so before.

Yes we need to deal with nutrients. There is knowledge to learn in the
organic approach, too. Watch out for yellowcake in the rock phosphate
maybe one. I don't think plants absorb much lead from dolomite (allowed?).

Organics can be more intense farming. Then land such as New Zealand with
low iodine and selenium and specialised life adapted to that could have
had more areas saved. I do not think it is healthy to have uniform
agriculture and small range of plants and beasts the world over, suiting
only the current financial drives we create.

We should be taking care of the oceans. The ocean food comes from the
surface algae that can grow, and while the area is larger than the land
area, the volume cannot be great because the layer is quite thin in
contact with light and much oxygen. Seaweeds can anchor near shores and
have more volume per area.

Let us find out more about what life has done up to the present before
setting in to change it for financial reasons with GM things we cannot
undo.

GM is the most contorled and studied thing we have ever done in agricluture.
Would you eat food that was derived from seed that were irradiated by Cobalt
60 until half wouldn't sprout and then picked over for any thing that looked
good and incorpeted along with who knows what other mutations into crops
with no testing?


Rather than put RR or Bt &c genes in several cotton types and say you have
increased diversity, increased profit for the mean time or whatever, find
out about companion planting, closed ecosystems like marvelously diverse
forests, and long duration success.

We call those weeds.

Most mature forest are rather steril monoculutres compared to a monoculure
grassland.

You have your cotton fields, thanks for the photos. Now when the wind
comes it moves the sandy soil. So can you get a crop which like marram
grass will enable dunes to form? Then you have a greater area of land to
some extent. And on the more shaded side of the dunes different plants
could grow. Harvesting technology would need to be developed. We need to
set aside thinking places and not only relating to what the govt
currently enables (Jim's posiiton).

Before we could control the sand it was fairly common practice to plant 66
foot wide strips of cotton, wheat, milo and alfalfa with the rows
perpendicular to the wind and work our rotations off that. We progressed
beyond that in the 60's when 100 hp tractors came out.

No till give use many of the things organic supporters claim such as less
pesticide and it really does increase the organic matter in the soil.

Hitler and Geobles would be proud of the why the people that have taken over
the greens have used their methods to sway public opinion to support
practices that 180 degrees opposed to the claimed goals of the
organizations. The greens and others of their kind are responsible for far
more deaths that Hitler and Stalin combined by derailing public health
efforts in the world. Malaria program are almost at a stand still. In the
first world as many as 50% of the children in some areas are not getting
their childhood vaccines all becuse so people with more time than good sense
have take up the cause of a bunch of archest that have hijacked a once
respectable movement and use it to promote their own ends.

Their imagined dangers that have no basis in science make as much sense and
not having your kids vaccinated for tetanus, whooping cough, and measles
when we have real dangers of insecticides, persistent herbicides and water
erosion not only destroying our land but clogging our water ways with silt
and nutrients that are killing our estuaries.

In the mean time we have a ever-increasing number of hungry people to feed
unless you would have use starvation as a population control measure.

Agriculture scientist know what their doing and they learn from the past. I
have oral history of family farming back to 1816. My grand father told me
the story his farther told him about the year it frosted every month of the
year in Indiana. Look up 'the year without a summer' on google. Think what
that would do if it happened today. If you look at tree ring evidence it is
not unlikely it will happen in your life time.

I have direct family history back to 1874 form my great grandmother. Almost
everyone in agriculture has roots like this. We did not hatch in a suburb
with only our peers as guides for our thinking. We started work when we were
8 or 9 and had investment in crops or livestock by the time we were 13. We
were working out for neighbors from the time we do something that the
needed. By the time we were 12 we were expected to keep up with the grown up
chopping cotton until 10 or 11 O'clock in the morning and do just as good a
job as they did.

For almost every one in the business from the farmer to the boards of the
multinational ag companies have farm roots. It's not a deal like Enron.
These people eat the food they sell and can only stay in business by
providing a product that their customer finds profitable. No farmer will
give all the profit to the seed company and the bank they will take the what
that makes them the most money.

Gordon