Ivan McDonagh wrote:

.....snip.......

Mr Hopkins emphasises to a very great extent the need for large amounts
of organic matter in the soil but is also convincing in his argument
that the amounts of humus that are required to provide sufficient
nutrients for the high density planting that both home and commercial
growers favour is difficult for the home grower and expensive to the
point of impossibility in the case of the commercial grower to obtain.

From what I remember from high school agriculture some 30 years ago, if
you apply chemical fertilisers direct to a (basic) soil, then your
plants only have a short time (the time it takes to leach through) in
which to take up the nutrients, etc that the chemical provided.

Adding organic matter to the soil provides an enormous amount (relative)
of places/sites for the chemicals to be bound/held/delayed so there is a
greater store of chemical for the plants to later take up and the
chemical is less easily leached out of the soil.

So Mr Hopkins ideas have been adapted in modern agriculture.


"Organic" to me is a system of certification and thus something is
"organic" if it is certified to be organic. End of story.

Some farmers are making a living being organic famrers. End of story
about cost, etc. So that answers your question in the subject.


Okay, we are forced to live in a capitalist world and the capitalist
world just exploits resources to enable some people to maximise the
amount of money they make at the expense of other people and the
environment.

So, not all farmers can afford to be successful organic farmers. because
as you say, the cost of that organic matter can be too high. If you look
at the nutrient cycle as per human activities, we have a few 1000 (?)
farmers growing food, that is 99% shipped to capital cities for sale
(99%) and consumption (95%)(Yes, some of it goes back - weird). So
basically our cities are drowning in shit each year. To prevent this
happening, we pump it out to sea. What %? and What % is now sold as
landscape fill, etc?

So, if a farmer wants to do what is right by the environment, they then
have to pay for cartage of that organic matter back to his farm, which
for most means that the costs of farming inputs are too high and they
would not have a commerically viable farm. Note, that book was written
in 1948 and transport infrastructure has greatly changed since then.

Instead, farmers tend to produce organic matter on the farm by growing
other crops, e.g, sub-clover with crops to directly provide nitrogen,
pastures that stock eat and defecate, etc.


As a home gardener,

1) I compost all food scraps and if I am feeling energetic, shred and
compost the newspaper, etc. Worry about energy cost of shredding and
have only just workerd out that it all had a ph of 5, which is why is
made negligible difference.

2) obtain bulk animal manures, (e.g horse and chicken), occassionally as
chance and carrying capacity allows. Actually, I know where I can get
trailer loads of stable stuff for free (Cobboty, NSW), but I have to let
it stand for weeks as the horses are regularly wormed and it has a very
large component of sawdust, so I tend not to.

3) buy commercial compost off the chicken farmers and mushroom farmers
and use that. Costs, but easily to handle, store (bagged) and use. and
it worked on the tomatoe this summer as we had a nice crop. however, the
beans were awful.