"Billy Rose" wrote in message
"debnchas" wrote:

http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2007/070710.htm

Hang on there pardner. You don't haver the only horse in the race.

From the Aug. '07 Scienticic American, "A Return to the Roots".

For many of us in affluent regions, our bath-room scales indicate that
get more than enough to eat, which may lead some to believe that it is
easy, perhaps too easy, for farmers to grow our food. On the
conttrary, modern agriculture requires vast areas of land, along with
regular infusions of water, energy and chemicals. Noting these
resource demands, the 2005 United Nations-sponsored Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment suggested that agriculture may be the
³largest threat to biodiversity and ecosystem function of any single
human activity."

Today most of humanity's food comes directly or indirectly (as animal
feed) from cereal grains, legumes and oilseed crops. These staples are
appealing to producers and consumers because they are easy to
transport and store, relatively imperishable, and fairly high in protein
and calories. As a result such crops occupy about 80 percent of global
agricultural land. But they are all annual plants, must be grown anew
from seeds every year, typically using resource-intensive cultivation
methods. More troubling, the environmental degradation caused by
agriculture will likely worsen as the hungry human population grows to
eight billion or 10 billion in the coming decades. That is why a number
of plant breeders, agronomists and ecologists are working to develop
grain-cropping systems that will function much more like the natural
ecosystems displaced by agriculture. The key to our collective success
is transforming the major grain crops into perennials, which can live
for many years. The idea, actually decades old, may take decades more
to realize, but significant advances in plant-breeding science are
bringing this goal within sight at last.


Roots of the Problem

Most of the farmers, inventors and scientists who have walked farm
fields imagining how to overcome difficulties in cultivation probably
saw agriculture through the lens or' its contemporary successes and
failures. But in the 1970s Kansas plant geneticist Wes Jackson took a
10,00 year step into the past to agriculture with the natural systems
that preceded it. Before humans boosted the abundance of annuals through
domestication and Farming, mixtures of perennial plains dominated nearly
all the planet's landscapes-as they still do in uncultivated areas
today.

More than 85 percent of North America's native plant species, for
example, are perennials. Jackson observed that the perennial grasses and
flowers of Kansas' tall-grass prairies were highly productive year after
year, even as they built and maintained rich soils. They needed no
fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides to thrive while fending off pests
and disease. Water running off or through the prairie soils was clear,
and wildlife was abundant.

In contrast, Jackson saw that nearby fields of annual crops, such as
maize, sorghum, wheat, sunflowers and soybeans, frequent and expensive
care to remain productive. Because annuals have relatively shallow
roots-most of which occur in the top 0.3 meter of soil-and live only
until harvest, many farmed areas had problems with soil erosion,
depletion of soil fertility or water contamination. Moreover, the eerily
quiet farm fields were mostly barren of wildlife. In short, sustaining
annual monocultures in so many places was the problem, and the solution
lay beneath Jackson's boots: hardy and diverse perennial root systems.

the approach used by people such as Masanobu Fukuoka priveliges both organic
and no till techniques. A no till approach can be very organic, organic
farming can be absolutely no till. He always claimed his yeilds matched that
of any contemporary farm in Japan. No till & organic are not necessarily
opposing regimes.

rob