"Billy Rose" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"George.com" wrote:

"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".


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.


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

Wasn't my intent to claim exclusivity. I am just fascinated by Jackson's
change of paradigm from annual to perennial. Additionally, the following
paragraph must resonate with anyone who read Gun, Germs, and Steel by
Jerod Diamond. From the number of months it was number one the NY Times
best seller list, not too many people could have escaped it.

yes, I realise you were not necessarily talking about opposing paradigms. If
anything it was probably the original source article that differentiated
between organic & no-till, with the latter denoted as chemical spray &
synthetic fertiliser dependant. Fukuoka absolutely practised organic based
no-till. In his view the ultimate way to grow, 'natural farming' or 'do
nothing' farming.

The matter of crop selection is also interested, and makes some sense as to
how our forebears selectively bred crops. Perennials are still chosen by
backyard gardeners though. Asparagus for example.

rob