In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:
Pavel314 wrote:
Yesterday evening I spread two 28' x 28' bird nets over my raspberry
patch. There were only a few berries last year but this year it looks
like I'll get about a quart. During the process, I realized that I was
struggling out in the heat to install $50 worth of bird netting to
save about $5 worth of berries. Not a great one-time investment, but
next year the patch should really start bearing and the netting will
be well worth the investment.
Paul
Small scale growing has problems of cost effectiveness when compared to
supermarket prices, especially when you are starting out. If you factor in
the other benefits and pleasures that eating your own produce provides it is
much more worth it. If you can increase your scale moderately so that you
multiply your production using the same fixed overheads and if you can learn
to recycle and reuse instead of purchasing your inputs the financial balance
comes back into your favour.
The way to do this is to provide for more than one family (unless you have a
large one already), to learn to preserve your abundant crops and to sell or
exchange the rest locally. This is probably not possible if all you have is
a balcony but if you have 50 sq metres of soil in a sunny spot it is.
If in doubt give it away. I often give surplus veges to neighbours without
expecting anything in return, however things come back to you. Last year
one fixed my car (which would have cost several hundred dollars) and refused
to take any money.
David
Truly, what is the price of community?
-----
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dile...ls/dp/01430385
83/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815576&sr=1-1
p.79
Some intriguing recent research suggests otherwise. A study by
University of California-Davis researchers published in the Journal of
Agriculture and Food Chemistry in 2003 described an experiment in which
identical varieties of corn, strawberries, and blackberries grown in
neighboring plots using different methods (including organically and
conventionally) were compared for levels of vitamins and polyphenols.
Polyphenols are a group of secondary metabolites manufactured by plants
that we've recently learned play an important role in human health and
nutrition. Many are potent antioxidants; some play a role in preventing
or fighting cancer; others exhibit antimicrobial properties. The Davis
researchers found that organic and otherwise sustainably grown fruits
and vegetables contained significantly higher levels of both ascorbic
acid (vitamin C) and a wide range of polyphenols.
The recent discovery of these secondary metabolites in plants has bought
our understanding of the biological and chemical complexity of foods to
a deeper level of refinement; history suggests we haven't gotten
anywhere near the bottom of this question, either. The first level was
reached early in the nineteenth century with the identification of the
macronutrients-protein, carbohydrate, and fat. Having isolated these
compounds, chemists thought they'd unlocked the key to human nutrition.
Yet some people (such as sailors) living on diets rich in macronutrients
nevertheless got sick. The mystery was solved when scientists discovered
the major vitamins-a second key to human nutrition. Now it's the
polyphenols in plants that we're learning play a critical role in
keeping us healthy. (And which might explain why diets heavy in
processed food fortified with vitamins still aren't as nutritious as
fresh foods.) You wonder what else is going on in these plants, what
other undiscovered qualities in them we've evolved to depend on.
In many ways the mysteries of nutrition at the eating end of the food
chain closely mirror the mysteries of fertility at the growing end: The
two realms are like wildernesses that we keep convincing ourselves our
chemistry has mapped, at least until the next level of complexity comes
into view. Curiously, Justus von Liebig, the nineteenth-century German
chemist with the spectacularly ironic surname, bears responsibility for
science's overly reductive understanding of both ends of the food chain.
It was Liebig, you'll recall, who thought he had found the chemical key
to soil fertility with the discovery of NPK, and it was the same Liebig
who thought he had found the key to human nutrition when identified the
macronutrients in food. Liebig wasn't wrong on either count, yet in both
instances he made the fatal mistake of thinking that what we knew about
nourishing plants and people was all we need to know to keep them
healthy. It's a mistake we'll probably keep repeating until we develop a
deeper respect for the complexity of food soil and, perhaps, the links
between the two.
But back to the polyphenols, which may hint at the nature of that link.
Why in the world should organically grown blackberries or corn contain
significantly more of these compounds? The authors of Davis study
haven't settled the question, but they offer two suggestive theories.
The reason plants produce these compounds in the first place is to
defend themselves against pests and diseases; the more pressure from
pathogens, the more polyphenols a plant will produce. These compounds,
then, are the products of natural selection and, more specifically, the
coevolutionary relationship between plants and the species that prey on
them. Who would have guessed that humans evolved to profit from a diet
of these plant pesticides? Or that we would invent an agriculture that
then deprived us of them? The Davis authors hypothesize that plants
being defended by man-made pesticides don't need to work as hard to make
their own polyphenol pesticides. Coddled by us and our chemicals, the
plants see no reason to invest their sources in mounting a strong
defense. (Sort of like European nations during the cold war.)
A second explanation (one that subsequent research seems to suppport)
may be that the radically simplified soils in which chemically
fertilized plants grow don't supply all the raw ingredients needed to
synthesize these compounds, leaving the plants more vulnerable to
attack, as we know conventionally grown plants tend to be. NPK might be
sufficient for plant growth yet still might not give a plant everything
it needs to manufacture ascorbic acid or lycopene or resveratrol in
quantity. As it happens, many of the polyphenols (and especially a
subset called the flavonols) contribute to the characteristic taste of a
fruit or vegetable. Qualities we can't yet identify, in soil may
contribute qualities we've only just begun to identify in our foods and
our bodies.
Reading the Davis study I couldn't help thinking about the early
proponents of organic agriculture, people like Sir Albert Howard and J.
I. Rodale, who would have been cheered, if unsurprised, by the findings.
Both men were ridiculed for their unscientific conviction that a
reductive approach to soil fertility-the NPK mentality-would diminish
the nutritional quality of the food grown in it and, in turn, the health
of the people who lived on that food. All carrots are not created equal,
they believed; how we grow it, the soil we grow it in, what we feed that
soil all contribute qualities to a carrot, qualities that may yet escape
the explanatory net of our chemistry. Sooner or later the soil
scientists and nutritionists will catch up to Sir Howard, heed his
admonition that we begin łtreating the whole problem of health in soil,
plant, animal and man as one great subject."
So it happens that these organic blackberries perched on this mound
of vanilla ice cream, having been grown in a complexly fertile soil and
forced to fight their own fights against pests and disease, are in some
quantifiable way more nutritious than conventional blackberries. This
would probably not come as earthshaking news to Albert Howard or J. I.
Rodale or any number of organic farmers, but at least now it is a claim
for which we can supply a scientific citation: J. Agric. Food. Chem.
vol. 51, no. 5, 2003. (Several other such studies have appeared since;
see the Sources section at the back of this book.)
Obviously there is much more to be learned about the relationship
of soil to plant, animals, and health, and it would be a mistake to lean
too heavily on any one study. It would also be a mistake to assume that
the word łorganic" on a label automatically signifies healthfulness,
especially when that label appears on heavily processed and
long-distance foods that have probably had much of their nutritional
value, not to mention flavor, beaten out of them long before they arrive
at our tables.
The better for what? question about my organic meal can of course be
answered in a much less selfish way: Is it better for the environment?
Better for the farmers who grew it? Better for the public health? For the
taxpayer? The answer to all three questions is an (almost) unqualified
yes. To grow the plants and animals that made up my meal, no pesti-
cides found their way into any farmworker's bloodstream, no nitrogen
runoff or growth hormones seeped into the watershed, no soils were
poisoned, no antibiotics were squandered, no subsidy checks were
written. If the high price of my all-organic meal is weighed against the
comparatively low price it exacted from the larger world, as it should
be, it begins to look, at least in karmic terms, like a real bargain.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://radwisdom.com/essays/this-is-your-brain/