It's called no till or minimum tillage farming using pants genetically
modified to resist herbicides. A lot less fuel is used and better use is
made of water. There is no way to get around the need for nitrogen by
planting legumes. We keep one place in alfalfa a third of time and five
years of alfalfa will provide 1 year of nitrogen for cotton but not for
wheat or corn because they are shallow rooted.

www.couger.com/farm. Show conventional and Minimum till cotton have a week
of rains.

Gordon
"Archimedes Plutonium" wrote in message
...
Dean Hoffman wrote:
(snip)


I don't think it would be practical for regular farms. Alfalfa, for
example is normally cut 3 or 4 times a year in my area. There wouldn't
be
any practical way to cut it out of a standing corn field.
The closest I saw to two simultaneous crops in the same fields was
soybean
and corn. Eight rows of beans, then eight rows of corn. It alternated
like
that through the field. The most obvious problem with that is
irrigation.
Beans and corn need about the same amount of water. The problem is the
timing. Corn needs water earlier than beans. Most irrigation here
(eastern
Nebraska, USA) is by pivot irrigation. That means problems for the
irrigation scheduling.

Dean

The farming I have in mind is Renewable and will succeed after the next
oil-crisis. I call it the MowerMethod of Farming where you combine the
need for a herbicide as a fertilizer. In other words, you love weeds and
grasses and legumes growing between your crop plant to mow and use
them as a fertilizer. Tractors will seldom be used, needed or seen on a
farm. No more plowed over and exposed topsoil. Farms will be much
smaller since about 20 acres is on average what one human can take
care of.

But the mowermethod can be immediately adopted by "organic farmers"
who never use chemicals on there land or crops. And the mowermethod
can be adopted immediately by European farmers because their farms
are about 10 hectares.

The current method of farming will abruptly end sometime in the future
because it is simply not sustainable to use 50 units of energy in order
to create 1 unit of energy in foodstuffs. Primitive agriculture that
relied
on muscle power created 49 units of energy for every 1 unit of energy
applied.

The current method of farming in the USA is similar to the story of the
monster V-8 engines out of Detroit that were 460 horsepower and guzzled
5 miles to the gallon. They were created in a bygone era when gasoline
was 20 cents a gallon or less. When no-one ever thought that gasoline is
too precious and finite to be used wisely. Farming where big machines
handle and solve most every problem is as fluke or aberration of history
as was the V-8 engine with its 5 miles per gallon.

Enjoy it while it lasts for it is not going to last long. Where the
topsoil of
most farm states is plowed under every year exposing topsoil to erosion
and where every plant is killed by herbicides except for the crop and
where
every thing is done by some huge machine. Enjoy it while it lasts because
it is just a fluke and aberration of history. For as soon as the oil of
the
world oil reserves start getting low, then farming will be forced to
become
Renewable.

Archimedes Plutonium,
whole entire Universe is just one big atom where dots
of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies