Making Sense of Things

Posts tagged with nitrogen

• 18 October 2010 - Story Time – The Story of Soil continued

  Hopefully you will remember a previous post on the Story of Soil which describes how agricultural practices have evolved to today’s dependency on fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.

  Today I have a few follow up topics about this partially thanks to your contributions.  The first is regarding the debate on whether organic can feed the world, the second is regarding oxygenating soil and the third is about learning from the past.

  Can organic feed the world?

  According to this article (and my own views), yes organic can feed the world but we need to change how we eat and farm.  Last week Australian television held a debate about organic food, raising questions like ‘how is organic certified/defined?’, ‘why is organic more expensive?’, ‘what are farmers supposed to do when plagued by a pest?’, etc.  These are all very valid questions with a lot of emotional responses but I’d like … Read the rest

• 26 September 2010 - Story Time – The Story of Soil

  Throughout my Permaculture journey I hear some incredible stories.  A few of them help me enormously.  By simplifying them I feel they are easier to share and can still have a massive impact on the way people think – or simply remind them of the basic connections they have lost in life.

  So, today’s story is the story of soil.

  Once upon a time (around 10 000 years ago actually) humans, likely to be living somewhere in the fertile belt, started ploughing their crops as an experiment.  Agriculture was born! They noticed that their crops now grew even faster and bigger than before and were probably quite excited and proud of themselves.  They would continue to plough the soil year after year but the crops would produce less and less until eventually they would have to move on to a new patch of land and start again. This produced … Read the rest