City-Roots

“We can fertilize with s**t but will have to sterilise (sic) it. That requires energy. We have to move food from farms to the public and s**t back.”

That’s what I found when I stumbled upon one web site this week. It is representative of wide ranging ignorance about some of the natural processes we relied on to obtain food LONG before Monsanto and Cargill were ever thought of.

Those of you who occasionally thumb through the scriptures are invited to consider how the first couple were supposed to get along without Monsanto. Their job, you will recall, was to extend the boundaries of paradise and fill it with children. LOTS of children. No fertilizers. No GMOs. No mention of tools, either. (It’s called no-till agriculture and we are just now rediscovering how to use it.)

How gullible are you?

That these companies, and others like them, are not only still in business, but “riding high” proves that it is possible, at least for a while, to fool everyone. Somewhere in the 1920s we got hoodwinked into thinking that natural processes which had worked since mankind first learned to plant in a straight row, had stopped working. Greed set in and reasoning went on holiday. We stopped manuring our fields and started fertilizing them. This led directly to the dust belts of the Great Depression as the reserves of humic acids were pulled from our soils. Without humus to bind them together, the soil particles were free to leave the Midwest on their way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Literally … some of that dust made it all the way to the ocean.

Not coincidentally, by the 1940′s vitamin advertising had leaped “from a little over a million dollars in advertising to two hundred fifty million dollars a year in just four years.” (The Have-More Plan – A Little Land –  A Lot of Living, Robinson, Ed and Carolyn, p.20, 1973, Storey Publishing, MA. $9.95). Why? Because, as Ed and Carolyn also note on the same page, “vitamin and mineral deficient spinach looks about the same as spinach right out of a good garden.”

Friends, these problems were already known in 1945 when this book was first published.

So, are we returning to the old ways? No. In fact, Monsanto is now one of the companies leading the charge toward GMOs and dominating the seed market (to the tune of roughly 95% domination).

We are believing them again.

The wide-ranging discussion on the site was interesting, to say the least. Mostly it was focused on how to survive a government ‘gone wrong’ scenario. The commenter, perhaps intending to lend weight to his opinions, had closed his post with the statement “This is not theory. My machines work.”

Here is my response, altered somewhat for this blog, to that comment:

Continue reading “Manure for the masses” »