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Reader says historic farming practices are beneficialI take it Trent Loos is a commodity producer, as he sounds offended by food producers in his Dec. 31 article in the High Plains Journal, entitled "Hungry and homeless, don't vote." As a health care provider and fifth generation awakened farmer, I am striving to improve quality (nutrient content) as well as quanity of production. I say awakened because, when my dad was calling all the shots, I went through the motions, not paying attention to the farming process or the outcome. Rotations were slow, promoting unnecessary weed pressure; fall tillage for compaction was nonexistent, etc.--all the important ingredients necessary for chemical or rescue farming. I know that now, having extensively studied soil, crop and animal health over the past eight years. Read the work by Dr. Albrecht, from the University of Missouri, or Neal Kinsey, a respected agronomy consultant, or Allan Savory, who developed holistic resource management, just to name a few. Incidentally, if there is a positive spin coming out of land grant colleges for conventional farming, you can bet it is financed and written to company specs. This mess goes back a long way. The first director, Dr. Wiley, of the Department of Chemistry, now the FDA, favored soil testing across the U.S. and tracking nutrient content of foods. He was ousted and his predecessor favored big business, cheap commodities, and claimed, "That there is no evidence that a less well fed person is more prone to disease than a more well fed person." It has been nearly one hundred years since then and we are finally beginning to see a turn toward large scale nutritional awareness. Recently, a ten-year study was completed at Iowa State comparing organic and (conventional) chemical farming. Soybean yields were equal, but organic corn yields trumped conventional corn yields, something Monsanto will not likely bring up because that is a win for farmer independence. Corporate agribusinesses have claimed, with no research to justify their findings, that this can't happen. In addition, soils under organic production showed several positive improvements compared to soils under conventional production. By the way, what is wrong with 1940s style ag while using bigger equipment and more refined techniques? My best investment has been a manure truck. I bought it used, rented it out to make the payments, and have put down thousands of dollars worth of fertilizer for the price of fuel and upkeep. It may not make a person warm and fuzzy, but it beats accidentally gassing my family if they are downwind of the anhydrous applicator. It doesn't take a brilliant person to figure out which causes more harm: anhydrous or manure? Green manure or chemical NPK? If soil is damaged, what happens to the quality of the plant and crop? Commodity farmers can ignore nutrient content, follow the lead of corporate chemical profiteers, take a pittance for hard work and whine about below parity prices. However, demand is for the food producers, who have concern for whom they feed and acknowledge the importance of nutrient content in the food they grow. Let the food producer feed the soil that feeds the crops that feed the people nutritiously, and stop complaining about the reaping of parity prices that consumers are willing to pay for those quality products. --Wiley N. Alexander, Washington, Kan. 1/21/08 Date: 1/16/08
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