A concise history of Soil, and a blueprint for change

"Instead of seeing the pattern that got us here in the first place we tend to trust in the system that misunderstood it from the beginning. The countermeasures in industrial agricultural have all been based on too narrow a definition of what is wrong. When a decision is made to cope with the symptoms of the problem, second generation problems are created. It has now come to the point where we’ve invented and hybridized plants to grow in degraded soil/dirt and genetically modified our food to be tolerant of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer. However, the use of chemicals is not just stopping the natural succession of the ecosystem, it is turning the clock backward toward death or desert."

Really, it's a 10 minute read and it goes over all the steps that led us into this mess, with an explanation of the problems and how easy the alternatives are.

permaculturenews.org...

reply to post by Fevrier

I read it, and it sounds plausible to me but I'm not a farming expert.
I have read that deforestation of amazon rainforest for farmland usually results in a dead farm after a number of years, and this may be why...maybe the land is being abused, but we need our rainforests also.

The one thing I've noticed is that organically grown produce seems to cost more...I'm not sure exactly why...but if this article is right about non-organic farming methods being so destructive, you would think better methods like organic farming would be more economically competitive.