Hello Josh
Why no heed to Arden Anderson? I have one of his books and a series
of audio tapes and i hold them in good stead.
Then I assume you haven't read the core works of the organic movement.
A major problem there's always been with organic farming/Biodynamic
farming is that people find it hard to make money selling stuff to
organic farmers. Organic farmers don't need anything much, they
supply nearly all their inputs themselves, from on-farm.
It's true Appropriate Technology, with maximum use of locally
available (ie on-farm) renewable resources and minimal input from
outside the community, or off-farm. That includes technology, local
skills, local everything.
It's been said there are three types of organic farming. One is
low-input, low-output, with medium to poor quality product, sometimes
described as Nature knows best farming, just let Nature do it, no
need to interfere.
The second is organics by substitution, which is the same as
industrialised, chemicalised farming (NPK thinking), but
substituting the chemical inputs (fertilisers and pesticides) with
equivalent inputs of natural organic origin; high-input, medium to
high output, medium to poor quality.
Third is organics by design, which deals with whole systems and
upstream management so that the problems don't arise in the first
place, and when they do arise they're easily managed. Aka humus
farming, or, as it was called here once by someone who's doing it,
the cheap and easy way. Low-input, high-output, high quality,
sustainable.
At the core of this third type of system is the work done in the
1920s and 1930s by Rudolph Steiner in Germany and Albert Howard in
India.
This work has never been replaced and it is not outdated, it's the
foundation stone of sustainable farming, on which all subsequent work
has been built.
You can find the core works and much else of the Howard school of
organic farming at Journey to Forever's Small Farms Library,
full-text free online.
http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library.html
Small Farms Library - Journey to Forever
Biodynamics has its own excellent websites.
What the two systems have in common is high-quality humus management,
especially via scientific composting of mixed wastes (including
animal manure), managed biodiversity, mixed farming, integrated whole
systems, and more. They're flexible systems, very adaptible, probably
no two farms are alike.
Arden Anderson is one of the Eco-farming school, along with Dan
Skow, Neil Kinsey, Charles Walters and so on - the Carey Reams school
pasted on top of William Albrecht's work. They often sneer at organic
farmers, but they remind me of a quote by James Lind, the naval
surgeon who found that scurvy among sailors could be prevented by a
ration of lemon juice: Some persons cannot be brought to believe
that a disease so fatal can be prevented by such easy means. They
would have more faith in an elaborate composition dignified with the
title of an anti-scorbutic golden elixir or the like.
Or of the myriad causes of common diseases offered up by medical
experts before the discovery of pathogenic microorganisms.
Anderson et al's Holy Grail is a high brix reading, ie high levels of
sugar in the plant sap. This is one indication among many others of
plant health, that is of soil health, but it's hardly the goal.
The rationale for the focus on high brix is that plants with high
brix levels have good pest resistance, as indeed they usually do. But
claiming that high brix levels automatically confer pest resistance
is putting the cart before the horse. It's the soil and other
conditions which result in the high brix levels that are the basis of
the plant's immunity to pests. Immunity is fabricated in the soil,
and passed on up throughout the biotic pyramid that lives on top of
the soil.
Can you imagine a type of medicine or healthcare devoted to achieving
and maintaining the normal human body temperature of 98.6 deg F (37
deg C) in patients, with the rationale that healthy patients have
normal body temperature so restoring normal body temperature will
cure disease? It might even look like it was working. But how much
faith would you have in such a doctor?
Chasing high brix is not that different.
Anderson et al propose complex and ongoing soil tests, the Brookside
base saturation test, which gives a list of percentages of the
various nutrients required for soil balance, or the La Motte test,
which measures biological availability, or both, plus the use of
electronic scanners to monitor compatibility and energy levels of
fertilisers, followed by micro-adjustments to individual soil
nutrients and to activate particular energy systems within the soil
complex, and so on and on.
(Is it sounding very holistic yet?)
This is not stuff you can do in your kitchen, you need a consultant with a lab.
Anderson says stuff like this: We often find that, just because we
have achieved the percent base saturations
