this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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For some crops, living soil also provides the necessary CO2 supplementation. I've read reports of people who only slow down the exhaust and reach the same CO2 levels as people who pay to pump it in.
Not being able to till or use synthetic fertilisers makes it a lot harder to scale up production.
This is exactly why I believe we need to start relearning soil health care among many other things. This is why we need to bring food back locally into everyone's yard's and parks. This is why we need this knowledge now to help future generations.
It's hard to imagine another way of living life but we'll never know if we don't collectively try.
I've personally drawn a lot of inspiration from Australian indigenous peoples and their approach to land management which is why I feel so strongly about learning soil health.
I remember watching some farmer testing different growing methods in separate plots (couldn't find it again). Permaculture, notill and similar methods work great for small gardens. But try to 3 sister a hectare of land and you'll curse everyone who ever mentioned it to you. You simply can't spend a lot of time on each set of plants to make sure they're actually helping each other instead of for example creating optimal conditions for pests and diseases. That means you get less produce than if you monocropped it.
I agree, but I don't think these methods are good for that without extensive support from local "experts". My first real grow was in my apartment, and I had a bunch of cooking herbs, peppers, tomatoes, and other vegetables in 0.5l plastic cups with coco coir. Mixing up the feeding solution taught me about plant nutrition and how to recognize specific issues (too much/little of a nutrient for example). Since the nutrient composition of the substrate changes with every feeding, you can quickly recognize what the plant wants and needs.
If it was living soil, I seriously doubt I'd get anywhere close. You not only need to be really specific when sourcing fertilizer, that you use in ways that require highly specific knowledge, but you also need like 200l beds to get anywhere. And you can get into weird situations like your plants showing N deficiency after you fed N mulch like 2 months ago. The cause can be something really tricky like using mulch with too much cellulose/lignin, and so the microorganisms had to use N in order to later release more of it later on.
Check out Koreans. KNF and JADAM have pretty cool methods to feed different levels of soil, organic pest control, and stuff like that. I've even seen KNF used to create pig sties and chicken coops that don't smell.
I think I meant gardening instead of farming in my first comment. I'm drawing comparisons from the majority of my life in the suburbs. I have strong feelings about industrial farming that I'm not interested in going into at the moment.
I do believe it's important for us to learn how to rejuvenate our land as a step towards a sustainable future which is why I'm interested in learning and sharing such things. Food is quite important to our lives.
Def check out knf then. If nothing else, it's going to be a pretty fun experience to try out.