Adelaide Hills, South Australia | This isnt just an issue in your country. People are happy to say that their food should be produced without chemicals etc, but when it comes to cleaning or looking after their own garden they reach for a bottle of whatever makes it easy, rather than use elbow grease. Some years ago the only load of milk around here that had been rejected becasue of chemical residues came from a small farm that was feeding lawn clippings from lawn mowing rounds. Sure they might not have observed withold from grazing or harvest period after chemical application, but who has an organic lawn? A local mainstream TV gardening show here often quotes high rates of fertiliser use on vegetable gardens etc, up to 2000kg/ha it equates to for a fertiliser that we might use at a high input of 130kg/ha! Then we are seen as the ones damaging food sources and the environment!
Sure, many of these critics are well educated in there own area of work etc but many lack the understanding of the farmers they heavily criticise. A recent greenies tv show down here, the type where they go and buy a 30acre "farm" and produce there own food, showed just how removed from food production and animal caring people are. They did well with many of there food producing ventures but failed in some. The hardest for me was seeing their Jersey cow die. I was sitting there knowing the the cow had milk fever after calving, give her some calcium and get her up, but they waited a long time for a vet and it was all to late. Then they bury it, she would have composted well and got the veggies to grow better next year!!
A quote I read recently did get me thinking though, "Organic food, or as our grandparents called it, food" These chemicals are really just a recent thing, aren't they?
Maybe someone can tell me, if you grow your own canola or some other crop to make biofuel out of, to use to plant and harvest your crops, what percentage of the crop does it take? Is it around one third, like it was when my Grandfather grew feed for his horses to work the ground and harvest crops? |
Seems like much of what I grow is bad for you
