Farming for self-sufficiency
(Page 16 of 18)
January/February 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
Rotate your crop by all means: never grow crop after crop of the same species year after year on the same land. Of course with perennials, like fruit bushes or trees, asparagus or globe artichokes, you can't rotate, but consider-all those things need great quantities of muck or compost. You practically renew their soil every year by the addition of manure. But annual crops should never be grown twice on the same land. Rotate your crops and rotate your animals above the crops and neither will suffer from any disease.
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As for the initial fertility of your land, I would advise anyone taking over a holding to have the soil tested by a man from the Ministry of Agriculture, and if he says it lacks lime -lime it, phosphate-slag it, or potash-potash it. If the land is in very poor heart (as it certainly will be if your predecessor has been an agri-businessman) then you may have to use some nitrogen for a year or two, until your animals have made you enough fertility to put the heart back into the soil. If you insist on farming with no animals then you will always have to buy nitrogen, even if you make vegetable compost, and if you make the latter you will have to get vegetable matter from outside because there just won't be enough on it to make enough compost to increase fertility. A man can't really hoist himself up by his own boot-laces, nor can a farm.
Another question we must consider before we leave the subject of the land is drainage. Much land is dry and selfdraining, and if it is we don't have to worry about this aspect at all. But if land grows sedges, rushes, heavy tussocks of grass, or mare's tail, then it will probably want draining, and won't be any good until it is drained. Wet land cannot support aerobic micro-organisms, therefore old vegetation cannot rot down properly into it (it turns into peat instead); few crop plants will thrive in it and it is almost impossible to cultivate. It will grow poor, coarse grass for grazing sometimes, and this may be welcome in a dry season, but whether you grow grass on it or arable crops, it will be far more productive if it is drained. And a factor against grazing wet marshlands is the almost certain danger from liver fluke. Both sheep and cattle will suffer from this, and man will himself too-if he eats, for example, watercress from flukey land. There is no excuse, really, for any husbandman to have ill-drained land on his holding unless he is keeping it for a nature reserve. Some marshes, indeed, ought to be preserved for this, for marshy flora and fauna can be very interesting, and have as much right to exist as we do.
But if you have wet land, and wish to drain it, in Britain you had better send for the drainage officer of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. For not only does that gentleman know a lot about drainage, but also he can hand out certain very useful subsidies: the government will pay half the cost of drainage schemes at the moment, and at times this subsidy has gone up as high as 75 per cent.
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