Our relationship with the earth/soil....and Corporate greed.

Oh where to start on this one?

From when the first human had the idea of planting seed in the earth to produce food we have been trying to figure out the best way of producing a nutritious, viable crop.

There have been several methods mooted in recent history - to dig or not to dig, double digging or single digging, deep beds, raised beds, intense monocrop farming or planting diverse mixed beds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides versus organic production or permaculture, no soil gardening using straw beds, hydroponics, the Japanese way of Shumei gardening and of course we mustn't leave out genetically modified organisms.

Each method listed above has it's ardent followers who absolutely swear that their method is the best, and no doubt there is merit in all of them depending on your belief system.

I learned veggie gardening from my father. He would use a combination of methods, for example he would have a compost heap and use the rotted down vegetation, mixed with animal manure to add "goodness" to the soil in readiness for planting his veggie crops. He'd also submerge certain plants/herbs, inside a hessian sack, in a barrel of water to use as a liquid tea when watering his seedlings to help them grow strong. So in that context he used organic principles, but if he had a plague of aphids he would reach for the petro-chemical pesticides as he was at that time under the impression that the chemical sprays were not harmful to humans. Oops!

He would single dig for some crops and double dig for others. He would (with my help) weed with precision between rows of some plants leaving bare earth between each plant where as for other crops he would mulch heavily. But what ever method he used, everything was planted in regimental straight lines. Each row would be of one plant type...maybe a couple or three rows of the same thing - say onions - and then the next row would be carrots. So here he was using companion planting as well, because onions mask the smell of carrots to deter the carrot fly.

So in short, he borrowed a little knowledge from many different gardening methods used over decades of gardening and adapted them to suit his garden and get the results that he wanted.

By observing the quality of the soil and the success, or otherwise, of each particular vegetable he used whatever method worked best for his garden and for him.

The trick is to use what works for you, both practically and ethically, and for the long term benefit of the soil.

Did you know that if the world continues to farm using single crops in vast fields, using chemical fertilizers and huge machines, there is less than 60 years of life left in the top soil.

After that nothing will grow and the vast fields will become barren wastelands.

We depend on the soil, on the quality of the soil, of the life within the soil, to provide us with our food. So it's up to us as gardeners or farmers to help the soil to take care of its self. And as human beings we need to protect the earth and the integrity of the soil on which we depend.

We have to do it ourselves as people, not wait for the governments of the world to fix it. Governments mainly think short term.....the length of their stay in power....the amount of time between each election, so they are not going to take action to prevent something that will happen in 50 or 60 years time. They will stick it on the back burner and forget about it until it's too late to do anything.....and then blame the other major party.

There is a lot more information available to budding gardeners these days thanks to the internet which can both add to our knowledge and equally to the confusion around the mysteries of gardening practices..

Most of us are now aware of the hazards of misuse/overuse of chemical pesticides and herbicides - the residue they leave both in the plants that we eat and in the soil in which they grow. Tests have shown that glyphosate, the most common chemical used in weed killers such as the Monsanto produced "Round Up" have been found in the urine, blood and breast milk of humans. They don't know what long term exposure to this chemical will do to humans as no long term testing has been done. BUT the increase in cancer rates could be a pointer.

We also know about the hijacking of the possible scientific advances of genetic engineering by greedy corporates. But for those of you who aren't aware, let me try to enlighten you.

Some people are very pro GMO crops and others (myself included) are very much against it, because of the genetic switching across different species that would never ever occur in nature. I am not talking about taking genes from plant to plant, but from animal to plant, insect to plant, bacterium to plant. No independent long term tests have been done - as far as I am aware - that confirm the safety to humans and to the environment of GMO crops. Tests have been done by the companies who own the GMO rights, but are usually short term tests lasting 28 days, rather than studying long term effects AND they are hardly going to publish any negative results that would undoubtably impact on their profit margins.

Genetically engineered food crops were meant to solve world hunger and be the answer to the prayers of third world countries in particular. By engineering a food crop that was resistant to drought, for example, farmers could be assured of a crop reaching maturity even if the rains failed to arrive. Sounds great doesn't it. And I don't doubt that the early G.E. scientists were sincere in their desire to help mankind. I'm not trying to knock the science behind it.

BUT....along come corporations such as Monsanto, DuPont, Bayer, Dow Chemicals and the like, who fund the research of these scientists and patent the rights of these "advances" in science. So it becomes about money and profit for shareholders, not about proven results and food safety.

They also sometimes insert a terminator gene which renders any seed produced from each crop sterile, so farmers can not save seeds from this years crop to grow next years. Instead they have to come back to the seed company (Monsanto, DuPont etc) and buy new seed each year. Also the GMO crops are reliant on certain chemical sprays....which are produced by Monsanto, Dupont and friends....adding more expense to the farmers and more financial gain for the GMO companies.

Thanks to these underhand methods, rather than creating the promised abundance and solving problems for third world farmers, they are creating scarcity and putting up many barriers along with the terminator gene, such as the patenting of seeds and compulsory licences, suing farmers for accidental cross pollination of crops etc.

Such was the "help" received by Indian farmers that over 30,000 committed suicide due to financial problems created by the greed of the GMO companies.

Scarcity is created in our fields when biodiversity-rich farming systems that produce more nutrition per acre are replaced with monocultures of commodities that are not real food. Scarcity is created when toxic chemicals transform food into poison.

As Socrates said almost two and a half thousand years ago "let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food". Basically stating that if we put the right fuel into our bodies i.e. healthy organically grown veggies and whole foods, our bodies will thrive and be healthy and we'll need less visits to the doctor.

Of course the doctor would usually reach straight for the prescription pad and write a script for more of Monsanto or DuPonts products by way of medication, when many illnesses are created due to diet and nutritional deficiencies. They have created a vicious circle on which the main stream of the population have come to depend.

Can you hear those cash registers ringing???

In order to demonstrate the power that the Corporate World holds over governments I use this example taken from Dr Vandana Shiva's website. By the way Dr Shiva (a physicist) did her PhD on the ‘Hidden Variables and Non-locality in Quantum Theory’, but later studied inter-disciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy,

She is always studying, always learning and always trying to protect the integrity of the soil and the natural environment. More information about this remarkable woman can be found on her website http://vandanashiva.com/

“Here’s what I’ll do as President. I’ll immediately implement Country of Origin Labelling because Americans should know where their food comes from. And we’ll let folks know whether their food has been genetically modified because Americans should know what they’re buying,”

– President Barack Obama, before becoming president of the United States of America

Of course this labelling never happened despite being President for two terms. It never happened because the Corporates have a strangle hold over the government through financial donations - also known as bribes - and through successful lobbying of both houses of government.

The now ex-President himself and his family eat organically grown food and will not touch GMO food products. If GMO food is not good enough for the ex-President of the USA it's not good enough for anyone else, And if "the most powerful man on the planet" can not get something as simple as the labelling of food pushed through congress, what does that say about the power of the businesses behind the government?

There is a documentary film out at the moment called the Circle of Poison which is well worth a look at. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78Im-hG1qy8

It discusses the ethics, or should I say lack of ethics, of the US chemical corporations.

When the US government banned the use of, for example, DDT in the USA due to safety concerns - specifically that it caused cancers and genetic mutations in people exposed to it - the chemical companies continued to produce it and sold it overseas mainly to 3rd world countries.

When the USA President at the time, Jimmy Carter, tried to put a bill through congress to ban all sales of this poison world wide, Congress wouldn't support him because of successful lobbying by the chemical companies (by which I mean buying off congressmen). To sidestep the unethical congressmen, he then made a presidential decree to enforce a world wide ban.

However at the end of his term in office, and within 39 days of Ronald Reagan taking over, the chemical companies had "talked" Reagan into over riding Carters Decree and once more allowing the poisoning of 3rd world farms, farmers and general population.

We don't want to poison our own people but it's ok to kill off thousands of foreigners, particularly if they are citizens of 3rd world nations.

We shouldn't be surprised by this financial greed over-riding what is best for the people and for the planet as it has happened so many times in the past and continues to happen daily - and if it's not greedy Corporates, its insecure governments who take a scientific breakthrough which was meant to serve mankind and corrupt it to become part of the war machine.

Take the splitting of the atom. This great achievement was intended to give us a 'relatively non-polluting' form of cheap energy without relying on coal and oil. (Aside from radiation accidents - for example at 3 mile island in the USA, Sellafield in the UK, Chernobyl in the Ukraine and most recently the Fukushima disaster in Japan - all of which produced major problems with radioactive contamination, you also have the problem of what to do with spent fuel rods which take an eternity to reach a harmless state).

The military of the USA, Britain, Russia, France and then later, China and more recently India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea have converted the intended "good" of nuclear power to the evil of nuclear weapons because of nothing more than insecurity, mistrust, and the desire by some for world domination. How any one nation could possibly imagine that they can benefit, in any way, from laying waste the entire world is frankly beyond me.

While we're on the subject of nuclear weapons can someone please explain to me how it is that the USA and friends can force sanctions on North Korea, via the United Nations, for developing their own nuclear deterrent and order them to cease and desist, yet the USA has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world and continues to upgrade and improve their killing potential and have no intention of disarming themselves. It's a case of do as I say, not as I do.

World Police or playground bully? You decide.

Although things do seem promising at the moment, with renewed talks between North and South Korea and the soon to be meeting between the USA and North Korea. I can't help but think that someones ego will get in the way of true peace talks.

Another controversial example is using chemicals to seed the clouds to make rain. Silver iodide, potassium iodide and dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) are the common chemicals used to make clouds produce rain. Liquid propane, which expands into a gas, has also been used. This can produce ice crystals at higher temperatures than silver iodide.

Again, this could have been a scientific breakthrough to solve problems of drought, but once more the government/military have got hold of it to control the weather to the detriment of their enemies as per recently leaked papers showing military intent to harness this method as a weapon since the 1970's..

Hence all the fuss over chem-trails.....spraying of the air with chemical and biological agents which are, according to conspiracy theorists, also used for solar radiation management, psychological manipulation, human population control, or biological or chemical warfare and that the trails are causing respiratory illnesses, allergies, cancers and other health problems.

I seem to have drifted off the subject of gardening.....but what I am trying to point out is that where there are claimed advances in gardening that are not natural, chances are that someone is making a profit out of it and its not the gardeners or the farmers - so I choose a blend of organic gardening, digging and composting and Permaculture methods for my gardens.

Chemical free soil, chemical free plants producing chemical free food - naturally better in my opinion.

I find that by mixing the crops in various beds....so I'll have carrots, onions, lettuce and tomatoes in the same bed for example, sometimes in lines and sometimes planted randomly...and interspersed with marigolds .... it confuses the insect pests so most of the time they leave my plants alone and go elsewhere. And when they do decide to attack my plants I mix up a plant based organic spray to combat them.

No nasty chemicals allowed on my property.

I'll leave you with this thought.

"We are what we eat".

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