Post

Guiness Freaks wrote:

Okay I know this is old but beer leader has REALLY strong feelings about this. What is happening is a damn travesty and due to terrible agro farming practices. High use of pesticides, high use of fertilizer (especially nitrogen), and growing the same crops in the same spot year after year is stripping the soil from the earth. There are many ways to combat this, but unfortunately they take time and the large agro farms have no incentive to farm any other way. Beer leader has been growing soil around his estate using various mulching practices and cover crops to combat this. As well as using swales for water irrigation. Beer leader suggests looking into permaculture techniques.

Around where I live, a farmer who plants anything but corn or soy beans is an oddity. And I agree on the over-fertilization/herbicide/pesticide thing. I'm not clear on the details, but I've heard that a lot of farmers are kind of in a bind: to get a loan to plant a crop, they have to plant corn or beans. It's not all bad news though: conservation tillage is widely practiced, and manure as fertilizer is readily available from confinement operations. And there's the CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) that pays farmers to take especially sensitive areas out of production more or less permanently. And I have an idea that herbicides at least will be replaced by robotic weed pullers at some point.