Layered gardens as ecosystems that have persistent community and environmental benefits: permaculture.
Description: We will be discussing how permaculture practices with an emphasis on land stewardship and building communities.
Who should attend: Anyone interested in community gardens, permaculture, and environmental philosophy.
“Benjamin Vieth has a BA in Continue reading
Research, including studies presented at the conference in Istanbul, is showing that organic agriculture can deliver reliably high yields ”and that organic fields thrive in the face of disaster and duress, where chemical-reliant crops falter. Organic fields, for example, fare significantly better than chemically managed ones in the face of extreme weather, such as droughts or floods.
Anna Lappe, for takepart, 4 November 2014, Yes, Organic Farming Can Feed the World, Continue reading
With GM crops come herbicides, which breed resistant weeds.
This has happened in about a decade for the worse mutants.
We can reverse the problem by reversing the spraying,
using plowing, cultivation, and crop rotation instead.
Mark Jeschke wrote for Pioneer Dupont, Crop Insights: Weed Management in the Era of Glyphosate Resistance, Continue reading
Veteran organic instructor Jerald Larson will talk about how to grow organic fruits at
South Georgia Growing Local 2014:
Jerry’s presentation will focus on blackberries, blueberries, figs and muscadine grapes. He will explain and demonstrate practical, low cost methods for trellising and pruning; soil and bed preparation; weed suppression, irrigation, and harvesting.
His conference bio: Continue reading
Christine Hagen will speak about her family’s CSA at
South Georgia Growing Local 2014:
We started out going to a weekly organic farmer’s market over in Thomasville but transitioned to a CSA after 2 years. We will explain whyand show you how our gardens have taken shape over these past few years. We are still a small operation after 4 years choosing to grow our business slowly. However, we have learned a great deal during these growing years. Plus we have gleaned much from other folks which we will be implementing over the next few years. We are grooming the farm as a business venture for our son, who does most of the labor.
Hagen Homestead’s website. Christine Hagen’s conference bio: Continue reading
Connie Hayes of Healthy Hollow Farms will speak at South Georgia Growing Local 2014,
How do we prove to customers that our products are free of genetically modified ingredients? while many homesteaders choose to be not certified or certified naturally grown, consumers are becoming more concerned with GMOs. We will offer practical tips for insuring consumers, as well as how to on certifications & non-GMO testing.
Here’s her conference bio:
Members of Coastal Organic Growers (COG), Connie & Jimmy Hayes own & operate Healthy Hollow Farms near Stilson, GA, which has been certified organic since 2007. They grow organic peanuts and raise Belted Galloway cattle. They are in the process of setting up an
on-farm processing facility for their peanuts. Connie serves on the board of Georgia Organics and has trained under Jeffery Smith with The Institute for Responsible Technology to speak on GMOs.
Come to
SOGALO2014 and hear Connie about getting certified organic!
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Want better yields and the same or more profit? Stop buying pesticides, rotate more crops over longer periods, and mix in animals. Yet another study confirms this. Oh, and a hundred times less disease-causing pesticides in streams, and presumably also less pesticides in the food going to market.
Mark Bittman wrote for NYTimes today, A Simple Fix for Farming,
The study was done on land owned by Iowa State University called the Marsden Farm. On 22 acres of it, beginning in 2003, researchers set up three plots: one replicated the typical Midwestern cycle of planting corn one year and then soybeans the next, along with its routine mix of chemicals. On another, they planted a three-year cycle that included oats; the third plot added a four-year cycle and alfalfa. The longer rotations also integrated the raising of livestock, whose manure was used as fertilizer.
The paper’s Figure 3 (above) illustrates that labor increased with crop rotation length, but so did yield, and profit remained the same or better. How can this be? Continue reading
The detailed schedule for the
South Georgia Growing Local Conference
is posted now on the
on the facebook event.
It’s also below.
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After an initial decline in yields during the first few years of transition, the organic system soon rebounded to match or surpass the conventional system. Over time, FST became a comparison between the long term potential of the two systems.Year after year, Rodale found:
Organic yields match conventional yields.
As Tom Philpott reported for Mother Jones 17 November 2011, Yet Again, Organic Ag Proves Just as Productive as Chemical Ag,
Norman Borlaug, instigator of the “green revolution” of no-till and pesticides, when asked in 2000 whether organic agriculture could feed the world, said: Continue readingAnd now comes evidence from the very heart of Big Ag: rural Iowa, where Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture runs the Long-Term Agroecological Research Experiment (LTAR), which began in 1998, which has just released its latest results.
At the LTAR fields in Adair County, the (LTAR) runs four fields: one managed with the Midwest-standard two-year corn-soy rotation featuring the full range of agrochemicals; and the other ones organically managed with three different crop-rotation systems. The chart below records the yield averages of all the systems, comparing them to the average yields achieved by actual conventional growers in Adair County:
Small farmers, independent farmers, competing against massive
corporate factory farms, decided to support Occupy Wall Street
with food:
This is the food Mayor Bloomberg had NYPD evict.
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