Organic Living In The Southeast

Why Organic Gardening by Teresa @ Nature's DNA

The definition of organic depends on your focus, but some define it as of, relating to, or derived from living organisms.

The chemist's version uses the word to designate carbon compounds, and that also plays into our garden.

But what do most people think of when you say organic living in the southeast?

Another definition is simple, healthful, close to nature.

Sure, that part fits too.

Yet another definition is constituting an integral part of a whole. Hmmm.

So what have we got?

Organic gardening is a simple healthful way to convert living organisms into carbon compounds in a way that considers the whole of nature and its integral place in that scheme.

There, all the definitions in one sentence. I'll consider that my mission statement for organic gardening.

When man started farming and raising plants, organic was all there was. You put humus (partial/fully decomposed plant or animal material) back into the soil to maintain fertility and you farmed until the soil gave out.

But farming was at the subsistence level, so not a big deal; they moved on when the soil gave out.

Mass Production Comes to the Farm Then as farming became organized, we didn't want to move around as much.

People learned to rotate crops and use green manures and leave fallow areas to help keep the soil healthy.

Fast forward to modern times: With the Industrial Revolution came a mass move to the cities and very few people producing most of the food.

The tractor answered the biggest part of the labor issue and deep plowing helped with fertility, but fertilization was still very labor intensive as it required huge quantities of manure to get the yields to feed burgeoning cities.

Better Living through Chemical Fertilizers? Then in 1918 a German scientist named Fritz Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for synthesizing ammonia.

Unfortunately Herr Doktor Haber's work was more focused on munitions, but the process eventually led to producing nitrogen based fertilizers (This follows the natural path of ammonia from decomposition being turned into nitrite, and then to nitrate by little organisms known as nitrobacters).

Suddenly hyper-fertility was possible; the land could be made to produce far beyond what it had been capable of. Many thought that better and better chemicals would surely help feed the planet.

Exhausting the Soil As the Okies of the Dust Bowl found out, this was no magic bullet. Higher yields and deeper plowing burned out the soil faster than ever.

More fertilizer was required just to maintain yields at a current rate, and then when the weather turned bad, the depleted, lifeless soil simply began to vanish in the air as dust storms blasted through.

When it did rain the dust would hold the moisture to the surface so that yet more soil ran into streams and rivers. Even in the Midwest, the topsoil of a thousand generations of prairie plants was disappearing at an alarming rate.

Further reading

Living An Organic Lifestyle

More Organic Food Articles 

Organic living in the southeast news

ORGANIC (Ltd) - News
Organic newsline from organic.com.au

ORGANIC (Ltd) - News
News relating to the organic and sustainable agriculture industries. http://organic.com.au/news
Woolworths Acquires Macro Wholefoods
Woolworths will continue to roll out its Thomas Dux Grocer stores in New South Wales and Victoria with its agreement to acquire up to nine store leases from Macro Wholefoods.
Banned Pesticide Blamed For Fish Mutations
A pesticide banned in more than 50 countries but still used widely in Australia has been implicated in the chronic deformities and deaths of thousands of fish in the Noosa River in recent months.
EU Assembly Votes to Ban Toxic Pesticides
European Parliament members voted to ban some of the most toxic and dangerous pesticides to human health.
Obama's Choice of Vilsack: AgriBusiness as Usual at USDA ?
Subdued approval greeted President-elect Obama's choice of Tom Vilsack for Secretary of Agriculture last week.

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