Title: Did farmers of the past know more than we do?

Summary: An early 18th-century agricultural experimenter Charles Townshend discovered that crops grow better, with fewer weeds and pest problems, if they are rotated in a careful sequence. Townshend’s rotation — like the ones George Washington and Thomas Jefferson used — included clover, wheat, other small grains and turnips, which made good winter food for sheep and cattle. The Romans knew about crop rotation, but by the Middle Ages, farming was based on the practice of letting the land lie fallow, unplanted — resting it, in other words. The purpose of that practice, like crop rotation itself, is to prevent the soil from becoming exhausted when the same crop is sown over and over again. In early American agriculture, only sophisticated farmers like Washington and Jefferson were using crop rotations in their fields. The Department of Agriculture, Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota shows, there’s nothing obsolete about four-crop rotation. It produces the same yields, it sharply reduces the toxicity of freshwater runoff, and it eliminates many of the problems associated with genetically modified crops, including the emergence of glyphosate-resistant weeds. It’s also simply better for the soil. The very structure of the agricultural system, as it stands now, is designed to return the greatest profit possible, not to the farmers but to the producers of the chemicals they use and the seeds they plant. And because those chemicals depend on fossil energy, the entire system is inherently unsustainable. What farmers used to return to the soil in the form of labor and animal manure — not the toxic kind you find in livestock confinement systems — they now must purchase, just the way they buy diesel for their tractors. Read the full article. ${imageDescription} Comment



Article: WeedsNews4015 (permalink)
Categories: :WeedsNews:crop rotation, :WeedsNews:agricultural weed, :WeedsNews:herbicide resistance, :WeedsNews:GMO, :WeedsNews:weed control
Date: 12 November 2012; 10:46:29 AM AEDT

Author Name: Zheljana Peric
Author ID: zper12