“Garden of Eden” image from artmajeur.com)
[An Ilocano, I have always been an original aboriginal; thus, I concocted Communication for Development(ComDev) in 1980, a counterpoint to Development Communication (DevCom) of UP Los Baños.]
Yes, I begin to preach today, for us descendants of Adam & Eve to regenerate on Earth the glories of the Garden of Eden by waking up life in the soil in our hands!
How? We hold & mold the soil to give literally more life to the millions of lives inside and outside of it: bacteria, fungi, bugs, worms, snails etcetera. The grand result? Soil giving health to crops, animals and human bodies!
I am not new to this. I was the first Filipino to write about what American gentleman farmer Edward H Faulkner had discovered: Trash mulching.
Nicanor “Nicky” Perlas, who won the Right Livelihood Awardfor his biodynamic agriculture practice, has copies of my Horticulture syllabuses with my Faulknerian application – he started with the organic agriculture I taught at Xavier University College of Agriculturein Cagayan De Oro City.
Once again I innovate: We need A New Agriculture.
Indeed, a very simple thing to do, and that is why it seems foolish: Run the rotavator over the field just deep enough to cut and mix together in one rotary motion the weeds plus crop refuse plus soil.
WEALth.
Weeds-Enriched Automatic Layer of Trash to Trigger Terrestrial Health.
You rotavate the soil shallowly, down to earth about 2-3 inches only, creating that layer of riches!
That WEALth will provide all the nutrients that your crop/crops need. It will at the same time enrich the soil so that it returns to itself its lost fertility. It will grow healthy crops and you will harvest healthy foods because you do not use chemicals. Your organic farmer will earn more because organic foods are more desired – not to mention that your farmer uses very little inputs to grow them. And the Earth will grow healthy instead of weary because farmers have stopped chemical agriculture and thereby are no longer producing greenhouse gases!
New? In fact, I wrote my definitive essay on the rotavator as the modern savior of the farmer whoever he is wherever almost exactly 4 years ago, 26 Mar 2018: “Organic Farming & The Lesson Of The Rotavator: How To Feed The World” (Organic Country, Blogspot.com).
So, rotavating like I describe above, to produce WEALth, is in essence Organic Farming as defined by the US Department of Agriculture as quoted by sare.org:
A production system that is managed to respond to site-specific conditions by integrating cultural, biological, and mechanical practices that foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity.
Forget the constant world today – “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”! – Ralph Waldo Emerson.@517
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