How to Grow More Vegetables : And Fruits, Nuts ... - Shroomery

“A [farmer] took up land [in
Saskatchewan], dug a cellar
and built a frame house on
top of it; ploughed up the
prairie and grew wheat and
oats. After twenty years he
decided the country was no
good for farming, for eight
feet of his soil had gone and
he had to climb up into his
house.”
—Richard St. Barbe Baker,
My Life, My Trees
30 SUSTAINABILITY
Sustainability Worldwide
Nature grows plants close together rather than in rows.
That’s why so many weeds grow between the rows in commercial
agriculture. The GROW BIOINTENSIVE method of growing
food takes advantage of Nature’s propensity to fill any void with
living plants through maximizing yields by growing bountiful
crops on a minimal amount of area.
The Chinese miniaturized agriculture in a similar way over
4,000 years ago! They grew food by closely spacing plants and
maintaining soil fertility (using nutrient- and carbon-containing
compost) for thousands of years without depleting their
resources. As recently as 1890 this process enabled the Chinese
to grow all the food for one person on about 5,800 to 7,200
square feet, including animal products used at the time. Other
people in different areas of the world—Greece, Bolivia, Peru,
Nepal, Guatemala, Mexico, and Japan—independently developed
miniaturized forms of agriculture 2,000 years ago. How
does this apply to our modern world? Recently, this kind of
miniaturized crop-raising has appeared in Russia, Ireland, and
other parts of Europe.
Ecology Action has built on the work of the Chinese,
Mayans, and others by using traditional agricultural techniques
that are thousands of years old, discovering the universal scientific
principles that underlie them. We have spent years making
mistakes, learning and relearning, as we attempted to streamline
these techniques and make them available to other people
(including developing written how-to materials that are easy to
understand). The worldwide results of our research and information
outreach have been amazing and rewarding.
The people in Biosphere II, a closed-system living project
in Arizona during the 1990s, used techniques based on those
rediscovered by Ecology Action: They raised 80% of their food
for two years within a closed system. Their experience demonstrates
that a complete year’s diet for one person could be
raised on the equivalent of just 3,403 square feet! In contrast, it
currently takes commercial agriculture 15,000 to 30,000 square
feet to do the same. Moreover, commercial agriculture has to
bring in large inputs from other areas and soils just to make
this possible, depleting other soils in the process. To raise all
the food for one person in a developing nation takes about
16,000 square feet, given the diets eaten and the food-raising
practices used.
The Environmental Research Laboratory at the University of
Arizona performed the first tests for Biosphere II, documenting
the status of the soil and crop yields over time. In the Human
Diet Experiment, all crop tests involved sustainable Biointensive
crop rotations including grains, legumes, and green manures,
and all crop residues were returned to the soil after harvest and
composting. Dr. Ed Glenn, who conducted the tests, stated: