road trip

" in 1977 the cropland base was 413 million acres. according to the natural resource inventories nearly one-fourth if this acreage, 97 million acres, has eroded in excess of five tons per acre per year on average...globally nearly one-third of the land devoted to farming has been lost to erosion since 1960, and continues to be lost at a rate of some twenty-five million acres per year."
"consulting the genius of the place: an ecological approach to agriculture" by wes jackson. pp.129-30

the top photo is what the field in the second photo looked like this morning...last summer it was all green and corny...now it's stubble and snow...it was bare through most of november and it will be uncoverd and exposed to the wind and rain from sometime in march until late april or early may when the anhydrous amonia goes on and the monoculture of field corn or soy beans goes in and the field turns green again for a few months...but even that's misleading...it's not like there's going to be masses of roots binding the soil together...in fact probably more of the field will be bare than covered even at the height of the season because farmer brown is going to apply healthy doses of herbicides to keep the vegitation beyond the monoculture from taking root...space between the rows will be bare and exposed to all the elements...and because whatever is planted will be an annual the roots won't go down to deep so even the residual abillity of the crop to bind the soil together after harvest will be minimal...another reason why the focus of the garden is perennials...i'll post some photos of root systems i took at harvest sometime to show the difference even in perennial root systems...so how renewable is the topsoil that millenia of perennial grasses produced?

deep river park is just down the road and around the corner from the field i have been using as a model of monoculture all year so i drove over and took a few shots of the river and the mill in winter... the only thing i lust after more than rustication is riparian rustication so i visit the river when i can...i like it.

and just as an odd note i notice that all the pioneer seed signs disappeared when the corn was harvested...not one to be seen...i suppose pioneer hods patent rights to their signs just like they do for their seeds.