Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I think it would be best for our health, the earth, the critters, and whatever souls we possess to limit our meat consumption to what we are willing to raise, kill, and butcher ourselves.

By breeding staple crops such as wheat, rice, maize, and soy to be more pest- and weed-resistant, more nutrient-rich and high-yielding, they hope to offer more nutrition per acre of farmed land.
Science can also provide new tools to increase crop production, such as an optical sensor to scan crops in order to customize fertilizer to plants' needs.

Hennie Ecksteen (Organic farmer): 'The food crisis could be expected because of the high input cost [and] we lost - well the last couple of years, I would say - at least 60 percent of our farmers. It's happening everywhere in the world that the farmers become less and less because of economics, and so [there's] less farmers available - to produce more.'

The problem is compounded by the fact that large tracts of commercial farmland [are] being swallowed up for game farming and bio-fuel production.

Hennie: 'And, on top of that, with the chemicals and the agrochemicals you produce an inferior type of vegetable as well. You know, [there's] figures that fifty years ago you could eat a portion of cabbage. To get the same nutritional value now, you'd have to eat a whole cabbage.'

Experts agree there is forty to eighty percent loss of nutrition in commercially grown crops.

Hennie: 'So it's not just a case of unavailability of vegetables, it's also the nutritional value of the vegetables that is deteriorating.'

For these reasons Hennie has transformed into a crusader for organic farming. He was first introduced to the concept 14 years ago while working as an engineer, designing earthworm bins for waste management. Since then - you might say - he's acquired a taste for them.

Hennie : 'You can't see the dorsal parts, but by that time they've cleaned out all the poison [Hennie on screen eating earthworm], so you can have them.'

Bonita: 'Hennie, doesn't it bother you that you're eating a worm that's just been in cow dung?'

Hennie: 'No, it doesn't at all because they've cleaned out all the pathogens.'

Hennie's right. Earthworms play a vital role in cleansing even the most toxic environments.

Hennie: '[The] starting point for them was Chernobyl, because they [find] after Chernobyl that earthworms can clear up even nuclear waste in farmland.'

With around 8 000 scientists studying earthworms in Russia, Hennie was honoured when he was invited to deliver two papers on earthworm farming.

But earthworms are equally at home in Chernobyl as they are in the glamorous Mount Nelson hotel [in Cape Town]. Last year Mary Murphy introduced us to these unusual hotel guests who devour a tonne of organic waste every month and transform it into liquid gold that keeps the hotel gardens blooming.

[Carte Blanche October 2007] Mary Murphy (Conservationist): 'The earthworms know what the plants need and what they like and they present it in such a way that the plants can take it up ten times more efficiently than any other compost you can think of.'

With our global food catastrophe growing, disease-free crops [aren't] just for farmers. More and more people are being forced to trade-in their flower gardens for vegetable patches.

Hennie: 'Even if they just grow their salad crops. A lettuce - because it needs very little water - grows quite fast; six weeks from transplanting to reaping. So it's quite a quick crop and you have fresh, healthy vegetables all the time.'

Bonita: 'Hennie, would we be able to do any of this without the Vermicomposting?'

Hennie: 'I doubt it very much because the Vermicomposting has two sides: the one is, you get rid of organic waste, you get rid of disease, pathogens, anything in the waste; and on the second thing, you need such a little bit and it reconditions the soil - that's the word - you only need, like, an inoculation in your soil of micro-organisms and from there, by keeping mouths and feeding them, you build up your soil again to a level where it's fertile and you can grow good crops.'

Although earthworms are the backbone of organic farming, Hennie also uses mulching and 'no-till' methods. And he never uses any chemicals on his crops.

Hennie: 'Everybody asks me, 'What do you use for aphids?' 'What do you use for lupin caterpillar?' 'What do you use for white-fly?' And I say, 'I don't know,' 'cos I never have them.'

Bonita: 'You've never used any pesticides?'

Hennie: 'I don't use not even organic pesticides.'

Bonita: 'After farming disease-free crops for 11 years, Hennie knew what was working, but didn't know why - until he came across the researcher, French botanist, Francis Chaboussou.'

Hennie: 'Any plant has the ability to be disease-free, the process is called 'trophobiosis', and what it really means is that for a plant when it's imbalanced - in other words it hasn't got the ability to balance its own nutrients - it wants to destroy itself. And the only way a plant can destroy itself is literally by providing a pest or an insect with the necessary nutrients it needs.'

Bonita: 'So the plant will then almost malfunction?'

Hennie: 'It will malfunction, that's right.'

Francis Chaboussou made some startling findings, which contradict popular thinking on farming. His research uncovered that water-soluble chemicals found in the soil or the plant will ultimately attract disease and insects.

Hennie: 'In a normal plant the process is photosynthesis: carbohydrates or sugars are produced, stored in the root zone as energy, the root zones excrete amino acids and that feeds micro-organisms in the soil.'

Trophobiosis is essentially plant suicide. The toxic cocktail applied to the plant in the form of a water-soluble chemical is absorbed through the root system, and excreted on the leaves as amino acids in a protein form, providing an instant meal for insects.

Hennie: 'A lot of these smaller insects, like your aphids and red spider mites, haven't got enzymes to break down food - they wait for the plant to produce the specific protein for their specific needs.'

Bonita: 'How would the insects know that the plant has excreted these amino acids for it?'

Hennie: 'This we don't know, but it literally attracts [insects] over kilometers.'

Bonita: 'It's been described as a revolution in plant pathology and a mortal blow to the agro-chemistry industry. Francis Chaboussou put it bluntly: the more poisons we apply, the more diseases and pests we get.'

Scientific discoveries like these have certainly inspired conventional farmers to cross over to the organic way of thinking. Henry Milner, a Nelspruit granadilla and macadamia nut farmer, attended one of Hennie's courses.

Henry Milner (Organic farmer): I wasn't very impressed with it because I had already started farming and I have my ways - which my father taught me, and my grandfather taught me. Then I said, 'Well, let's just go. Let's go and take a look'.'

So he decided to put the theories to the test.

Henry: 'I got some worms and started making Vermicompost. So, I decided to take one block of trees and do it organically.'

Bonita: 'Was there anything that really startled you, or was surprising to you, about the macadamia nuts?'

Henry: 'What struck me as different was that the nuts began to bloom very quickly. At a very young stage the trees were healthy, and we were harvesting nuts sooner.'

He's reaped the benefits in his granadilla crop too.

Henry: 'With the granadillas I had a much bigger harvest per hectare. The fruit was much better. My first grades were very, very nice and more plentiful than the conventional chemical farmer.'

Henry harvested the same tonnage of granadillas on six hectares as his neighbour did, using conventional toxic methods, on a staggering 20 hectares. That's three times as much. Organic farming clearly allows farmers to yield more crops on smaller tracts of land. The only negative for established farmers is the cost of switching.

Henry: 'If you start off farming organically from the beginning then it's not expensive, because you build up a good soil structure, and it's much cheaper.'

Bonita: 'So Hennie, if this method is so good, then why are so many conventional farmers still using pesticides?'

Hennie: 'You can't blame them because there is so much money spent by these agro-chemical companies promoting their products.'

Bonita: 'So it's actually just a money trap?'

Hennie: 'It is the money trap. Unfortunately it gets worse and worse [that] you will find also that the chemical people not only stay in chemicals, they go into the seed trade because they want to monopolise the whole agri-trade. So the farmer is caught - he has to depend one hundred percent on them. That trap - they can't get out of it.'

Trophobiosis Theory:
A Pest Starves on a Healthy Plant
By John Paull
Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University, Canberra
Pests shun healthy plants. Pesticides weaken plants. Weakened plants open the door to pests and disease. Hence pesticides precipitate pest attack and disease susceptibility, and thus they induce a cycle of further pesticide use.
This is the essence of Trophobiosis Theory, a thesis presented by Francis Chaboussou, an agronomist of the France’s National Institute of Agricultural Research (INRA), in “Healthy Crops: A New Agricultural Revolution”. After two decades, this important book is finally available in English.

Trophobiosis has been characterised by the former Minister for the Environment in Brazil, Jose Lutzenberger, as: “a pest starves on a healthy plant” (1995). It is “a revolution in plant pathology and is a mortal blow to agrochemistry as commonly practised in modern agriculture” (Lutzenberger, 2000, p. 2). He laments that:“Chaboussou is still unknown to most workers in agriculture, even in organic agriculture” (2000, p. 2). Lutzenberger puts the case bluntly: “the more poisons we apply, the more diseases and pests we get” (p. 3). It is certainly the case that agribusiness continues its focus, not on the health of the crop, but rather on the demise of the pest, and so continues to develop novel pesticides, genetically modified organisms that produce pesticides or can withstand heavy pesticide dosages, and most recently the coupling of nanotechnology and pesticides.

Lutzenberger writes that: “I knew that pests shunned healthy plants, as most observant organic farmers knew. But I didn’t know how and why. Chaboussou was a revelation to me … I dare say that Chaboussou’s work is the most important discovery in agricultural chemistry since Liebig” (p. 5).

If Chaboussou is correct then the premises of the so-called green revolution are false. There is the common experience that pesticides used on crops lose their efficacy after so many applications, the pests return and the pesticide dose, or the frequency of application needs to be stepped up, and/or new pesticides need to be introduced into the spraying regime. The green revolution explanation of this is that the pest develops resistance. Chaboussou’s explanation is that the plants are weakened, and progressively more so, as they are repeatedly assaulted by this chemical warfare. Because they are progressively weakened ever more chemical intervention is required - hence the pesticide treadmill experienced in chemical farming. Chaboussou’s alternative approach is to focus on the health of the crop. According to Chaboussou “we need to overcome the idea of ‘a battle’; that is we must not try to annihilate the parasite with toxins that have been shown to have harmful effects on the plant, yielding the opposite effect to the one desired. We need, instead, to stimulate resistance by dissuading the parasite from attacking. This implies a revolution in attitude, followed by a complete change in the nature of research” (p. 209). ……………

+5
that would surely diminish consumption
we are too used to letting others do our "dirty work"

frank

2 cow would mean I'd end up with 2 more animals I can't eat. Like the idea of manure makers for the garden. And the BSF part would be great for the chickens(pets) and the fish(also pets). On a side note. Is being a vegan hard.