Saturday, February 7, 2009

What Is A Natural Farm?

A natural farm is:

  • a complex, self-regulating, designed ecosystem
  • where a large variety of plants, animals, insects, birds and microorganisms are nurtured
  • with minimal physical intervention
  • and no chemical inputs
  • to produce abundant food and other resources for human consumption
  • while enriching the local natural resources.
Natural farming requires significantly less labor than traditional low resource agriculture, and none of the chemical fertilizers, pesticides and costly machinery necessary in modern commercial monoculture. Despite the low inputs, the yields of well-managed a natural farm consistently equal or better those of the best modern farms.

Does the high efficiency of natural farming sound like a fantasy? In fact, over the past few decades, natural farming approaches have been independently developed and demonstrated numerous times in many different environments. Fukuoka Farming and Permaculture are the most popular and best systematized.

On this blog, I will explore the small farm and ecosystem crises in the developing world, and how natural farming can provide solutions.

The time to act is now.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great to see the link to Navdanya. Dr Vandana Shiva gave the Soil Association international lecture at our last conference.

The podcast is here http://tinyurl.com/2u5vy6

 

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