Farm Technology
Food Chain Radio Show #1164
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
Farm Technology
Guest: David Blume, Farmer at Whisky Hill Farm in Freedom, California, Author of Alcohol Can Be A Gas, and Proprietor of Blume Distillation, LLC
Can we combine the best of traditional agriculture with the best of modern agriculture to create the means to carry us on for another forty centuries?
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Farm Technology – Can we combine the best of traditional agriculture with the best of modern agriculture to create the means to carry us on for another forty centuries?
218 years ago, former Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture F.H. King took the best ag technology the modern West had to offer to Asia to do a little comparison shopping…
The essence of what he learned can be gleaned from observations recorded in his book, Farmers of Forty Centuries:
“The man walking down the row with his manure pails swinging from his shoulders, informed us on his return that in his household there were twenty to be fed; that from his garden of half an acre he usually sold products bringing in $400 (now $6,000). The crop was cucumbers in groups of two rows thirty inches a part in the row.”
King then goes on to explain how this Chinese farmer’s technology, which was the result of 4,000 years of survival-of-the-fittest farming, worked. He then he offered this conclusion:
“Four acres of cucumbers handled by American field methods would not yield more than this man’s half acre, and he grows besides two other crops the same season. The difference is not so much in activity of muscle as it is in alertness and efficiency of the grey matter of the brain.”Think about it for just a moment: This farmer of forty centuries, using little more than his mind and muscle, was 800 percent more productive than the best of the West. Now, the thought that comes to my mind, is as follows:
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