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Organic Farming is not earth-shattering new science. A couple of generations ago, farmers everywhere called it "common sense." Certainly in the age of communication we have more opportunities to share experiences and learn useful techniques, but there is nothing new in understanding the role of compost and building up healthy, living soil.

These organic practices are still common in places where land ownership has not been centralized by agribusiness, where subsistence farmers eke out a living on small marginal plots. Such people cannot afford energy wasting and chemical intensive modern farm techniques. They make do, as their great-grandparents did, by feeding the soil that feeds them.

Inevitably, all farming will be done organically in the not-so-distant future. There really aren't many other choices, if we want to survive. Nature makes the rules we must live by, and the cycle of life must be supported if we are to remain a part of it.

The question is not whether organic farming can feed the world. Except for the last several anomalous decades, it always has, since the beginning of gardening. The question is "How long will it take us to recover from the damages of modern, industrial agriculture?"

There are several features of industrial agribusiness which will lead to its demise. Perhaps the most pervasive of these is shortsightedness. Modern corporations tend to focus on this quarter's profits. But experienced farmers can tell you a lifetime is too short to learn the best techniques to encourage an ecosystem to support more people, much less to implement them.

Imagine by contrast the patience of the traditional practitioners of sylvan culture in America's Pacific Northwest, who would often wait 50 years or more to stage a controlled burn. To maintain the maximum biodiversity on which they depended required understanding each phase of the natural cycle of trees, which takes centuries to run its full course.

The undoing of modern agriculture will be its dependence upon cheap oil, a short-lived exploitation of a natural resource that took tens of thousands of years for the ecosphere to produce. At this point in time, humans have extracted about half of all the petroleum that ever existed on Earth. The second half will be increasingly expensive to get at and there will be great competition among the many human processes that depend upon it. Farming is not likely to win out.

That is a good thing, because petroleum has not been particularly useful in raising healthful

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