Comments on: Is sustainable agriculture possible?

By: Arlette Seib

Arlette Seib — Tue, 18 May 2010 23:58:08 +0000

I am glad the discussions are taking place. This is a starting point and along with films such as Food Inc. sustainable agriculture will have its day.

However, I believe there is also another avenue for increasing the bounty from the land. If farmers and ranchers on the land were to focus on maintaining land health and diversity (including all the involved ecosystems such as wetlands and woodlands) the land would respond in plenty.

Current cropping and livestock feedlot methods keep us so under productive and inefficient it is no wonder we have arrived at this point and are having conversations about feeding the population.

By: CSchnoll

CSchnoll — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 18:04:59 +0000

Land, what “history of screwing people” do you speak of? Is this accusation made from personal experience? Where can I “follow the wake”? Is it online? Are there actual formal complaints made against them? Or is this just plain slander? Personally, I’ve found nothing but positive feedback in the community in the area of Skokomish Farms.

Your post does not even address the topic of “Is Sustainable Agriculture Possible?” so I have to take your negative post as irrelevant in it’s present context.

To answer Alann Krivor: Yes sir, I do believe your ideas can work globally and in some countries, I’m sure it already has.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:31:35 +0000

every acre of farmable land will have to have precision ag. It’s the only way to minimize finite resources that are needed to produce the crops. Throw GMO crops in the trash can and use wider spacing so new robots can cruise down the row spacing’s and swab weeds with round up. The robots will have to have high teck silver halide batteries and little solar panels with silver in them to make most efficient use of the suns energy to move along the gound.

That is the option on a large scale. the other is for everyone to have a garden, but that’s not possible.

Interesting things have been happening with vertical grow systems where you grow produce on a “blind like sheet” that has pockets. Could be a very effective way to grow food in the desert where you could never grow much of anything before. There would just be lots of greenhouses in the desert with these grow systems. Problem is water. Piped it in. The vertical grow system takes the problem with flat land “leaching” away because the nutrients flow through the pockets and then are just recycled back up on top again. Very interesting system.

Our biggest hinderence in the future of Ag is GMO. We are playing with our survival product and at the same time making the competing forces (weeds)stronger with the tolerance. Plant’s in the ground fight for nutrients like UFC fighters fight in the Octagon.

By: Land

Land — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:32:29 +0000

This is coming from the owners of Skokomish farms who have a history of screwing people on land deals. Follow their wake in Montana and eastern Washington. These people are the worst type of developers who are now trying to cash in on a “new age” of land development.

By: Mark Tinsley

Mark Tinsley — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 13:23:34 +0000

The Skokomish Farm sounds like one of many good attempts at reducing the monoculture farming world to which we’ve come to be dependant. I live a few miles from Polyface Farm and use their pork, beef, chicken,and eggs in my restaurant. I believe we should all have acccess to “pure” food. Unadulterated chicken, pork and beef. Joel Salatin’s symbiotic farming methods are duplicable, and scaleable. Water, land and desire to accomplish such farming methods, is all that is needed. Getting the USDA to open its’ eyes to what can be accomplished relatively inexpensively and safely is a major challenge. Awareness of the needs of the world’s hungry is an issue that needs way more than the lip service most governments are giving the problem.

By: Deborah Byrd

Deborah Byrd — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:03:18 +0000

Lindsay, feeding a world with 9 billion or more people is a daunting prospect. Perhaps these scientists don’t have solutions currently. But I for one feel gladdened that the fact that they are, at least, discussing it!

By: Alann Krivor

Alann Krivor — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:07:16 +0000

This is not an answer only ideas about a possible solution for America, and hopefully globally….
In the U.S. an estimated 1,200,000 rural acres of croplands, pasture, woodlands, and wetlands are disappearing under the pressure of urbanization each year.
Our company has been in rural land development in Idaho, Montana and Washington for over 40 years. During these four decades our ideas have evolved on what we consider, the optimum way to utilize land for, not necessarily its highest, but its best use.
At Skokomish Farms, our current project on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, we are taking the next step of combining preservation of prime agricultural land with the desire of people to live in a rural atmosphere.
We are taking lessons from Randall Arendt’s teachings about conservation design, and combining his ideas with agricultural processes with forward thinking farmers like Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms in Virginia by literally creating ‘a Village around a Farm’.
Other developers like Bundoran Farms in Virgina, Prairie Crossing in Illinois, and Hidden Springs in Idaho are doing or have done somewhat similar developments.
As developers, we are most often the industry that converts agricultural land to urbanization, therefore our industry must be the one who first addresses the problem and proposes the answer.
The solution for more land being permanently preserved for crop production together with urbanization will only work with the joint cooperation of governmental planning departments. developers and environmental organizations all working together.
As we at Skokomish Farms have learned from Randall Arendt, “If developers, environmentalists, and government all work together, all will succeed…!”
Does this solution work globally……….?