Intercropping and layering offers a lot to crops, from nutrients to shade. Fast & slow maturing vegetables can be grown together: radishes, carrots, lettuce & cauliflower are a traditional French combination. When beans & peas are planted with corn, they add nitrogen & mature before the corn blocks the light they need. The Mexican highland plantings of corn have amaranth, squash, beans, epazote & other crops all together. Lettuce likes the shade of a tall crop; cucumbers like the shade that corn gives all season. - Corn is the example here, but you can imagine the beauty of some combinations using trees.

Fallowing too, is a very old type of rotation, with many variations. On the plains of the Northwest & Canada, people wanted to settle, to survive & to feed the hungry world. They were ambitious, vastly so, as the land is vast. The weather allowed one crop & crushed the next. In 1886, Angus Madcay discovered that plowing the land, keeping it dear & leaving it bare all year enabled the growing of a good wheat crop the next year, even if it was exceptionally dry. The land was collecting water. - You can see the fallowed fields today alternating with planted ones in Colorado, the Dakotas & north. Effective dryland farming?

Intensive gardening is hands-on work. (In 1800, 80% of our population farmed, now less than 10% farm.) The incredible agriculture of South America fed 100 million people. Paris at the turn of the century, with almost a million people, got its food from a small area (3,000 acres) of intensive gardens right in & around the city with transportation & fertilization from the horse; it was a symbiosis, a culture-agriculture. Bill Mollison's wonderful word is Permaculture. Thoughtful gardening presupposes a culture with involvement. Our cultural acceptance of poisons immediately destroys our thoughtful gardening & farming despite our ingenious technical and investigatory abilities. But many techniques, like fallowing ask the question: What is good farming? Much of the world is dry & windy. Do we leave the earth bare to harvest water & wheat for a few years while the soil blows away? Do we study dryland crops & water harvesting or import the water of Canadian rivers & Antarctic ice? Fallowing seems a devastation in the northern U.S. and Canada, but a sensitive practice in Africa where protection & improvement of the soil is part of the fallowing practice. - The land, the people and the future of both hold the answers. - On the Canadian plains, settlers' cabins at times were marooned 12 ft. above the fields they were built on in just a few years, so huge was the soil loss from plowing & leaving the fields bare between plantings of annual grains. No system, no techniques of ours even come close to the sustained productivity of a grassland or a forest with its magnificent diversity. The relationship between soil and civilization is clear, even if what to do is not - the Tigres Euphrates breadbasket became salt, destroying the people living there; the Imperial Valley is becoming salt. Endless wind-water erosion, and salting of precious living soil. Over time, the plow is far deadlier than the sword. - This is the beautiful and ironic statement of Wes Jackson. Even our symbols of compassion reveal ignorance & self destruction. The dream is protection & enhancement of the land. How? So many people are coming. Exponential too will be the soil loss (especially with technology's help & food & water viewed as profit objects). But funny things happen. The food industry right now is glamorizing no-till farming on TV. Gracious me, what does the petrochemical corporate farming world stand to gain with this? It is the dream of their adversaries. But who knows who's whose adversary? "Right" is too crude & polarizing is dangerous therapy. The permaculture pioneers - indigenous peoples and brave individuals like Fukuoka, Jackson, Mollison, Russell Smith - would be delighted if corporate executives & other modern slaves came to the feast. We could all be learning with the weather & our children in view.