Up to 96% of the food you buy in stores is commercially raised so the farmer can make a profit, the store can make a profit and all the links between make a profit - or they would not be in operation for long. This is a fact of our commercially (for-profit) society. And, there is no other way to feed the 7 billion, soon to be 9 billion people on the planet.

To grow this much food, to profit from it, corners must be cut and the only way to do this is take as much from the earth as she can offer, give the plants the minimum they need to produce and process it as fast as possible. The farmers who did not subscribe to this method of farming all but perished in the 70s - 90s and only now are they growing again in numbers with many more to follow as oil becomes a declining way of life.

Soil managed under these conditions has no "life" left it in. It erodes quickly as it can not hold moisture well. It has no worms, no insects, no microbes. Its color is that of sand or clay when bare. And when dry, it is either rock hard or sifts through hands like dust. If you dig into the soil you will often find a hardpan (plowpan) about 1 to 2 feet deep that water does not penetrate.

Healthy soil has a fresh scent of earth. It is alive with worms, bugs and holds together when picked up. The depth of this health should be 2 - 3 feet deep for a healthy root system.

To take over a farm these days often means taking on improving the soil that years of chemical use degraded. This is a 2-part problem as chemical residuals remain in the soils for years and the life of the soil needs to be revived and the second can not happen without assistance.

Green Manures are cover crops that help absorb chemical residuals. They are then turned back into the soil to encourage micro-organism re-population. The cash crop planted then has some nutrients and micro-organisms to convert the nutrients for its use. The estimated time to completely replenish the soil using this method alone, to its pre-industrial levels of fertility is about 30 years.

Animal manures are faster at soil replenishing with runament animals having the highest microbial content. Chicken manure is high in calcuim and adds strength to plants as well as a defense against blight viruses. Deep ripping plows are occationally used to cut through a century of hardpan and deposit the manure deep to where the plants can access it.

Other soil improvers are - fish emmulsion, kelp, seaweed and rock dust. To help plants feed on the nutrients in the soil, adding microbes like bokashi, yeasts, mycylium and worms will also aid in returning the soil to good health.

We make compost from manures, the barn animal bedding, kitchen food scraps and use it as our potting soil. To make the richest compost from manure, we add lime, potash (wood ashes), kelp (which is actually given directly to the animals first), bokashi (made from tea mushrooms), mycylium (see below) and rock dust. We add diatomaceous earth over the stales to keep flys, fleas, ticks and other insects down on the farm. These things are all spread around the barn stales in the bedding while the animals are using it to keep down parasites, disease and odor.

My recipe for adding mycylium is -in a blender mix - 1/2 cup peroxide, 1/4 sugar, some fresh mushrooms and fill the blender 1/2 full with water and blend till its all liquid. Immediately mix this with 20 gallons water and spray on dry soil before working it. This also gets sprayed on animal barn bedding to break it down and whatever is left on the compost pile.

The other microbial mix I make is kombucha tea mushroom mix which is a symbiotic mix of yeasts, mushrooms and pro-biotic bacteria. Never use the Mother Mushroom but subsequent batches of mushrooms can be used.

Note that the bedding is taken out in spring and piled to finish composting. It needs a "tipping" occationally but in a few months its "cooked" and ready for whatever plants are being planted.

We have 3 types of compost - human, runamint and chickens. The chicken manure is higher in calcium and copper and the runamint is higher in microbial population. Human manure is treated the same way as animal except it is cooked longer. More on that later. All manures have proven to be some of the richest, nutrient rich soil and here's how it gets used:

Starter plants- Fill your seedling pots and pack down. Poke a hole in the center for the depth of the seed and plant. Keep following growing conditions for the plants you are starting. Plant the seedling when appropriate by digging a hole 3 times the size of the starter pot and toss in cooked compost. Mix in the composted manure as deep as possible. Put in the seedling, give a drink of willow mix water (willow branches cut & soaked in water) and cover with the soil you took out. Add supports to larger plants.

For potatoes - dig a trench about 1 ft diameter and mix in compost and a scoop of potash to level the area. Place your potato seed in and cover with the dirt you removed so you have amound. Keep mounding over the season until the plant dies back and dig up more potatoes than you can imagine.

You can not use any manure (even cooked) the first year on leafy greens. I do not use human manure except on field crops for hay and clover, corn and beans. The thing about humanure isn't the worry about bacterial growth if you have added enough mycylium and kombucha, its that it may contain medications.

In one of the many gardening books I read, one of the oddest recommendations was to suck on the seeds before planting. This seemed a little odd but the author theorized that the seed would then sense any deficit areas of health and compensate for that in its fruit. Well, it turns out - this might actually be true. Plants have more genes than we humans do and though you might think it would be the other way around - but they have been on the planet millions of more years and survived millions of more assaults by bacterias, viruses, insects and growing conditions so they have all these genes to help them adapt. They can call on 500% more "variables" than us from their gene pool. I refrain from putting anything in my soil with medications but I encourage "sick" people to learn to humanure because the resulting plants can adapt to their illness and heal the person (except with leafy greens).

This means that generations of family who may suffer from the same genetic conditions can evolve the plant life they produce as well as maladies inheirant to them by generational farming.