Flawed systems

I'm waiting for a decent shower to sprout weeds where we intend to plant pasture. That flush of weeds can be sprayed and then we can no-till plant the new seeds. Without tillage there will be few competing weeds when the grass comes up.

As we drive around the country, I am still shocked at the incredible wealth around us; wealth as evidenced by all the tillage being done in order to plant the spring crops. With all the evidence now available that shows lower cost per bushel by eliminating tillage passes, it is obvious that Iowa farmers are very well off and habitually follow tradition while ignoring science.

I say all this at the risk of offending fellow farmers. But I have found that speaking out today could provide benefits long term. I've had some pain-ful criticism through my life that serves me well. Those easy teachers we liked are not ap-preciated as much as the tough ones, eventually.

I hated school until the twelfth grade. Mr. Hurst was a football coach and my Biology teacher. He is one reason I am staunchly pro-life today. This standard of leaving things as created has bled over into all aspects of my worldview. From farming to economics, things are best left alone.

We learned about life, which has a lot to do with growing crops and livestock. From bedrock to the upper atmosphere everything has an impact on everything else and serves a purpose. There are minerals deep in the soil that plants need. All manner of soil life transport and convert those elements in a complex web of activity.

This web is not unlike our human relationships. Where a need arises it is fulfilled by someone who can profit by helping fulfill that need. Each niche, while sometimes in sur-plus, sometimes in short sup-ply, is naturally balanced as the best providers stay in the business and the poorer ones move on to a better fit.

As these relationships get distorted by interest rate ma-nipulation, subsidies, and man-dates, inefficient relationships are propped up and waste piles up.

In the soil, a prairie built by centuries of natural selection and mutually beneficial relation-ships can be destroyed in one tillage pass. The farmer is no longer a partner with the soil life, but a miner harvesting the produce of its ancestors. The science of agronomy as a study of complex relationships has become a study of ingredients in a concoction to fight nature.

As I listened to the news this morning, most of it was about the coronavirus. But one story stuck out. La Nina is making a comeback. La Nina is a cooler than normal ocean current by the Equator west of Peru. It can cause drought in the Midwest.

The fascist policies that shut down the economy to try to constrain the virus is going to expose the weakness of an illusory period of prosperity. We could have gone on for a while but an economy that is a lie is bound to fail eventually. It will not be pretty.

As La Nina strengthens and our crops run out of water we can blame farming as a mining operation. We are used to hav-ing applied fertilizer in a medi-um of otherwise useless and lifeless soil available to the crops through timely rains. Tillage has rendered our soil dead, however. The critters that transported and created pathways to nutrients throughout the soil profile have been killed. The fertilizer in that top six inches will do no good without the water that is trapped below the tillage zone.

The stress of the virus reac-tion and the stress of drought will break the backs of these flawed systems.

Any responses to The Al-ternative may be sent as a letter to the editor or to Fritz’s email address 4selfgovernment@gmail.com. His blog, www.alternativebyfritz.com, is now being updated regu-larly. It's diverse, like the universities claim to be.