From vic@daena.eepo.com.auMon Jan 13 20:47:34 1997 Date: Tue, 07 Jan 1997 11:30:33 WST From: Victor Guest Reply to: PERMA@eepo.com.au To: Permaculture WA Subject: (Fwd) Agricultural Testament (fwd) From: "Jeff Goebel" Nice post. ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date: Tue, 24 Dec 1996 21:21:31 -0600 To: sanet-mg@amani.ces.ncsu.edu From: William Vorley Subject: Agricultural Testament Dear Sanneters, Some of you will be much more familiar with the work of Sir Albert Howard than me. But I was going through his 1940 book 'An Agricultural Testament'and found a perspective to the question posed by Willie Lockeretz. It seems to point out the fork in the road leading to either linear or to systemic/holistic approaches to pest control, long before Bt corn, Roundup ready soybeans, systems-speak and computer modelling,and even before the widespread use of DDT in agriculture. 'An Agricultural Testament' is based on forty years of field experience and observations in England, the West Indies and especially India. Howard wondered why peasant crops were so free of pests, and between 1905 and 1910 he set out to acquire the traditional knowledge, with the local farmers of Pusa, India and the `insects and fungi' as his instructors. After 30 more years of refining his ideas, he concluded: "Insects and diseases are not the real cause of plant diseases but only attack unsuitable varieties or crops imperfectly grown. Their true role is that of censors for pointing out the crops that are improperly nourished and so keeping our agriculture up to the mark. In other words, the pests must be looked upon as nature's professors of agriculture: as an integral portion of any rational system of farming." "The policy of protecting crops from pests by means of sprays, powders, and so forth is unscientific and unsound as, even when successful, such procedure merely preserves the unfit and obscures the real problem-how to grow healthy crops." Agricultural research has been an expensive failure. "The cause of this failure is not far to seek. The investigations have been undertaken by specialists. The problems of disease have not been studied as a whole, but have been divorced from practice, split up, departmentalised and confined to the experts most conversant with the particular fragment of science which deals with some organism associated with the disease. This specialist approach is bound to fail. This is obvious when we consider: (1) the real problem-how to grow healthy crops and how to raise healthy animals, and (2)the nature of the disease, which includes the soil in its relation to the plant and the animal." Season's greetings, William T. Vorley Visiting Scientist Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, 209 Curtiss Hall, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011-1050 USA Tel. (515) 2947853 or 2929302 Fax (515)2949696 wtvorley@iastate.edu