Using a soil sifter, I sift my dirt and compost for my potting mix. Photo credit Rick Gush/UrbanFarmOnline.com

I cleaned out the main compost bin this week and am really happy with the results. I’m doing some seeding and repotting these days, and the compost has allowed me to prepare what I think of as the potting soil of the gods. Plants and seedlings grow particularly well in this mix, and I even give my friends bags full of the stuff.
My potting soil recipe is simple: equal parts of sifted dirt and sifted compost mixed thoroughly. The only way to make this stuff better is to let it mature a bit. Two weeks after it’s mixed, the resultant soil is fully chemically active and alive with all the microorganisms that make soil fertile.
Garden supply centers often sell bags of planting mix, but those bags usually contain only organic materials like ground up tree bark. The planting mixes are sterile, which can be good for some seeding situations, but otherwise they are a poor substitute for the real thing. The reason they contain only organic materials is mostly because that material is relatively light in weight, whereas dirt is pretty heavy. If the potting mix manufacturers put dirt in their mixes, the shipping costs would jump considerably, and they’d need to charge more for their product.

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Gil Carandang: Full-time farmer, Fulbright scholar, and passionate advocate for empowering farmers to harness the indigenous life of the soil right on their farms. Photo credit: RodaleInstitute.org

Like a cut-rate magician, Philippine farmer and scientist Gil Carandang teaches farmers how to use cheap vodka, generic brown sugar, milk, rice and local soil to harness local microorganisms as invisible workhorses on their farms.
Who wouldn’t be suspicious? Right from the get-go this workshop is promising cure-all concoctions that bring new life to everything they touch. The potions work in ways that are difficult to explain and impossible to actually see. The man conducting the affair is fast-talking and charismatic—he even lives in a far-off land. The whole thing smells like snake oil.
Here’s the catch: Gil Carandang, this crafty man from the Philippines, is not trying to sell us anything. In fact, he wants us to buy as little as possible—that’s the point of this seminar. The lesson that’s officially on the agenda is the same as the event’s formal title: “Cultivating Beneficial Indigenous Microorganisms.” But what’s really being taught here, the true objective, is the empowerment of farmers.
By learning how to cultivate microorganisms, growers become able to meet their needs with what exists on the farm and can stop buying amendments from chemical companies (purveyors who, some might argue, are the real peddlers in modern farming). The technology was born of ingenuity, but it has spread by financial necessity, primarily among farmers in developing countries for whom agricultural chemicals are painfully expensive.
“This technology can reduce your costs by 30 to 50%,” Carandang says. “It sounds amazing, but that’s the percent most farmers spend on pesticides and fertilizer. On my farm, we have only two medicines: Lacto bacillus and ginger-garlic extract. We make both ourselves.”

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NORTHERN CALIFORNIA UCCE farm advisors Doug Munier, left, of Glenn County and Kent Brittan of Yolo County are getting out the word about a new Roundup-resistant weed that has popped up in the state. Photo credit: Western Farm Press

“This is not just a weed, but one totally resistant to Roundup, a herbicide that is intensely used in a wide variety of high value crops in California,” Doug Munier said.
There is a new glyphosate-resistant weed. It is so new it’s not anyone’s fault.
Cannot blame this one on overuse of Roundup or poor weed resistance management.
It’s a volunteer that in California blindsided farmers and researchers.
It is Roundup Ready canola, a crop that turns into a weed if you are not careful.
Canola shatters badly during harvest. University of California Cooperative Extension farm advisors Doug Munier in Glenn County and Kent Brittan in Yolo County knew that when they became part of team testing RR canola as a possible oil crop for biofuel.
Munier, Brittan and others found yields too low to make canola a profitable irrigated California crop at current prices. They gave up on canola, but canola did not give up on California. It is still around in many fields, three or four years after it was grown as a commercial crop.
Canola shattering losses can potentially be huge.
However, there is far more to it than that.
“What makes canola a different critter is that a significant percentage of this shattered seed does not germinate the following year, which is very different from other California field crops,” Munier explained. “When the shattered seed is incorporated into dry soil, it creates what is called secondary (seed) dormancy.” This is a common genetic trait for canola.
A canola crop that yields 1,400 pounds per acre would produce the equivalent of 182 million seeds per acre or 4,177 seeds per square foot, according to one Canadian researcher. Irrigated California canola has yielded 3,000 pounds per acre. A little shatter goes a long way.
From a 5 to 10 pounds per acre crop seeding rate, Munier said, shatter at harvest can produce up to 10 times the initial seeding rate to fall on the soil to germinate for years to come.
In canola growing areas, the shatter issue has created the axiom, “Once a canola grower, always a canola grower,” because the shattered seeds remain viable and dormant in the soil for years.
Compounding the problem is the fact this secondary dormancy seed may germinate year-round in climates like California.

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Beef cattle manure is a more economical option for providing nitrogen to crops than anhydrous ammonia, according to Dr. Seong Park, Texas AgriLife Research economist in Vernon. Photo Credit: Image courtesy of Texas A&M AgriLife Communications/ScienceDaily.com

No significant differences in corn yield were found between organic and chemical sources of nutrients, but a Texas AgriLife Research economist said manure generates higher economic returns than anhydrous ammonia.
Dr. Seong Park, AgriLife Research economist, recently had his research published in the Agronomy Journal. The work was from studies he conducted in the Oklahoma Panhandle while at Oklahoma State University and finalized while in his new position at Vernon.
The long-term experiment involved the use of pig and beef manure on irrigated corn fields, he said. The testing was conducted in part due to a rapid growth of animal population and density in that region, as well as the northern part of the Texas Panhandle.
Park said when swine manure, which is normally stored in open-air lagoon systems, is properly applied and the economics figured, the effluent can be used as manure with minimal environmental and nuisance concerns.
Animal manure, he said, benefits producers by reducing waste management costs and the need for chemical fertilizers because it contains multiple essential crop nutrients, according to previous research. Park said the key between animal manure transitioning from a cost (for disposal) to a benefit (as a fertilizer) is determined by agronomic and economic factors such as chemical fertilizer costs and equipment and labor needed to apply each.
Anhydrous ammonia was the most costly nitrogen source across all three equivalent nitrogen rates of 50, 150 and 450 pounds of nitrogen per acre, with costs of $30.86, $54.88 and $126.95 per acre, respectively.

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Caitlyn Galloway weeding a test plot at the urban farm in San Francisco's Outer Mission District that she leases with her partner, Brooke Budner. Photo credit: Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen/NYT

Brooke Budner and Caitlyn Galloway are a common sight on the streets of the Mission district — covered in dirt and carrying baskets of salad mix from their backyard farm to Bar Tartine, a stylish upscale restaurant.
“We’re fairly scrappy ladies and often pretty dirty,” said Ms. Galloway, 29, a part-time sign painter who founded Little City Gardens with Ms. Budner, 29, last year.
But their new piece of land — three-quarters of an acre on a quiet residential block in the outer Mission — is now mostly quiet and overgrown with weeds and without much sign of the lettuce, kale, arugula, purslane, lemon balm and other greens for which the women are known.
The problem is the legality of selling vegetables grown in San Francisco without a special permit, an expensive and time-consuming requirement for a small, low-profit business.
Even as the hype around urban agriculture and the local-food movement has exploded, laws governing land use are still stuck in another era, one that frowned on farming in the city, especially in residential areas, experts in urban planning say.
“There was an effort to zone agriculture out; it wasn’t seen as the highest and best use of the land,” said Jennifer Wolch, dean of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. “Culturally, there was a shift in the postwar period where it was unacceptable.”
A changing attitude and new ventures like Little City Gardens are now prompting city planners to consider revising zoning laws.

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Anti-GMO activists gather before the GMO grapevines were destroyed. Photo credit: AFP/Info-Wars.org

Rady Ananda reports on the site Info-Wars.org,

Early Sunday morning, French police stood helpless as sixty people, locked inside an open-air field of genetically modified grapevines, uprooted all the plants. In Spain last month, dozens of people destroyed two GMO fields. On the millennial cusp, Indian farmers burned Bt cotton in their Cremate Monsanto campaign. Ignored by multinational corporations and corrupt public policy makers, citizens act to protect the food supply and the planet.
The French vineyard is the same field attacked last year when the plants were only cut. But the security features installed after that incident kept authorities at bay while the group accomplished its mission yesterday.
Speaking for the group, Olivier Florent told Le Figero that they condemned the use of public funds for open-field testing of GMOs “that we do not want.”
Pitching tents in the rain near France’s National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA) site in Colmar the night before, the group waited until 5 AM before converging on the site and locking the gates behind them. They uprooted all 70 plants, then submitted to arrest.
This is the second attack on GMO crops to make international news this year. In July dozens of people destroyed two experimental corn crops in Spain. In an anonymous press release, they wrote, “This kind of direct action is the best way to respond to the fait accompli policy through which the Generalitat, the State and the biotech multinationals have been unilaterally imposing genetically modified organisms.”
In the 1990s, Indian farmers burnt Bt cotton fields in their Cremate Monsanto campaign. Monsanto did not disclose to farmers that the GM seeds were experimental. “Despite the heavy use of chemical fertiliser, traces of which still can be observed in the field, the Bt plants grew miserably, less than half the size of the traditional cotton plants in the adjacent fields.”

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Graphic credit: www.paulhoppe.com and Permaculture.org.au

Major crops genetically modified for just two traits – herbicide tolerance and insect resistance – are ravaged by super weeds and secondary pests in the heartland of GMOs as farmers fight a losing battle with more of the same; a fundamental shift to organic farming practices may be the only salvation.
Two traits account for practically all the genetically modified (GM) crops grown in the world today: herbicide-tolerance (HT) due to glyphosate-insensitive form of the gene coding for the enzyme targeted by the herbicide, 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS), derived from soil bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens, and insect-resistance due to one or more toxin genes derived from the soil bacterium Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis). Commercial planting began around 1997 in the United States, the heartland of GM crops, and increased rapidly over the years. By now, GM crops have taken over 85-91 percent of the area planted with the three major crops, soybean, corn and cotton in the US [1]] (see Table 1), which occupy nearly 171 million acres.
The ecological time-bomb that came with the GM crops has been ticking away, and is about to explode.
HT crops encouraged the use of herbicides, resulting in herbicide-resistant weeds that demand yet more herbicides. But the increasing use of deadly herbicide and herbicide mixtures has failed to stall the advance of the palmer super weed in HT crops. At the same time, secondary pests such as the tarnished plant bug, against which Bt toxin is powerless, became the single most damaging insect for US cotton.
It is the Day of the Triffids – not the genetically modified plants themselves as alluded to in John Wyndham’s novel – but “super weeds that can’t be killed” [2], created by the planting of genetically modified HT crops, as seen on ABC TV news.
The scene is set at harvest time in Arkansas October 2009. Grim-faced farmers and scientists speak from fields infested with giant pigweed plants that can withstand as much glyphosate herbicide as you can afford to douse on them. One farmer spent US$0.5 million in three months trying to clear the monster weeds in vain; they stop combine harvesters and break hand tools. Already, an estimated one million acres of soybean and cotton crops in Arkansas have become infested.
The palmer amaranth or palmer pigweed is the most dreaded weed. It can grow 7-8 feet tall, withstand withering heat and prolonged droughts, produce thousands of seeds and has a root system that drains nutrients away from crops. If left unchecked, it would take over a field in a year.

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