Cultivating as in the past: progress or regression?
When you can no longer look forward, you start looking backwards.
It is an undeniable axiom. An incorrigible behaviour. An obvious reality. When it happens one almost always falls into the impossible and generally complicates the situation.
For some time now, there has been talk of farming as it used to be. According to what has just been said, it means there is no more future.
From this general about-face that we find at all levels, we should first understand what that once meant, whether in prehistoric times, Roman times, the Middle Ages or the 20th century. In any case, it must be borne in mind that a backward evolution as well as a forward involution is always impracticable because the time factor entails changes in the situation and its conditions. In other words, it is as unthinkable to produce on a large scale by ploughing the land with a pair of oxen at the yoke as it is to cultivate on the moon with a rocket. Progress and regress are two concepts that are too often confused. In this sense, it is worth mentioning Elon Musk with his investments on Mars and, closely linked to agriculture, to dust off here the letter from researcher Mendini to Prof. Mario Fregoni (written and published in VQ in 2008) who, in an editorial entitled Organic Viticulture Wanted, called for a return of agriculture to the time of the Benedictines or Cistercians to conserve the increasingly poor soil in humus.
Dear Dr Mario Fregoni,
one must realise that the era in which we live has nothing to do with that of the Benedictines or the Cistercians. Conditions have totally changed and that knowledge is ill-suited to our reality. Machines then were biological, today they consume oil. Wars were white-warfare, today they are chemical; nuclear fission ships and submarines are used, astrophysical machines with planetary destruction potential; there are huge deposits of active waste and... we have ruined the planet's protective barrier. So Steiner's biodynamics made sense in the early 1900s and cow dung certainly does not solve the problem of dioxin, ddt, oil and all the poisonous substances distributed in agriculture. Standing with one foot in the 1600s or 1300s and the other in 2000, sooner or later you are bound to split in two. Rather than seeking organic viticulture, it is necessary to adapt to the technological era. What is needed is a technological product born of advanced science, precisely to repair technological mistakes.
As for organic, the first plant on the planet did not have dung, animals came later. What about those plants that live on the rock... The plant is used to transform the mineral into a vegetable and this function can be read in the atomic structure of the mineral, which highlights the plant's growth code and its form. There is a programme, implemented with magnetic fluxes, of which the mineral has its own transmissions. The first plant on the planet was generated by an agglomeration of waves at a point where conditions were suitable for the breaking down and reassembling of molecular structures (primordial soup). The plant is not just sucking roots, it is a transforming energy factor with complex exchange factors that cannot be invented or improvised. Of course the plant 'sucks up' everything, including organic matter, but it must first remineralise it and then transform it through atomic micro-combustion. This would happen thanks to the energy derived from photosynthesis, but we have 20 per cent less light; moreover, the uptake of bacteria and viruses as well as unsuitable nutrients, based on blood or fresh manure, cause nematodes and other diseases. Hence the need to intervene with a suitable product, capable of strengthening the plant programme. It is the inorganic that creates the virgin micro-organisms necessary for the humification process, and it is nonsense to use the horse to not compact the soil if then in winemaking the winemaker, in a super-technological cellar, uses chemistry to make up for the lack of conditions in grape production.
Researcher Alessandro Mendini
Musk's and Fregoni's positions are completely disassociated from real human conditions and totally unbalanced either in the past or in the future, disregarding the concrete limitations of the present. An assumed life on Mars without the ability to produce food is not so different from the production crisis that is leading us to starvation on Earth.
