Once a week, a group of Somali Bantu refugees drives 45 miles from the City Heights neighborhood of San Diego to this remote agricultural valley in North County.Someone is teaching Somalis organic farming?!? What kind of odd parallel universe is this? What do you think they did in Somalia, drive their John Deere tractors over to the local Dow fertilizer plant and then harvest the crops with robotic combines and threshers? They came from Somalia, for heaven's sake! All they have is organic farming.
Their mission is to learn local growing techniques and start an organic farming business that can help them support their families.
Well, that and lots of weapons.
Despite the irony, it really is a lovely story.
3 comments:
KT, I was thinking the same exact thing seeing that gringo crouching in the dirt with the Somalis looking on when I realized... they all drove taxis over there, right?
hey now
Well, to be fair, modern organic farming is quite a far cry from burning off the vegetation, poking a stick in the ground, and dropping in a seed the same way your great-great-great. . .-great grandparents did.
Sorry if this is a silly and I'm being too serious, but....
They have to find out how to use all the same chemicals that the other farmers do-- but in lower concentrations, more often. Also, finding less effective chemicals that they can add because the half-life is nicer in the gov't books.
Also, how to play the system.
Also, equipment isn't involved in defining organic farming-- the big corperate farms are the ones that generally do organic.
You might be thinking of "sustainable"? That's the one that worries about CO2 and tries to use zero science. (including * totally natural selective breeding*)
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