[Terrapreta] USDA organic certification standards

[rukurt at westnet.com.au]

Jeff Davis wrote:
>>     
>
> Dear Kurt,
>
> It always seemed that the farmer had too many middle men cutting into
> his/her profits:
>
> How does the saying go? Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a
> farmer how to make Terra Preta and he grows produce for a live time!
>
>
>
> Just a thought,
>   
Don't know about that. Here, in Aussie, we had the fertilizer 
manufacturer about 100km away and we had the Farmers Co-op selling the 
fertilizer. If you wanted semitrailer loads, they arranged it.
Middle men??? Heck we owned the Co-op and paid the feller behind the 
counter.

The point is, if the farmer needs 100 tons of charcoal, how is he going 
to make it? Unless he has a huge farm and a heap of dough to set up the 
factory he will need to make that much, which will then lay idle when he 
doesn;t need any charcoal. There's a reason for middlemen.

When I was buying crocodile skins off the natives in New Guinea, I 
bought them packed them and put them on the ship. The money for each 
consignment came from a mob in Melbourne, who financed the 25,000 odd 
bucks the consignment was worth (every three month). That was more cash 
than I had. The skins went to a big wholesaler in Singapore who had 
warehouses with millions of bucks worth of skins stored in them. The 
Tanneries from Belgium went to him and bought  hundreds of thousands of 
bucks worth of skins to make into luggage and the like. We all made our 
cut. Without us there would have been no trade in them.

Now, in the food industry, the farmer is a middleman between the soil 
and the wholesalers. It's the gardner who grows and eats his own.

Kurt
who was only a small farmer