How to Grow More Vegetables

food. When we purchase food that has been grown with
less sustainable practices, these are the types of practice
we are encouraging.
We often think of sustainability in terms of using
nonrenewable resources carefully. More important,
however, is learning to use renewable resources well. If
all the Earth’s agriculture became organic tomorrow, it
would be wonderful and challenging. A healthier
resource-conserving, food-raising, and planetary
ecosystem would be possible. However, there would be
new challenges to how to manage the renewable
resources within the system. The cost of purchasing the
cured compost needed to grow food organically would
skyrocket because the demand would exceed current
supply. It is a reason for which we need to learn how to
properly preserve, manage, and develop our renewable
resources. Soil, for example, needs a given level of
humus, or cured compost, in order to thrive. Therefore,
we each need to make sure we grow enough organic
matter to properly preserve the renewable resource of
soil.
For a garden or mini-farm to be sustainable, it must be
able to produce su+cient crops to provide the grower
with what she or he needs over an indenite period of
time. This is possible only if the mini-farm’s soil is kept
fertile in a way that relies neither on nonrenewable
resources, such as petroleum, nor on the nutrients or
health of another soil. Most chemical fertilizers and
pesticides are created in part from petroleum, which also