cricket tragic, try reading it one word at a time. there are times when our languages are quite similar.
Getting back to organic/sustainable style food production appears to be something that isn't just chic, but may be necessary for humans to get beyond peaking oil, climate change, and tough economic times. This from an article out of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Which link I have lost recently but if you are interested I'll have another look.
re tillage operations, there may be farmers that are still following the practise of up to 7 tills of their fields, I don't expect that would be each year, as rotations of green manure play a big part of organic production and in cases like that you can go three or four years without tillage. You suggest that zero and minimum till operations are "ideal" . What does that mean in the context of different soil structures, different crops, and different farming methods?
In the event that farmers striving for sustainability are tilling their land four or more times in any given year I expect that at each of those tills is working fibre of one sort or another into the soil. This worked in material helps to improve the quality of the soil. excessive tillage would by my definition be tillage that is degrading the soil, ie not sustainable, it would appear by it's nature to be counter-productive to the effort.
The "small rump" sector you keep referring to might take offense at the suggestion. I'm sure their rumps are pretty much of a size with conventional or gm type farmers.
Let's try an analogous situation to the organic. Say a small native fishery dedicated to the continued existance of wild salmon were suddenly confronted with an aquaculturist bringing in another species, that through an unhealthy mixture of resource depleting feedstocks, poor disease or pest control, and numbers of escaped fish that would threaten the wild salmon stock for which the native nation had built up a small and trusting market and the infrastructure to meet it. I think it would be completely valid for the organization of a movement to stop the aquacultural venture. Then if you were to throw in a GM splice that could potentially infect the local salmon run and I think it could be serious.
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