Food For Thought

Along with my No Till Farming pilot studies, utilizing exotic and wild plants, I am working on ecologically sound bioswale methods designed to capture rain more efficiently, reducing runoff which contributes to the potential for flooding.

The crop I have been most successful with, from virtually every perspective is Shmooo. The seeds have been harvested by native peoples for many centuries. There is also some evidence that a certain number of people have also eaten the foliage, both raw and cooked. Because of the ease with which the plant is grown, in the absence of conventional farming equipment and labor, this plant now takes up 2/3 of my research time and effort.

I have worked with other crops that have developed little real potential as a major food source, with only the advantage that they will grow well without painstaking cultivation. The wild Indian strawberries are bland small berries. And it would take an eighth of an acre to provide me with enough for my own household. Wild chives? They are fine, and I use them all the time, but certainly they are not an important main food source. The Taro root? Grows well and without effort, but not really a pleasant tasting vegetable from my perspective. All the other exotic crops I have experimented with have only marginal value from the standpoint of feeding the world.

Only Shmooo could provide excellent nutrition for vast numbers of people without industrial or skilled farming, with the only real labor in the harvesting. Only Shmooo has the culinary characteristics that could easily fit into a wide variety of multicultural diets. And of all the crops I have experimented with, only Shmooo contains such dense and well balanced nutrition that in times of emergency or famine, one could literally survive and thrive on it alone as a feed supply.

My first experiments (two years worth) were hydroponic, seeing how well it thrived grown in conjunction with a great variety of other plants grown with the extremely high overcrowding and density which would be required for a crop that could be grown in a space environment. I cannot think of a better crop with which to feed future space colonists, providing both grain and edible foliage, And although I have not done it yet, there is no doubt that the stalks could be fermented into cellulosic alcohol, a commodity that I expect space people will find useful.

I would not be at all surprised if Shmooo wound up being the main agricultural food crop in space.

But with the New Depression, our attention needs to turn for now to how to better feed the population of Earth. As a food grain, as a vegetable, as a spice, Shmooo has the right stuff to solve the biggest problem facing us all. The inevitability of widespread famine.