ANRA:Lecture:Farming techniques - an overview

Farming techniques - an overview

I'd like to welcome you all to this lecture about farming techniques. This lecture gives an overview of the farming techniques and other lectures will give a more in depth information about the various farming techniques. If you have questions dont hesitate to ask them, but I may have refer you to other lectures. I would like to talk about the following farming techiques: crop rotation, fertalizing and acidic soil. But first of all let me tell you a bit about why all these techniques are needed.
If you look around Blandenburg and M'Chek you can see that the soil is very dry and looks more like a desert then farmland. In the years past these lands have been used to feed a lot a people with wheat, corn, milk and meat. And when the land could not support the intense farming anymore, people moved on to new places to farm the same way again. As you may well know the soil has no more nutrition left for the plant to grow. We looked at this and came up with two ways to help the soil: fertalizing and crop rotation.
With fertalizing you add nutrition to the soil again and you can do this in various ways. One way is to use dung of the animals and another way is to use leftovers of plants. Collect the dung and plants in separate heaps during the year. It might be best to make the dung heap at the edges of town or even out of town to minimize the annoyance for the citizens of the town. The dried dung and decayed plants have to be spread on the land before planting a new crop and plowed under. But watch the amounts too much and too little isnt good. More of fertalizing and the detailed ins and outs in the separate lecture.
What we also found out is that different plants us different nutrition from the soil. And that plants also give nutrition back to the soil. So you can see that plating the same plants over and over again on the same piece of land makes it unusable after a certain amount of crops. But if you plant one plant this year and another plant the next that dont need the same nutrition and give the needed nutrition back to the soil for the other plant you save the soil. This process of growing different plants on the same field year each year is called crop rotation. Crop rotation has more advantages, but more on that in the separate lecture.
Here in Blandenburg there is some added problem acidic grounds. We are still working on this. The ideas are good, but we have to test them in practice. So I cant tell you any definite way how to get rid of acidic ground at the moment. But I hope that ANRA can tell you more about it in the near future.
I hope this lecture gave you ideas about how to manage your lands in the future.

Mhog'ar