I've seen it mentioned several times on this site that "growing food is not rocket science" and "it doesn't take much brain power to grow food."
If you want to spend your money on dumping fertilizer on your soil (and killing the microorganisms that your plants need to absorb those nutrients) and waste a lot of water to irrigate and wash all that expensive fertilizer right off the land instead of figuring out how to make your soil store water for you, it doesn't take much education. It doesn't take a biologist to identify the insects you find on your crops to figure out if they're good bugs or bad bugs—you can just spray some pesticides and all the bugs will die. Anyone can do it.
Your first year's yield will assure you that you're doing everything right. Next year might not do as well, but just add some more NPK and everything will be fine. You've killed off the bugs, but the ones that eat your plants by nature recover and develop resistance faster than the ones that eat other bugs, so soon you'll have a huge pest boom and have to buy more, and more expensive, pesticide. As the soil gets burnt by the excess NPK fertilizer it holds less water, which means more money into irrigation, which washes off the fertilizer, so you have to put more fertilizer on. Within four or five years you'll realize you're sinking more and more money into fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation, and every year your soil is getting worse, and in the end you see why big time conventional farmers can only make it with subsidies.
Everyone on this forum is too smart for this losing game. We can figure it out with the same brain power that tells us it doesn't make sense to hire someone to clean our house if we can do it ourselves in a few minutes a day, for free. If some bugs are doing the work of a pesticide for free, we should let em do it instead of spending money on the pesticides. We can figure out that if the soil can hold more water if it isn't tilled too much and it's topdressed with some mulch or straw, that will save us money on irrigating. We know, or can learn easily, how to manage a rotational and/or intercropping plan to increase the soil nutrition year after year through the actions of legumes and rhizobial bacteria and livestock, for free, instead of using purchased fertilizer that in the end will actually decrease soil fertility. And we know the nitrogen cycle backwards and forwards and which soil amendments can add calcium and phosphorous without throwing off the pH balance too much. Right?
There is a science to it. A good farmer can feel a soil's texture and make a guess at its fertility, its micronutrient content, and whether it has enough calcium to prevent blossom end rot if s/he plants tomatoes there. I feel like some people think farmers just throw some seed on the ground and food comes out. It's not that simple, but if you use some brain muscle before you use some brawn muscle, you can actually help set up an ecosystem that will do most of that work for you. Growing food doesn't take much brain power, but doing it right, and frugally, and productively, without killing yourself, does.
What do you folks think? DIY it or find a farm manager who will work for rent or just keep buying groceries?
