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Soil

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Today as I was preparing the cornfield for planting and working in the garden. I started thinking about soil.  Yeah, soil, dirt, that stuff that gets under my fingernails.  I was just amazed at how this mixture of clay, loam, sand, organic matter, various elemental nutrients, microbes, and macrobes allows plants to grow and thus life as we know it to exist on Earth.  When I got the mail, I noticed that I received one of my 'freebie' magazines that talks about soil as being a dead medium that is to be completely controlled and not something that is alive and needs to be worked with to grow the crops and produce needed for our existence.  That, I believe, is the major divide in agriculture right now.  The two extremes are very large scale industrial operations and very small organic practitioners. But most of the farmers I know are somewhere in the middle of these extremes.  As a farmer, I try my best to grow healthy crops and as an extension, livestock, that are tasty and goo