America's gardens

One of the things that stands out in my mind that First Lady Michele Obama did as a positive step forward was to break dirt and have a garden at the White House once again. In the past there has been fruit and orange trees, herbs, a victory garden during war time and even a children's garden at the White House. Above is the garden layout at the White House this spring. There is approx. 30 different crops not including the perennial herbs. The crops planted here are very common in what you would see in a typical garden in the US.


However, have you ever thought what that very same garden would look like if all that was planted were crops that are subsidized with your tax payer money? Crops that are grown using common commercial practices such as pesticides, herbicides and mass cultivation of only one or two crops. Not to mention Monsanto's push to use their genetically modified seeds.


This is what the crops would amount to if transposed onto the same garden layout:





Corn 35%
Wheat 20%
Cotton 20%
Soybean 15%
Fruits, Vegetables, Nuts and other specialty crops 0.5%

The remaining 9.5% you would squeeze in Rice, Canola, Sunflower, Peanuts, Sorghum and Tobacco.


I guarantee you the very same garden would have a lot more variety like the first garden design if you took the averages from small farms that practiced more natural, organic, earth and organism friendly gardening practices. Farms that are strongly against Monsanto's Frankenstein seeds and stick to Heirloom seeds that have been passed down from generation to generation.  Those crops also stand up better in droughts and floods than those crops regularly doused with man made chemicals.