Email sent to Catherine May 8, 2012 from a subscriber:
Catherine,
Franklin Sanders had CC’d me your email address in regards to any soil questions you might have. My name is Brian G. Bankston (but you can call me “Cowboy”) and I have been a gardener and soil lover since 2004. From casual backyard gardening I found peace and a calm that no other doctor prescribed substance or activity has ever given me. Growing flowers, strawberries, and herbs sent me on a path that landed me in an internship at a permaculture park project for 2mos in Clarksville, AR with a bunch of “yankee-hippies” from PA an IN (one of those “yanks” is now my wife) that opened the door of planting design relationships and a new pair of spectacles in which to view the world of growing food and from there the paths multiplied with opportunities to learn about sustainability.
The next journey intersected me with Franklin Sanders’ two boys Justin & Wright at a month long course held at “The Farm” in Summertown, TN called Carbon Farming and that is where I learned about the Australian based “Keyline Design” system through Darren Daugherty. Darren is quite the “aussie” character but for all his antics he has a sound solution for building topsoil at such a rapid rate that any NRCS or USDA rep will call you a bold face liar if you tried to share it here in the US with them.
After that course I bought a Yeoman’s subsoil plow and then traveled to Australia for Jan. & Feb. of 2010 to see if all this hype about soil regeneration was for real. And spending time on a continent so arid and dry that every single millimeter of water from the sky is the difference between life & death for plants and animals (as opposed to the southern US where we get 54″ of annual rainfall – Australia gets 51mm) it opened my eyes to the importance of land management. Most of all the soil!
A calling came out to my wife and I – almost, if you will, “divine” in nature to set out in the US and save soil, regenerate soil, build soil, and build natural sustainable nutrient pathways that don’t kill soil biology and leach toxic residues into our watershed. Doing this in a country that lives by the click of a mouse, remote, or cell phone is very difficult because our instant gratification ways have more than just wreaked havoc on our food, families, and children but also our farmers – “I want to see results now” . Not paying attention to the long-term effects of the toxic conventional chemical systems for growing MASS AMOUNTS OF MONOCULTURE FOOD. So if there is ever anything we can do for you here at Keyline Cowboy as far as information exchange or actual plow work is concerned please feel free to reach out to us – a friend of Franklin Sanders is a friend of ours.
Blessings,
The Cowboy