For hundreds of years, farmers built the soil as a foundation for the food that fed their families.  A foundation for their future. A built-in daily vitamin for themselves that would be harvested in the months ahead.  Then something happened when I was still measured in relation to my Gandpa’s knee.  There were better ways, they were told.  Better?  Faster, more….but really it was the point of diminishing returns.  More lackluster crops were produced in greater numbers.  A strong line was drawn. Agricultural crops were now treated very differently from vegetable gardens.  Farmers seemed to hang on to the build the soil method in the vegetable patch that fed their family, and in times of need, their neighbors.  Why was that?  Was it because that was the domain of the woman of the house?  She held onto these methods that are methods that organic farmers still use today.  Rotating, covering, mulching…So was it scale that was the issue?  Probably.  In the never-ending American push that bigger was better, we learned quite late that bigger was simply bigger. And the “better crop” was in the farmer’s own veggie patch.