Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The big point of this book--that permanent, perennial-based polycultures must largely replace annual crop production to make agriculture sustainable--is right on the money and occasionally well-argued. Those good arguments, however, are buried in a rambling mess of a book and severely undercut by copious logical fallacies, self-contradiction, and the occasional bald-faced lie. Shepard says we have to build perennial polycultures that can be harvested by machines if we're going to provide the world with food, then advises the would-be farmer to commingle crops in ways that would eliminate any possibility of mechanical harvesting. He says that there's no such thing as nutrient deficiency in soil, just farmers planting the wrong crops for their biome. Later he talks about how he had to use chemical fertilizers to get asparagus to grow on his own farm, which he also says is his best cash crop. He claims that his efforts have converted his farm from red clay subsoil to rich, high organic content topsoil, having sequestered loads of atmospheric carbon in the process. Not one actual measurement of the soil's organic matter content to back the claim up, though, and certainly not a before-and-after to compare real-world results to the purely theoretical estimates he claims instead. Chapter 12 is an especially magical chapter, where 13.9 million is actually a smaller number than 5.9 million, and a lactating dairy cow, a beef cattle, two pigs, 10 chickens, and 2 sheep can all be raised simultaneously on a single acre of pasture...