Siwmae (Hiya) WK!

Actually my white-clover undersowings, growing strongly as ground cover in my no-till food plots beneath my positively BURGEONING food-plants (see! mine's bigger'n yourn! Nyah!) do seem to be fixing atmospheric nitrogen pretty effectively, just as the experts say.

Also, the plots get composting-john output, once it's been well composted in the holding bins. And the free-ranging Muscovey ducklings (with their Turkish [Anatolian, Kangal, Karabash, Akbash, take your pick of these names and do a Youtube search] Shepherd Dog bodyguard) are taking up a lot of nitrogen, phosphorus, and other goodies, in the form of slugs, snails, etc., and passing them along to the beds in the form of their collected night-droppings. Collected and spread by me, that is. The duckling don't go up on the raised beds. You can multiply detailed local tactics of food-growning like this endlessly, using the permaculture methods.

Bob's right: if we can just drag ourselves into being slightly brighter than yeast, and get sophisticated organinc growing going bigtime, in the form of the many already-proven tactics of permaculture, we should be able to replace the horrendously inefficient, abysmally low productivity of industag (see here: http://www.permaculture.com/drupal/node/141 for more vindication of that assertion) with an organic agriculture that could, realistically, feed everyone -- whilst we do something humane but effective about our current population overshoot.

But WILL humans behave more wisely than yeast......? What do you reckon! --RhG

Ducks do not fix nitrogen. The nitrogen in their waste is from plants and is less than you would get by plowing the plants into your land.

Never said it fixes nitrogen, said it produces it, and I hope you are ploughing with a horse as you will never get a horse egg from a tractor ... hmm then again, maybe you should think about getting a duck and forget that horse, as I remember, their eggs have a distinctly fishy taste:)