Originally Posted by Richard

Mitchel, prior to writing the article I discussed "vegan" growing with many people here in San Diego county. Even among people with a vegan diet, it seems that there are several narrow (and sometimes defiant) definitions of "vegan gardening". So I opted to coin a new term "bio-organic" and also give them the word "strict" to play with. Of the Vegans who read the article, some of them said that their practices are more "progressive", or "strictly vegetarian", and I think in general they now understand that their choices are more individual than universal.



Well, maybe some observations. The first concerns the diet motivations of vegetarians and the stricter vegans. Now among vegetarians there are those whose principle desire is to not eat slaughtered animals and in general these folks are opposed to raising animals for food. However, the vast majority of this group will drink milk because they see it as a "natural" phenomena in our world. Vegans are essentially a schism of vegetarians that reject this idea, although they appear to be internally conflicted over the issue of human milk. My observation is that "Veganism" is a faith-based principle, and is not based on any external heuristic or observable physical/biological process.

My second observation is that for organic and especially vegan gardeners to produce sustainable, self-sufficient crops over many years tilling the same soil, they will incur substantial costs in plant nutrition: 5 to 10 times more than those willing to work with nutrients from non-plant sources. For example, phosphorus that has been chemically extracted from poultry manure is far cheaper than phosphorus extracted from plants -- because it is uncommon for plants to have phosphorus in significant quantity. Consequently, as organic gardeners "wear-out" the minerals originally in their soil, the replacement costs become high.