Become Food Independent using Wood Chips as ground cover

I'm a small scale vegetable farmer. I tried this. It DESTROYED the fertility of the 2000 square feet of garden I experimented with for 3 years running now.

Year 1: Worked ok. Suppressed weeds somewhat. Not nearly as good as the hype. I put the wood-chips 4 or 5 inches deep around established annuals.

Year 2: Despite valiant attempts to plant while keeping wood-chips at surface level, it became obvious quite a lot made it to subsurface levels. ANYWHERE wood-chips were covering, or were even nearby, plants were NOTICEABLY smaller, weaker, and often failed to produce at all, or were dramatically less productive.

Year 3: Raked off as many wood-chips as I could. Plants were still smaller than those in areas I treated as standard.

Apparently conventional science is right in this instance. Decomposing wood (or anything else) takes and holds nitrogen. And based on my results, I would suspect quite a lot of other nutrients.

If you don't like manual weeding (and who does?) I suggest getting a wheel hoe. I prefer the Hoss, but there are several good brands out there. Don't believe this back to Eden crap from people whose survival and future depends on the productivity of their gardens.

Can you grow toilet paper?

you know what i always find the coolest things. those closed systems they have in some bunkers. where they have fish in water with plants and those feed of something else and that in turn feeds veggies etc. forgot the name
hydrofarm?

Wood chippers are good at things besides wood.

Yeah I like that guy. Mulch is the key to gardening. Ruth Stout books about gardening with mulch are the best. Mulch is everything, whether it's wood chips or hay or whatever.

Now someone who is doing things intensively on a commercial scale may do things differently. If you are a market grower then you can't do better than to look up Curtis Stone and see what his methods are. But he is in and out of his beds in a matter of weeks with succession crops one after the other. They are never left to their own devices like you probably want to do with your home garden.