In article ,
Bill who putters wrote:

In the coming days, I expect that Big Ag will marshal their forces and
come out with its own brand of science and experts to refute all
testimony that threatens its profit margin. Of course, what I'm really
waiting for is the day the Subcommittee calls on one of the dozens and
dozens of AWA farmers to relate how changing from confined to
pasture-based farming has eliminated the need for subtherapuetic and
most therapeutic antibiotics because their animals and their farms are
safe and healthy to begin with.

Not to mention that beef evolved to eat grass, not US tax-payer
subsidized corn, that gives them ulcers.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dile...ls/dp/01430385
83/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815576&sr=1-1
p. 126

""Grass," so understood, is the foundation of the intricate food chain
Salatin has assembled at Polyface, where a half dozen different animal
species are raised together in an intensive rotational dance on the
theme of symbiosis. (Joel) Salatin is the choreographer and the grasses
are his verdurous stage; the dance has made Polyface one of the most
productive and influential alternative farms in America.

Though it was only the third week of June, the pasture beneath me had
already seen several rotational turns. Before being cut earlier in the
week for the hay that would feed the farm's animals through the winter,
it had been grazed twice by beef cattle, which after each day-long stay
had been succeeded by several hundred laying hens. They'd arrived by
Eggmobile, a ramshackle portable henhouse designed and built by Salatin.
Why chickens? "Because that's how it works in nature," Salatin
explained. "Birds follow and clean up after herbivores." And so during
their turn in the pasture, the hens had performed several ecological
services for the cattle as well as the grass: They'd picked the tasty
grubs and fly larvae out of the cowpats, in the process spreading the
manure and eliminating parasites. (This is what Joel has in mind when he
says the animals do the work around here; the hens are his "sanitation
crew," the reason his cattle have no need of chemical parasiticides.)
And while they were at it, nibbling on the short cattle-clipped grasses
they like best, the chickens applied a few thousand pounds of nitrogen
to the pasture‹and produced several thousand uncommonly rich and tasty
eggs. After a few week's rest, the pasture will be grazed again, each
steer turning these lush grasses into beef at the rate of two or three
pounds a day.

By the end of the season Salatin's grasses will have been transformed by
his animals into some 40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of pork,
10,000 broilers, 1,200 turkeys, 1,000 rabbits, and 35,000 dozen eggs.
This is an astounding cornucopia of food to draw from a hundred acres of
pasture, yet what is perhaps still more astonishing is the fact that
this pasture will be in no way diminished by the process‹in fact, it
will be the better for it, lusher, more fertile, even springier
underfoot (this thanks to the increased earthworm traffic). Salatin's
audacious bet is that feeding ourselves from nature need not be a
zero-sum proposition, one in which if there is more for us at the end of
the season then there must be less for nature‹less topsoil, less
fertility, less life. He's betting, in other words, on a very different
proposition, one that looks an awful lot like the proverbially
unattainable free lunch.

And none of it happens without the grass. In fact, the first time I met
Salatin he'd insisted that even before I-met any of his animals, I get
down on my belly in this very pasture to make the acquaintance of the
less charismatic species his farm was nurturing that, in turn, were
nurturing his farm. Taking the ant's-eye view, he ticked off the census
of a single square foot of pastu orchard grass, foxtail, a couple of
different fescues, bluegrass, and timothy. Then he cataloged the
legumes‹red clover and white, plus lupines‹and finally the forbs,
broad-leaved species like plantain, dandelion, and Queen Anne's Lace.
And those were just the plants, the species occupying the surface along
with a handful of itinerant insects; below decks and out of sight
tunneled earthworms (knowable by their castled mounds of rich castings),
pocket gophers, woodchucks, and burrowing insects, all making their dim
way through an unseen wilderness of bacteria, phages, eelish nematodes,
shrimpy rotifers, and miles upon miles of mycelium, the underground
filaments of fungi. We think of the grasses as the basis of this food
chain, yet behind, or beneath, the grassland stands the soil, that
inconceivably complex community of the living and the dead. Because a
healthy soil digests the dead to nourish the living, Salatin calls it
the earth's stomach.

But it is upon the grass, mediator of soil and sun, that the human gaze
has always tended to settle, and not just our gaze, either. A great many
animals, too, are drawn to grass, which partly accounts for our own deep
attraction to it: We come here to eat the animals that ate the grass
that we (lacking rumens) can't eat ourselves. "All flesh is grass." The
Old Testament's earthy equation reflects a pastoral culture's
appreciation of the food chain that sustained it, though the
hunter-gatherers living on the African savanna thousands of years
earlier would have understood the flesh-grass connection just as well.
It's only in our own time, after we began raising our food animals on
grain in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (following the dubious new
equation, All flesh is corn), that our ancient engagement with grass
could be overlooked. "
-----

No antibiotics creating resistant bacteria. No stinking lagoons of
excrement fouling the air, and contaminating ground water. No animal's
meat awash in endocrine hormones in response to being terrified and
brutalized. No need for fossil fuels for fertilizer or pesticides. No
need to create monocultures of feed for feed-lot animals, and their
concomitant destruction of the habitat, and the diversity of species
that live in them. We can stop the rape of nature, and we can create new
topsoil in the process.

Fossil fuel have done enough damage, and they need to be reduced, and
then terminated. They are no more sustainable than the fossil water that
we pump from ancient aquifers. If we had leaders, they would tell us so
and do the work that must be done for us to survive. Require reduction
of fossil fuel CO2 emissions. Require population controls. Require
lessening our dependence on grains, and encourage consumption of
vegetables.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/2/maude
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/2...al_crime_scene