songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
...
Joel Salatin on his farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, yearly
transforms his pastures into "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 it
will be the better for it, lusher, more fertile, even springier
underfoot (this thanks to the increased earthworm traffic)."

these numbers do not look right. i don't think there's that
many calories available on 100 acres of pasture for that
many animals (figure the herd must be around 100 animals
for cows alone).

does the basic math add up right here Billy?


songbird

The quote is accurate. It is misleading though as Pollan points out later
(p222) Salatin does not claim this level of productivity because there is
450ac of woods as well as the 100ac of pasture. The woods make a sizeable
contribution to the farm, it produces much pig feed and biomass that is used
for a variety of purposes and assists in other ways. So to be more accurate
the above production is from 550ac.

I would be interested to know what can be done by conventional means. The
comparison would be very difficult to make fair I think because the
conventional system uses many external inputs and would have trouble
matching that diversity of outputs. I suspect that just measured in
calories per acre the intensive monoculture might win. The whole point of
this is that you can only do that for a limited amount of time with many
inputs and many unwanted side effects. Not to mention that man does not
live by bread (or high fructose corn syrup) alone.

David

David