In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:
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
David, I'm surprised you didn't respond to
"Peter Bane did some calculations. He estimates that there are a
hundred million agricultural acres in the US similar enough to the
Salatins' to count: "about 2/3 of the area east of the Dakotas, roughly
from Omaha andTopeka east to the Atlantic and south to the Gulf of
Mexico."5 Right now, that land is mostly planted to corn and soy. But
returned to permanent cover, **it would sequester 2.2 billion tons of
carbon every year**. Bane writes:
**That's equal to present gross US atmospheric releases**, not
counting the net reduction from the carbon sinks of existing
forests and soils ... Without expanding farm acreage or remov-
ing any existing forests, and even before undertaking changes
in consumer lifestyle, reduction in traffic, and increases in
industrial and transport fuel efficiencies, which arc absolutely
imperative, the US could become a net carbon sink by chang-
ing cultivating practices and marketing on a million farms. In
fact, we could create 5 million new jobs in farming if the land
were used as efficiently as the Salatins use theirs.4
The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith
http://www.amazon.com/Vegetarian-Myt...ability/dp/160
4860804/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281718588&sr=1-1
p. 250
With the Salatin paradigm, the US could sequester its CO2 emissions,
grow healthy meat on permanent pasture, and create 5 million new jobs.
It's good not just for your inner environment but your outter
environment as well.
--
- 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://english.aljazeera.net/video/m...515308172.html