In article ,
Doug Freyburger wrote:
Billy wrote:
Actually this thread started with the observation that, besides Salatin,
others have created intensive food producing systems.
"In Bangladesh a new chicken coop produces not just eggs and meat, but
waste that feeds a fishpond, which in turn produces thousands of
kilograms of protein annually, and a healthy crop of water hyacinths
that are fed to a small herd of cows, whose dung in turn fires a biogas
cooking system.
In Malawi, tiny fishponds that recycle waste from the rest of a farm
yield on average about 1,500 kilograms offish. In Madagascar, rice
farmers working with European experts have figured out ways to increase
yields. They transplant seedlings weeks earlier than is customary, space
the plants farther apart, and keep the paddies unflooded during most of
the growing season. That means they have to weed more, but it also
increases yields fourfold to sixfold. An estimated 20,000 farmers have
adopted the full system.
In Craftsbury, Vt., Pete Johnson has helped pioneer year-round farming.
Johnson has built solar greenhouses and figured out how to move them on
tracks. He now can cover and uncover different fields and grow greens 10
months of the year without any fossil fuels, allowing him to run his
community-supported agriculture farm continuously.
Then it morphed into CO2 and topsoil.
Natural ecosystems and organic farmers are the only creators of topsoil
today.
While true in general I wonder if there are exceptions here and there
that are of interest.
There's a wildlife preserve in the Netherlands that forms a natural
European grassland with herds of wild undulates and some natural
predators. The idea is humans tend to view forest as the natural state
of Europe without humans but how did the herding grass eaters like cows
and horses evolve in a forest? It's a grassland that's not really
natural but more of a deliberate immitation of natural.
Much of the previous discussion has been about ways to conduct small
farming to build topsoil, but only in a specific geography. At first I
easily imagined morphing the concepts regionally to acheive making
topsoil in other regions with adapted methods.
An assertion was made by Peter Bane
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/design/Designconsult.html
that using Joel Salatin's methods and converting existing farmland to
permanent pasture would allow the U.S. to more than sequester the CO2
that we produce.
Now I have started to wonder how herd management might be conducted so
it grows topsoil instead of depleting it. Buffalo herds were a part of
the North American grasslands and soil building in grasslands was
discussed. Current herding methods deplete soil - How to change that so
they build soil?
Salatins method employes the synergistic effects of steers and chickens
caring for a pasture, and he is reputed to generate an inch of
topsoil/year.
I recall the soil being pretty good in the small farm oriented dairyland
where most of my relatives lived when I was a kid. Small herds of dairy
cattle, crop rotation including legumes, some farms growing feed for the
farms with the bigger herds. I wonder how such a model can be mapped to
beef herding. What comes to my mind is - grass fed beef rather than lot
fed beef, mixed with a smaller heard strategy where the feed is closer
to local than it is with modern large beef cattle herds.
That is the ideal. Healthier for the animals and human beings. 70% of
antibiotics are used in agriculture, so I'm sure you can guess where
antibiotic bacteria come from. Plus, using the steers and chickens in
combo, no fossil fuel is used in fertilizing the pastures. The chickens
eat the bug, thus there is less fossil fuel based pesticides used, if
any.
--
- 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