In article ,
songbird wrote:

Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
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Billy wrote:

fascinating but expendable conversation snipped


Top soil can be regenerated. Joel
Salatin is doing it at the rate of 1"/year.
http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0104saveworld.htm

i've read most of what he's published.

he is not building topsoil, he amends it
heavily with organic materials that he brings
in by the truckload. they get run through
the cow barn, the pigs, chickens, before they
get scattered on the fields.
...
Thanks, but why do you say he's not building topsoil. He has picked
up
the pace, but this is how soil is built.

he is taking materials from other places.
these materials are what would eventually become
a part of the topsoil in those locations. he's
mining topsoil components from other locations.

Seems like splitting hairs. The claim is that he is conjuring up 1" of
topsoil/year. That's still pretty impressive.

it's an important hair to split if you're
talking about sustainable agriculture over
the long term. if it takes materials from
other locations to keep a farm's topsoil
going then it becomes a larger question
about how sustainably those materials are
grown. as it is pretty sure the soils in
that area are already heavily depleted by
tobacco farming it is a critical question
and one i'm surprised you're just ready to
accept as not really important.

Did the bison poop where exactly where they consumed the buffalo grass,
or was it a couple of hundred yards away? I didn't say that Salatin was
making 1" of top soil in a closed system. Like all other news, I get it
second or third hand, through reporters I trust, or from enough
reporters to make it plausible.

" Their system is based on native pastures, without cultivation or new,
³improved² pasture species. The only input has been the feed for the
poultry. This multi-species rotational grazing system builds one inch of
soil a year and returns the family 15 times the income per acre than is
received by neighbouring farms using a set stocking of cattle."
- Andre Leu
President of the Organic Producers Association of Queensland and vice
chair of the Organic Federation of Australia

The above statement, and the praise from Michael Pollan gives me
confidence that the statement is probably true.

the above statement is wrong. "The only input"
is incorrect.
Would you amplify that response? What other inputs?


i'm not buying the claim as being true.

That's your prerogative.
What is the source of your doubt? Who claims otherwise?

i'm still king...
Just let me adjust the "Sword of Damcles" for you.



My computer's dictionary lists "Make the most efficient use of
non-renewable resources and on-farm resources and integrate, where
appropriate, natural biological cycles and controls", as one of the
attributes of sustainable agriculture.

i have stated multiple times that i consider
Salatin's efforts as _more_ sustainable than
most conventional agriculture. other than that
i couldn't say how sustainable or how it impacts
the surrounding area. mostly i think it is ok.
i'd rather live near his farm than many others.

Not to put too fine a point on it, your arguments sound as if they are based on faith.


(snipped for brevity)
...
returning to my more local issue as one with a
limited amount of land in trying to be as sustainable
as possible i cannot raise both enough veggies in
the current gardens and sell them to raise enough
money to cover the taxes on the land let alone
the other expenses of having this place.

I have no familiarity with that. What I have is a marginal growing
environment, and I simply try too get more from what I'm given.
Clear plastic over the mulch, and drip irrigation seem to be a good way
to heat the soil and promote earlier harvests, but if you have a cool
summer, there's not much you can do.

put in some cooler weather plants. peas/peapods
are my favorites here. for arid climates tepary
beans are one possibility, but i'm not sure how
they do with cool weather.

Doesn't help if you want to grow sweet corn, or melons. If all the stars
line up, we can grow these things, but we have had cool summers for
nearly a decade now, i.e. only 1 - 3 days of temps over 100F, whereas in
the bad ol' days we'd get 6 - 12 100F days.

good luck!

have you ever tried the smaller baby corn
plants? i'm not a corn guru. around here
all corn that isn't well protected is raccoon
food.

One year I had a really good stand of dent corn, but the sweet corn just
petered out.
Yeah, I've tried the 60 day wonder corn, but still no go. I'll probably try
the "Golden Bantum" corn again.

I figure I can let rocky the rascally raccoon have a portion of what I grow,
after all, he and his kin were here first.


for some people property and other taxes are reasons
behind extractive agricultural practices. if property
isn't taxed then it takes some pressure off people to
exploit it.

Duh. Federal land is nearly free, but it is exploited by ranchers, and
mineral extractors.

well yeah, our country doesn't care about
sustainable practices enough as of yet. in
time it will be forced to.

Too bad the government can't make federal land available for for
sustainable agriculture.

i'm not sure what land you are talking about
but most land i'm aware of that the government
owns is either in cities, military, nuclear
testing, or sparse rangeland that should not
be used for any soil disturbing agriculture.
How about mountain top removal, or strip mining, or just plain
ol' mining? Military bases are being closed. They would be one place
to develope. Agriculture can take place without plows. Any land that
is leased, should have a remediation plan.

for a longer term project i'd want ownership.
Of public lands?

out west in arid places i'd also require water
rights. it doesn't make any sense to do long
term projects if you can't harvest rain water
to hold back and use and if you aren't sure how
long you'll be there.
What about downstream users?

that is what makes most
property taxes so nasty. it's almost impossible
to do a longer term project that doesn't turn
into yet another exploitive system.
Exploitive systems-R-us. The business model is "privatize the profits",
and "socalize the costs" be if foul air, diry water, or sick employees.



...
it happens, companies do go private.

They go private so that they won't have to show their books to the
public.

you can think that, but i'm sure in many
cases that is wrong.
Since the dot-com bubble of 1999, more public companies go private each
year, according to financial sources like "Business Week" and CNN.
Reasons for changing the business structure of major corporations vary
from company to company. However, a general trend seems to be because
private companies are subject to less regulatory oversight.

if you really have such a negative opinion
of so many others how do you manage to drive
down the road or buy food at the store or do
much of anything other than huddle in a cave
waiting for the boogeyman?
You mean Koch Industries, Bechtel, Cargill, Publix, Pilot Corp., one of
the members of the Big Four accounting firms, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu,
Hearst Corporation, S. C. Johnson, and Mars which are among the largest
privately held companies in the United States? Oh, ja, you betcha.

You're a regular Pollyanna, aren't you?



...


as we put up most of the tomatoes we grow we need
a regular acid tomato.

I only have about 600 sq. ft. for everything.

oy!

Oy, indeed.

good luck!
Luck doesn't have much to do with it. It's just tinkering to maximize
what I've got. It's a small garden, but it has given me a great education.



...
Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale
today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous
to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an
elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from
countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between
being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the
Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?
(Search for it on the web: mistake_jared_diamond.pdf)

well, i'll say i don't agree with many of
his assumptions and so that won't lead me to
much harmony with his conclusions.

Wouldn't want to amplify on that would you? You disagree with what
assumptions?

that agriculture was the cause of class divisions.
that he's making valid comparisons between cultures
on the whole. that he's doing much other than picking
what suits the conclusions he's already made.

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that
agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied
diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few
starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor
nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate plants--wheat, rice, and
corn--provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species,
yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential
to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops,
farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere
fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded
societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded
societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some
archaeologists think it was crowding, rather than agriculture, that
promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because
crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't
take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly
shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise
of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped
bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-
gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food
sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild
plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no
kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from
others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, nonproducing elite
set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs
at Mycenae c.1500 B.C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than
commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and
had better teeth (on average, one instead of six cavities or missing
teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A.D. 1000, the elite were
distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a
fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.

If we consider a twenty-four hour clock on which one hour represents
100,000 years of real past time. It the history of the human race began
at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We
lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day,from midnight
through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p.m., we adopted
agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of
famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will
we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind
agriculture's glittering facade and that have so far eluded us?


...
i did, i don't agree with too many of his
assumptions.

What, that a division between the people who did the actual work, and
the planners didn't lead to a stratification of society?

i'll repeat myself. all groups stratify.
period. full stop. end of statement.
And your example of that in a hunter/gatherer group would be . . . ?
It used to be, if you didn't like your neighbors, or the local strong
man, you walked away. The food was there for the taking anyway.

function
of the species/brain. we group, divide up,
regroup, etc. constantly. even the most rigid
of the religious societies fragment and divide
once the charismatic leader dies or something
happens which sets enough people off into another
direction. it's just what we do.

any group of people of more than one person
has a class system, rankings, etc. they may be
unspoken and there are likely many different
ones in operation.


The word
civilization comes from the Latin civitas, meaning city or city-state.

You saw his argument on hunter/gatherers superior health?

and i don't agree, he's sweeping a lot of
things under the rug.
Such as?


read any modern text on microbiology and
parasitology. read any collection of actual
studies by anthropologists of many different
groups. there are no utopian societies in
the past. all have their challenges and
troubles.
Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University
of Massachusetts show these early Indian farmers paid a price for their
new-found livelihood. Compared to the huntergatherers who preceded them,
the farmers had a nearly fifty percent increase in enamel defects
indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency
anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a
threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general,
and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably
reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in
the preagricultural community was about twenty-six years," says
Armelagos, "but in the postagricultural community it was nineteen years.
So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were
seriously affecting their ability to survive."

[T]he mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in
crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other
crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease.

Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale
today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous
to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an
elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from
countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between
being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the
Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?


having read 1491, etc. recently how can you
accept this comparison as being right? if you
took a group from a European area in 1490s and
compared that to a group from the Amazon area
at that time you'd find the Amazons decimated
by diseases.
Brought from Europe. Neither groupe was hunter/gatherers. The
Amazonians tended huge orchards, which is where most of the terra
preta was found.


...rest snipped, gotta get out for a walk before
the rains come...


songbird

And I have ivy that needs pulling, plants that need water, and lettuce,
and flowers to plant.
If I have time, maybe I'll start a new tray of seeds for germination.

Just have to have it done by 6:30 PM, which is when I plop in front of
the TV, margarita in
hand, to watch the news, on Deutsche Welle. Simple tariyaki chicken
dinner tonight. Ten minutes to prep, and then cooks for an hour, and
serve. Not sure whether I'll make a salad, or steam a couple of
artichokes (they're huge). Chives from the garden for the baked potato.

ˆ la table!

--
Remember Rachel Corrie
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/

Welcome to the New America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg