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

....conversation about Joel Salatin's methods...

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?

from the books of his that i have read he brings
in corn, wood chips, sawdust, chickens, pigs, turkeys,
and _any_ other organic material he can get for cheap,
in one case he got a truckload of sweet potatoes. i
think he no longer brings in cows as his herd breeds
well enough on it's own [which is great as far as i'm
concerned -- in his _Salad Bar Beef_ book he describes
how he went through and culled out the disease prone
cows and selected for certain characteristics. an
interesting topic in it's own right.]

he also has to bring in other materials for the
packaging and sales, fencing for the fields, fuel for
the tractors, saws, chipper, mower, baler.

his pigs and cows he has butchered off-site so he
looses out on the offal from those for composting.

i don't know what he does for the turkeys or rabbits.
i'm assuming they butcher their own rabbits.

the chicken butchering process is described in several
of the books so that is known to be done on site. the
innards from the chickens gets composted.


i'm not buying the claim as being true.

That's your prerogative.

What is the source of your doubt? Who claims otherwise?

reading his books where he describes his practices.
you seem to be as you keep quoting the same point
over and over again even though it has been refuted
by his own words in his own books.


i'm still king...

Just let me adjust the "Sword of Damcles" for you.

it's the dictator who says who sits where.

as i recline (as a proper state fitting to an
heir of the Roman empire) i'd be more worried
about Procrustean adjustments...


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.

faith in my reading abilities and recall of what
i have read.


....your local garden...
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.

the problem around here is that they don't take
only a few ears and leave the rest alone, they'll
raid the entire garden clean.


....
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 any new projects there are things required
nowadays (called Environmental Impact Studies). i
doubt there are any new mines going in without a
remediation plan also being in place. for the
older mines i don't know what they have set up for
the longer term.


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?

i've not studied western water rights as i
don't live out that ways (but it is becoming
a topic of interest because a relative has
some land out there and they are asking me
questions and we're talking about their site).


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.

there's more than one business model.
i keep thinking you have no actual experience
in small businesses, non-profits or
governmental organizations. it seems you
are only bent upon larger corporations and
even some of those are decent and do what
they can to help out.

recently there was a list of companies
and organizations published that purchase
clean energy credits to offset their energy
use. is that something you see a company
doing if they had no interest in being
socially responsible?


....
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.

statistics would be interesting to back this up.
more and more companies could be going private just
because there are more and more companies overall.
many have been created since so many people lost
work and had to start their own things up from
scratch. so that base number could be quite
relevant to the discussion of how many are going
private...


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?

no, but i'm aware of the over-all trends in
the society and it is towards cleaner and
sustainable ways of doing things. more and
more people will keep applying pressure even
upon companies that aren't as socially
responsible as others because competitively
over the long haul a company that doesn't
pay attention to the wants of the customers
isn't going to do as well as the rest that do.


...
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,

a prime example of my point. there are many
hunter-gatherer societies that do not live off
a varied diet.


while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few
starchy crops.

plenty of hunter-gatherers were/are in the
same situation.


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.)

reads like begging the question to me.


Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops,
farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed.

if you were an idiot farmer then yeah.
there were likely idiot hunter-gatherers
who starved too.


Finally, the mere
fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded
societies,

the mere fact is that it is likely that
there were people clumping together for
reasons other than agriculture long before
agriculture came along.


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,

the whole thing 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.

this is the point in dispute isn't it? i claim
that class divisions existed in groups long before
agriculture.


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.

this is a very limited view of hunter-gathering
societies, which happens to ignore some groups
which do store food (because they live places
where it stays cold enough to freeze meat) or the
herders who have large stores of food on the hoof.
it also ignores the many groups which lived in
northern climates which required them to have
food stores for the winter or they'd die. so
clearly there is a bias in his writings, observations
and comments which exclude peoples who clearly
survived just fine for thousands of years without
agriculture who also had class divisions in their
groups.


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.

perhaps to be an elite you had to be healthier
to begin with? perhaps there are other reasons
for the elite being healthier? like they had
personal servants who kept things clean? that
could make a difference in disease rates apart
from nutrition...

i don't find his arguments well thought out
and too much of the conclusion is biased by
his preconceptions.


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'd suggest finding a better approach, but
shoddy thinking isn't too likely going to help
much at all.


...
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 . . . ?

strong and smart person is likely at
the top of the heap. most likely that
person will even be more on top if they
are considered good looking or have
charisma, if they have many children
or many wives or husbands.

children, elders, injured, chronically
sick, mothers, fathers, those who know
the plants and animals well.

there are many different types of
layering going on, one person may be
at the bottom of the heap in one aspect
but near the top in another.


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.

i think that's not very likely. families
stick together even in the face of some
rather rotten behaviors and situations.
many many stories of police getting called
into a domestic dispute to help break it up
only to find that both parties start in on
the police officer. there's a good reason
why police hate domestic trouble calls...


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?

all the stuff i wrote above.


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."

i'd look into that study further because i'd
want to know how they actually did the comparison
between the two societies.


[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.

repetition of the conclusion does not make
an argument any stronger. the "mere fact" is
in dispute.


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.

sure does. there's not many places left to hunt and
gather from. monocrop farming is likely to continue
to remove wild spaces and kill off diversity. so...
if you really want to make the most difference put
your money into nature conservation efforts in
various places (to protect diversity), read up on
native plants and how to give them a good home,
add more food plants for critters to your property
and keep the water from getting polluted that
runs through your area.


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?

i've already made the choice to be a peasant
farmer in the US. why would i want to go to
either of those places? i'll be green and
save the transportation cost.


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.

so that is a comparison between two groups
of agriculturalists. one built topsoil and
the other destroyed it. what were the differences
that brought this about?

wouldn't the existance of both terra preta
and agriculture based upon thousands of years
be a counter-example to his claims? from
what i have read of digs done in that area
i'm not hearing anything that tells me that
was a society divided by deep stratification
or that those people suffered from malnutrition
and diseases. so i think this is a more
interesting and fruitful thing to look into
or think about.

as for the rest of the above agricultural
tragedy line of arguments.

too many holes in assumptions and comparisons
being made. selective biases in picking groups
to compare, etc. i just don't know how you can
consider his arguments very strong. looking into
the one study mentioned might be on the list of
topics for the future, but otherwise i think i'll
let you have the last words.


songbird