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It's not Just Joel Salatin anymore
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"songbird" wrote: Billy wrote: songbird wrote: FarmI wrote: Billy wrote: Well, in this case, it would be prairie grass (reflecting Salatin's pasture), What sort of species are you talking about when you say 'prairie grass'? The reason why I ask is that the You-tube clips of Salatin's place doesn't look like anything I'd call a 'prairie'. He looks like he's got a farm on quite rich land in a well protected area. 'Prairies' to me suggest very open and exposed locations and the grasses there would, TMWOT, be much tougher and less nutritious than in good pasture land. I might be talking through my hat 'cos I haven't got a clue about US farms, but that's what I'd expect here in Oz if we were looking at farms of differing capacities. Having another bi-polar day? I just loves the way you flog that strawman. that wasn't me (FarmI is quote level not me, i am quote level ) right, anyone talking about grassland production in the eastern seaboard of the USA being equivalent to what happens on the prairies is full of it. If you take the time to read the quote, you will notice that it says, "similar enough". That takes us from "equals" to "approximates" which, a sane person would agree, don't mean the same thing. yea, but i'm pretty sure the difference between growth on the prairie vs. eastern grassland is closer to an order of magnitude which to me is a significant difference not so easily ignored. the time scale difference isn't minor and probably heavily depends upon the average annual rainfall. Time scale for what? for building topsoil. one inch a year on the eastern grassland (reasonably heavily managed otherwise it converts to woodland) as compared to how much per year on the prairie. the soil of the prairies was probably produced over the period of time after the last ice-age. it isn't that thick. if it could accumulate at a rate of an inch a year it would be much deeper... Best guess is 500 years/inch to produce prairie topsoil which was approximately 10" thick when Europeans showed up.. wow, that's 5x worse than what i thought it was. but i'd not looked into that specific detail yet. i'm just noodling about numbers and wondering why some things don't seem to add up right about certain claims. ok, so let's return to the eastern seaboard and wonder why the topsoil in unmolested places isn't deeper? if it can be so productive why isn't it? because it is woodland and not grassland and unmanaged woodlands cycle carbon but do not sequester once it's reached maturity. Actually, it takes a pine forest, roughly, 50 years to develop 1/16" of topsoil. i wonder if anyone has broken down how much of that is char. very little is sequestered and that would be because of fires that char and thus turn the carbon into a form not easily consumed... The sequestered CO2 in eastern forests is charcoal? if we're talking carbon effectively removed from the atmosphere and not easily returned via rot then yes. didn't you say something like 55,000 years? that's sequestered. a forest at maturity is not sequestering much in the way of carbon, it's cycling it (i.e. i agree with DHS). if trees and forests were so good for carbon gathering and keeping the soils of the Amazon would be deep and fertile, but they are not unless you find the places that were altered by the natives in prehistorical times. And don't forget the warm weather, and heavy rains that wash the quickly decomposing organics out of the laterite soils, unless you find the places that were altered by the indigenous prior to 1492. not forgotten, it just seems that if the forests were so good at sequestering carbon in the soil (that is what we were talking about was soil building) then the Amazon would be much different than it is and the eastern USoA would have much thicker soils too than it has. so this says that reforestation is barking up the wrong tree when it comes to CO2 sequestration and rebuilding topsoil. Ah . . . hmmmm? Who said anything about reforestation? Not that it's a bad idea, and we do need to stop cutting them down. You silly goose, the proposition was returning the farm soil to permanent ground cover, like you might use to graze cattle on, and then run out some hypothetical mobile chicken coops (hypothetical chickens included) to do clean up duty on the cow flops from the hypothetical cattle. reforestation is what happens to eastern land when left alone. so to keep it from turning to forest means some kind of management (which means energy expenditure of some type to keep it clear of trees be that via grazing or mechanical means the effort is the same no matter what). grazing unfortunately does not keep land clear. So we got our farmers switching from grain crops to meat production. This in turn leads to: i'd say that the stats say we don't need more meat, we need more exercise and more fruits and veggies. 1) cessation of the use of chemical fertilizers, which encourage some bacteria to devour the organic material in the soil (topsoil) yes, this is good to do, 100% with ya on this one. 2) stops the release of NO2 from the fertilizer, which is a greenhouse gas. in addition to the energy taken to produce the fertilizer to begin with. 3) stops the pollution of ground and run off water, thus improving the quality of drinking water, and cutting off the cause of ocean dead zones. i think those are not eliminated with our current river management, wastewater and drainage systems. reduced would be nice though -- i agree as it would return large areas of the Gulf to productive use. 4) At the very least, what remaining topsoil would be protected by the permanent ground cover, and the is the expectation that we may add to it. this is good and i'm all for it, but i don't see how you get from point A to B without a massive labor shift. not many of the kids today have any plans of working on the farm at minimum wage with no benefits. only some small percent of the people have the dedication this type of change takes. even for me to go all organic would be tough here, but i'm doing better each year. that's all i can do and try to get people around me to see easy things they can do to improve. 5) Additional topsoil (because there is more of it, and it is made from organic material) would effectively sequester CO2 to some extent. Again the question is where to put the decimal point, not "if one is needed". Peter Bane (google the name) puts the sequestration potential at being equivalent to the US production of CO2. 6) Increased topsoil leads to increased absorption of rain fall, recharging aquifers, and reducing chances of flooding. this is only partially true. large sections of agricultural land is ditched, drained, drain tubed and trenched. to restore it to the previous state would involve a lot more than letting it go back to green and then putting livestock on it to keep it short and having chickens pick their piles apart. for mosquito control too. you're not going to get people back to where they'll want more mosquitoes (even if i think the current spraying program is poisonous, dangerous and wasteful -- i'm not going to get many others around here to agree with me as it is very flat and swampy with a lot of mosquitoes if left alone). add to that the runoff troubles from streets, parking lots, storm sewers, rooftops, and then add the waste from treatment plants and then make it even worse by draining all the lowlands and farming them, building levees so the rivers cannot flood, etc. well, we're nowhere near getting a handle on groundwater restoration. getting the farmers to stop dumping nitrogen is only a small part of the problem. getting people to stop burning ditches would do a lot too (stopping erosion), getting people to stop using pesticides would accomplish a lot more for the long term health, nitrogen is quite simple a poison in comparison to the others. we've got timebombs ticking on a long slow fuse. at least we are looking now, but so many years from now it will take to fix and trillions of dollars. instead we will spend them on wars in far off places to support criminally insane or corrupt gov'ts, etc. 7) Increased meat production on grassland instead of in CAFOs, means that 70% of antibiotics in this country won't go into meat animals, thereby creating antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. i know, once i heard about that use of antibiotics i got sick to my stomach. f'n idiots. it should be banned outright immediately (along with feeding chickens arsenic, feeding cattle bubble gum or any other animal byproducts, etc.). but i disagree about meat production needing to be increased. 8) Less grain will be needed to divert into CAFOs fine by me. 9) Fewer CAFOs means fewer stinking lagoons of animal excrement, that won't be dumped into public water ways, or find its way into ground water. yea, we had someone doing a feedlot down the road a ways. luckily we are miles away and not downwind. but i felt sorry for any neighbors. a dairy farm smells good when run correctly. a CAFO smells nasty. there is a bison farmer on the opposite corner and the CAFO is now returned to corn and soybeans so i'm thinking the corn and soybeans are a better tradeoff. 10) Gives us a good source of complete proteins (beef and chickens), for healthy, growing kids. too much protein already for most people. the kids (who don't usually eat it anyways) they like hotdogs, macaroni and cheese and ice-cream -- nothing green please. So to summarize; permanent ground cover on existing farms, won't work for many crops, they don't do well with any competition -- variety in diet being important and i like some of those grains. if they can eventually come up with perennial versions that would be great. i know that is being worked on. that would go a long ways towards stablising the soils and improving the soil community/structure and it would also reduce weed troubles if you could get a field going full of mixed grains and legumes which could fruit at different times and thus be harvested at different times using different means. we're only starting on this sort of figuring. so while i agree that bare soil can be troublesome, it can be worked around in some ways and at other times it's necessary (to switch crops or to deal with certain types of weeds -- beans and sow thistle being specific examples) and then there are certain perennials and annuals that only get going in disturbed soils. do you suddenly want to remove that type of plant from the diversity of life? which is used to raise beef, more or less along the lines of Joel Salatin's paradigm, results in clean food, clean air, clean water, and just might save the world. no, probably won't. it would help some things for sure, but it is only scratching the surface. Other than the above points, I think you made a very cogent response, where you had your facts straight ;O) songbird Too much lack of content to deal with tonight, back at you in the AM. Save the Forest Litter. -- - 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 |
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