Billy wrote:
....
The first one has Noam Chomsky, so you can hardly fail to learn
something new.

yep, should be fun.

arg! weather forecast has more rain coming.
looks like flood weather for some folks down
stream and in town. the water is already up
to the levees in several areas.

the wetlands have a few more feet of capacity,
but that won't do much good with the ground
already being saturated.


songbird

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


i'm not buying the claim as being true.

That's your prerogative.

i'm still king...


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.


(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.


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.

for a longer term project i'd want ownership.
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. 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.


....
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.

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?


....


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!


...
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.


....
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. 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.

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.

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.

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


songbird

In article ,
songbird wrote:

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

In article ,
songbird wrote:

Billy wrote:
...
The first one has Noam Chomsky, so you can hardly fail to learn
something new.

yep, should be fun.

arg! weather forecast has more rain coming.
looks like flood weather for some folks down
stream and in town. the water is already up
to the levees in several areas.

the wetlands have a few more feet of capacity,
but that won't do much good with the ground
already being saturated.


songbird

Until about a decade ago, we had one town that flooded nearly every
year. Only place I ever knew where flooding was normal. People started
putting their houses on 20' stilts. Then the Corp. of Engineers put in
flood control, and the river has been very sedate ever since. Not that I
wish flood victims harm, but we used to enjoy the floods. It would close
the main road, and the silence was golden. Additionally it was an
enforced vacation, where for a couple of days you just had to sit, and
watch the day slowly go bye. If we got very lucky the power would go off
for a day or so. Not enough to ruin what's in the freezer, just enough
to give a feeling of sanity to the neighborhood.

That said, a few years back it rained until June. Mud everywhere. No
fun, and the garden was late.

Is this normal weather for you?

We just had a 3 day wind storm, which is unusual for Northern California.

Hope everybody that wants to stay dry gets their wish.

Good luck.

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

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

Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
...
The first one has Noam Chomsky, so you can hardly fail to learn
something new.

yep, should be fun.

arg! weather forecast has more rain coming.
looks like flood weather for some folks down
stream and in town. the water is already up
to the levees in several areas.

the wetlands have a few more feet of capacity,
but that won't do much good with the ground
already being saturated.

Until about a decade ago, we had one town that flooded nearly every
year. Only place I ever knew where flooding was normal. People started
putting their houses on 20' stilts. Then the Corp. of Engineers put in
flood control, and the river has been very sedate ever since. Not that I
wish flood victims harm, but we used to enjoy the floods. It would close
the main road, and the silence was golden. Additionally it was an
enforced vacation, where for a couple of days you just had to sit, and
watch the day slowly go bye. If we got very lucky the power would go off
for a day or so. Not enough to ruin what's in the freezer, just enough
to give a feeling of sanity to the neighborhood.

we camped quite a bit when i was young so
bouts of roughing it don't bother me either.
right now i'd welcome a few days of quiet time.


That said, a few years back it rained until June. Mud everywhere. No
fun, and the garden was late.

i'd not enjoy mud season in hilly country.


Is this normal weather for you?

not compared to the past few years, but
going back further this would have been a
more normal.

the good point of having more rain is
that the lakes need the boost. not much
snow the past few years and those hot and
dry summers...


We just had a 3 day wind storm, which is unusual for Northern California.

Hope everybody that wants to stay dry gets their wish.

Good luck.

holding out so far, more rains this morning
and tonight. there was a break that has let
some sink in. for us locally we're fine.
it is still the town down slope from us that
will be more of a risk because it has two rivers
flowing through it that have to push against
all the other water coming from both the north
and the south via other rivers and there's only
one outlet to Lake Huron for all those sources.
add to that how flat the area is and that makes
for some interesting times.

the last time it flooded the town was in the
mid-90s. i think that is when they put in the
levees (i wasn't around then). i'm not sure
we're going to top the levees this time with a
break in the rains coming over the weekend. we'll
see...


songbird

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

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

there's more than one business model.
i keep thinking you have no actual experience
in small businesses

Owned, and operated a small 3,000 case winery for 10 years. Our broker
was screwing us, and our landlord was about to do the same, so we went
to Europe for a year instead.

landlord for a winery, oh my...

Twenty acre minimum to have a winery on agricultural land. One acre of
vineyard = $100,000. As it was, I spent the first 3 mo. in Europe
grinding my teeth, and then I relaxed.

$2M, ouch, around here 20 acres might run
about the price of the one out there, but
it's not prime grape turf here (not enough
hills, foggy and hot and humid, etc.) anyways.
east and west of us there are vinyards coming
along. i'm not sure what they run per acre.

ok, so you have actually been a corporate
overlord. that means your comments are
geared towards the big corporations and not
the smaller ones?


but what do you think of a large company
that does make green efforts (or any company
for that matter)? already they are making
headway even more than the government is in
some areas.

i'm still asking this.


songbird

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

there's more than one business model.
i keep thinking you have no actual experience
in small businesses

Owned, and operated a small 3,000 case winery for 10 years. Our broker
was screwing us, and our landlord was about to do the same, so we went
to Europe for a year instead.

landlord for a winery, oh my...

Twenty acre minimum to have a winery on agricultural land. One acre of
vineyard = $100,000. As it was, I spent the first 3 mo. in Europe
grinding my teeth, and then I relaxed.

$2M, ouch, around here 20 acres might run
about the price of the one out there, but
it's not prime grape turf here (not enough
hills, foggy and hot and humid, etc.) anyways.
east and west of us there are vinyards coming
along. i'm not sure what they run per acre.

ok, so you have actually been a corporate
overlord. that means your comments are
geared towards the big corporations and not
the smaller ones?

Large wineries, in a year with a large harvest, can tell a grower that
they don't want his 200 tons of grapes. That's a lot of grapes to eat.
Inevitably that leads to dickering over price, even though the grower
had a contract. There are provisions for grape quality, and who do you
think determins that?

sounds like a horrible business if you get
treated those ways.


Sometimes a grower can find other buyers, and
negotiate sales. Sometimes the grower will take a chance, and spend his
own money to turn the grapes into wine (custom crush). And, sometimes,
the grapes just sit there and rot, which ****es everybody off, because
the mold spores fly every where.

which would make the next year even harder if
everyone is P.O.ed...


but what do you think of a large company
that does make green efforts (or any company
for that matter)? already they are making
headway even more than the government is in
some areas.

i'm still asking this.

I think they are great people, and I know some do exist, but not enough
to make an impact on our economy.

one company alone buys enough megawatts to cover the
entire output of several wind projects which means that
it is no longer coal, natural gas generated electricity
or one less coal or natural gas power plant built. it's
an impact, maybe not large yet, but tiz there and i'm
glad for it.


I tried to find a list of them, but
the lists would include Whole Foods Markets, GE, and Goldman Sachs.
Eeeew!

you can edit out the ones you don't like. the Billy
approved list at least is better than nothing at all.


songbird

Billy wrote:
Billy wrote:

uhoh, quoting is messed up below...


...
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.

Humor me with an example.

pick any of the far northern tribes.
i'm not sure what the names are now, but
they used to be called Inuit or Athapaskans
or something like that. fairly limited
diet for large parts of the year. also
they are small people (like the many rain
forest tribes of Africa and South America).


American Plains Indians would follow the buffalo , or what ever from
place to place. They were working an environment that they knew.

most of their food came from the buffalo.
that society was not long running, as the
last ice-age was only recently gone.


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.

Again, humor me. I'm not seeing it.

the native groups of the eastern US used
cattail, acorns, corn and wild rice as their
major starches. that's about it, four isn't
a great variety.


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.

It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat seventy-five or so wild
plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish
farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.

you won't have hundreds of thousands of bushmen
in the same area to have that kind of problem, but
i would be very surprised if there were not various
events which caused starvation in bushmen too.

i think you understand that many who starved
during the potato famine starved because of
political reasons. the Irish were still shipping
food to England even as their own people were
starving.


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.
�he Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created
the famine�.

yep in that case and in many many other
cases too, it's often politics or wars
which cause a lot of starvation.


You don't have to be an idiot to starve, but we can talk more about
corporations later.



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.

Perhaps, my understanding is that groups of hunter/gatherers were rather
clanish, and not looking for recruits. When groups got too large, they would
divide ans separate. I'd probably have to do some digging thought to come
up with supporting references though. Unless you'd be willing to accept
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-
gatherer#Social_and_economic_structure
Hunter-gatherer societies also tend to have relatively non-hierarchical,
egalitarian social structures. This might have been more pronounced in
the more mobile societies.

According to archaeologists, violence in hunter-gatherer societies was
ubiquitous. Approximately 25% to 30% of adult male deaths in these
societies were due to homicide, compared to an upper estimate of 3% of
all deaths in the 20th century. The cause of this is near constant
tribal warfa "From the !Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the
Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-
gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly
90% go to war at least once a year." [16]

does that sound like a great way to live?
i think not... but that was a part of how
they controlled their populations to keep
within the bounds of what that land could
support (in addition to infanticide and
elder-suicide).


Full-time leaders, bureaucrats, or artisans are rarely supported by
these societies.[17][18][19] In addition to social and economic equality
in hunter-gatherer societies there is often, though not always, sexual
parity as well.[17][20] Hunter-gatherers are often grouped together
based on kinship and band (or tribe) membership.[20]

i think most have some kind of respected
elder or shaman role which is held apart.


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.

Sedentary hunter/gatherers? I'll need to think about
that for awhile. I've never heard of such a thing.

the far north coastal tribes, gather from the
sea, they cannot wander in the extreme cold.


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...

Being an "elite" was based on a physical??!

no, being an elite means you may have been
bigger to start with. much as in today's
society there is an elite based upon looks
or how tall someone is.


In any event, things were kept clean by the hunter/gatherers moving away
from all their manure, and garbage, and going over the next hill, or
across a valley where there was fresh, clean land.

surely that's a big help if you don't know
how to compost or are too lazy to bury your
wastes.


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

"One straightforward example of what paleopathologists have learned from
skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece
and Turkey show that the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the
end of the ice ages was a generous 5'9" for men, 5'5" for women. With
the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B.C. had
reached a low of 5'3" for men ,5' for women. By classical times heights
were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have
still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.

again this could be some other aspect
happening. not that i'm sure it is, but it
could be. selection for taller or shorter
people is possible and is independent of
nutrition to some degree (not completely,
but possible, after all those herders in
Africa are tall (so they can see their
cattle and see predators? i'm not sure
why actually, but they do seem to select
for tall), but they also live on a fairly
restricted diet (meat, milk, blood being
their major foods)).


Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian
skeletons from burial mounds in the lllinois and Ohio river valleys. At
Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and lllinois
rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a
picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer
culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A.D. 1150. Studies by
George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of
Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found
livelihood. Compared to the hunter- gatherers 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."

ah now we've finally gotten a long enough
study of one society to see it happen. ok,
yay! one society is not the whole of the
world. the Tikopians and the Amazonians
practiced agriculture and seemed to be
healthy for long periods of time (thousands
of years in both cases).

what you really are coming up with is the
case that poorly done agriculture is bad for
the health of certain peoples. which is not
a blanket condemnation that they seem to be
trying to come up with.

one counter-example is good enough to
disprove the universal claim.

right now, we have a very broad variety
in many different agricultural societies.
this is currently being supported by
fossil fuels so diversity in local crops
isn't as quite a problem as it could be.
as oil gets more expensive more and more
people will raise local crops for diversity
because they'll be forced to. otherwise
they'll be subject to the malnutrition that
you are speaking of. this is the difference
between modern times and times past. more
people know better.


-----

Would you settle for his post conceptions? If you read the archiological
record, I don't know what other conclusion you could come to.

Hunter/gatherer: healthy
Farmer: malnourshied, and sick.

the archaeological record is biased too.
only some societies practiced burials in
places that could be found later. the
more stable the society the more likely
they did this. which means that the more
stable societies have an archaeological
record, maybe even a fairly complete one,
but they are trying to compare that
society against a hunter-gatherer bone
record which may not be even close to
being complete. they are missing the ones
who died in infancy and were discared or
the elderly who went off to die alone if
that was the accepted way.

i accept that some societies are healthier
than others, but that's about it. clearly
(at least to me ) not in all cases is the
health of the people determined alone if they
practiced agriculture or not.


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 think it's called putting things into perspective.

i think putting 20-30% deaths by murder into
perspective is a pretty good counter-point.


...
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.

Deference to an individual, because of their hunting kills isn't
stratification
isn't social stratification. When one individual benefits all, and I mean
ALL,
there will be deference, just as there will be for the best stone
chipper, healer, singer, or painter, but that isn't social stratification.

what is it then? i think it is the basis
for stratification. that is how craft-guilds
get started, how priesthoods get started,
because the specialised knowledge starts
getting complicated enough that it requires
years of study to get it right, which means
if the society values those practices it
has to support the setting of some people
apart and come up with a way of feeding
them and protecting them. and that then
pushes agricultural practices along too. it
is a transformation that happens all together
and is not "the result of agriculture".


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.

So it isn't stratification.

last i knew stratified is just
another word for layered.


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.

That's a bit dodgy to say, but if you'll just respond
to what I've responded, we can get on with it.

i have done that.


http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/086...29546060_email
_1p_1_ti

Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization

The evolutionary road is littered with failed experiments, however, and
Manning suggests that agriculture as we have practiced it runs against
both our grain and nature's. Drawing on the work of anthropologists,
biologists, archaeologists, and philosophers, along with his own
travels, he argues that not only our ecological ills-overpopulation,
erosion, pollution-but our social and emotional malaise are rooted in
the devil's bargain we made in our not-so-distant past. And he offers
personal, achievable ways we might re-contour the path we have taken to
resurrect what is most sustainable and sustaining in our own nature and
the planet's.
-----

I know it doesn't prove anything, but at least I, and Jarod Diamond,
aren't alone in this belief.


I can't believe that I found another book to read :O(

hehehe, always more to read.

alas, i'm getting into planting season, and my
health is better than any hunter-gatherer. especially
if you consider i'd have never lived past a day in
a society that didn't have some form of medical
science and an incubator.

i'm still rather fond of the much less than 20-30%
murder rate too, but perhaps that is only a temporary
lull in the mayhem of human existance. if the future
goes wild and crazy we might get back to mass
starvations and high rates of murder as the planet
answers the question of over-population and abuse
of resources.

i certainly hope for better, i don't think a
return to hunting-gathering is likely for a vast
number of people. a subset might be able to do
it as urban hunter-gatherers or those who can
be rich enough to afford enough land and have
some way of protecting it from intruders or
governmental confiscation. the next real hunter-
gatherer societies are likely to be either those
of the post-apocalyptic or on another planet.
if that other planet is one we've had to
engineer then it's pretty likely we've also had
a good shot at doing good work here on this planet
too. at least i try to remain optimistic about
either of those cases. the world can heal itself
given time. we see this in the geological record
after huge events. so, yeah, i am optimistic,
the world will continue, the question is with
or without us?


songbird

Roy wrote:
....
That so-called "Devil's Bargain" is total bullshit fiction.

dude, you just quoted an entire article (and
double spaced it) and then added one line?


songbird

On Thursday, May 2, 2013 9:44:34 AM UTC-6, songbird wrote:
Roy wrote:

...

That so-called "Devil's Bargain" is total bullshit fiction.



dude, you just quoted an entire article (and

double spaced it) and then added one line?

songbird

Sorry about that....will edit if and when there is another posting.

On Thursday, May 2, 2013 9:44:34 AM UTC-6, songbird wrote:
Roy wrote:

...

That so-called "Devil's Bargain" is total bullshit fiction.



dude, you just quoted an entire article (and

double spaced it) and then added one line?

songbird

Dudette: I've noticed some really long postings where you answered
paragraph by paragraph and they were VERY long.
Also the double spacing is how these postings appear on my screen...
I do NOT double-space them...blame Google.

In article ,
Roy wrote:

On Thursday, May 2, 2013 9:44:34 AM UTC-6, songbird wrote:
Roy wrote:

...

That so-called "Devil's Bargain" is total bullshit fiction.



dude, you just quoted an entire article (and

double spaced it) and then added one line?

songbird

Sorry about that....will edit if and when there is another posting.

Feel free to offer some citations for your responses, otherwise it is
just opinion, and you know what they say about opinions.

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

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

Billy wrote:
....
Feel free to offer some citations for your responses, otherwise it is
just opinion, and you know what they say about opinions.


from _Permaculture_, Bill Mollison, 1990 p. 377


"SOILS

In drylands, any soil humus can rapidly decompose (in
dry-cracked soils) to nitrates with heat and water,
giving a sometimes lethal flush of nitrate to new
seedlings. Dry cultivated soils exacerbates this effect.
Mulches or litter on top of the soils prevents both soil
cracking and the lethal effect of rapid temperature gains
that cook feeder roots at the surface, so that in
subsequent rains there is less roots to absorb water.

Fire is destructive of this protective litter. After fire
and cultivation, most of the soil nitrogen, sulphur, and
phosphorous is lost, and even a cool fire loses plant
nutrients to soil water and leaching. When we know
more of the effects of fire in drylands, it is my opinion
that we will use any other method (slashing, rolling,
even light grazing) to reduce fire litter to soil mulch.
It now seems probable that Aboriginal burning has not
only gravely depleted soil nutrients, but caused a
breakdown in soil structure, and perhaps been in
great part responsible for the saltpans that preceded
agriculture. However, agriculture itself is a mon-
strously effective way to speed up this process and
intensify it."

an opinion from someone who wrote a primary text on
permaculture. it would be interesting to know what
observations he used to form that opinion. i've
yet to see anyone else make the obvious connection
between grassland burnings and soil depletion for
drylands. to me the thought upon seeing fires almost
anyplace is of all those nutrients going up in smoke.

the book has been interesting overall. i like many
of his perspectives and how to treat an area based upon
the limit of the water supply and that you cannot have
more people than the worst case scenario will support.
also he recognizes overgrazing as the most damaging
problem for many areas that are currently having
trouble feeding people. and like me he laments the
loss of the forests.


songbird

In article ,
songbird wrote:

Billy wrote:
...
Feel free to offer some citations for your responses, otherwise it is
just opinion, and you know what they say about opinions.


from _Permaculture_, Bill Mollison, 1990 p. 377

And this would be "Permaculture : a designer's manual / by Bill Mollison
; illustrated by Andrew Jeeves", 576 pages, Tagari Publications
(December 1988)

Good thing his books are available at the library. They are very pricy.


"SOILS

In drylands, any soil humus can rapidly decompose (in
dry-cracked soils) to nitrates with heat and water,
giving a sometimes lethal flush of nitrate to new
seedlings. Dry cultivated soils exacerbates this effect.
Mulches or litter on top of the soils prevents both soil
cracking and the lethal effect of rapid temperature gains
that cook feeder roots at the surface, so that in
subsequent rains there is less roots to absorb water.

Warm, wet environments also lead to rapid breakdown of organic material
(OM). This is also the reason that healthy soil should only be 5% by
weight, 10% by volume "OM". Otherwise, you'll pollute just like chemical
fertilizers.

Fire is destructive of this protective litter. After fire
and cultivation, most of the soil nitrogen, sulphur, and
phosphorous is lost, and even a cool fire loses plant
nutrients to soil water and leaching. When we know
more of the effects of fire in drylands, it is my opinion
that we will use any other method (slashing, rolling,
even light grazing) to reduce fire litter to soil mulch.
It now seems probable that Aboriginal burning has not
only gravely depleted soil nutrients, but caused a
breakdown in soil structure, and perhaps been in
great part responsible for the saltpans that preceded
agriculture. However, agriculture itself is a mon-
strously effective way to speed up this process and
intensify it."

In the book by Charles Mann, "1492", it was noted that the Amazonians
used "slashed and burn" agriculture, which was detrimental to the land.
Exhausting the laterite soil, they had to move every couple of years
IIRC. Subsequent archeology revealed that the Amazonians had a much more
complex society that wasn't reflected in their "slash, and burm"
agriculture. Prior to the arrival of diseased Europeans, many Amazonians
lead an urban life based on great orchards. However, to protect
themselves against European diseases, Amazonians left their cities to
live in small groups, which survived by subsistent farming.

an opinion from someone who wrote a primary text on
permaculture. it would be interesting to know what
observations he used to form that opinion. i've
yet to see anyone else make the obvious connection
between grassland burnings and soil depletion for
drylands. to me the thought upon seeing fires almost
anyplace is of all those nutrients going up in smoke.

The soil needs to have organic material in order to hold moisture, and
to feed the micro-organisms that compose the soil ecology, which
ultimately feed the plants. Whether the "OM" is lost by the rapid
oxidation of cellulose in a fire, or the stimulation of micro-organism
in the soil from aeration caused by a plow doesn't make any difference.
Any consistent loss of "OM" from the soil will reduce it's fertility.

the book has been interesting overall. i like many
of his perspectives and how to treat an area based upon
the limit of the water supply and that you cannot have
more people than the worst case scenario will support.
also he recognizes overgrazing as the most damaging
problem for many areas that are currently having
trouble feeding people. and like me he laments the
loss of the forests.

The forests, of course, are the source of freshwater.


songbird

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

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