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OT but a welcome bit of brightness
In article ,
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. i don't think he's much wrong in what he does, but some aspects are not sustainable in the sense that he is using inputs from other areas. Bird, can you reference this? Where do the amendments come from, i've read most of the books he's published (all but two) in a short period of time all together so i can't tell you which of the books mentioned what he does, but i think it is in more than one book he mentions that he hauls in whatever organic materials he can find for cheap. straw, ruined hay, sawdust, wood chips, expired sweet potatoes are some i specifically recall. i can't give book or page numbers. and what do you mean they get run through the cow barn, the pigs, chickens? Are we talking feed, or soil amendments? he uses a deep bedding system for the cows during the winter when he keeps them off the pastures (he doesn't have the mix of grasses in the pastures which resists damage like the folks in the _A Farm for the Future_ segment had... could be climate is harsher and such so they wouldn't grow or he's not gotten into it, dunno.). so he puts down bedding until it gets full of cow poo/pee and then he scatters corn on it and adds another layer and keeps doing that all winter until he can get the cows back to the fields. after they are out of the barns then he lets the pigs in to stir the bedding (they go after the fermenting corn). when they are done then it all gets taken out and spread on the pastures. Thanks, but why do you say he's not building topsoil. He has picked up the pace, but this is how soil is built. http://grist.org/sustainable-farming...e-new-york-tim es-re-sustainable-meat/ While its true that at Polyface our omnivores (poultry and pigs) do eat local GMO (genetically modified organism)-free grain in addition to the forage, the land base required to feed and metabolize the manure is no different than that needed to sustain the same animals in a confinement setting. Even if they ate zero pasturage, the land is the same. The only difference is our animals get sunshine, exercise, fresh pasture salad bars, fresh air, and a respectful life. It has been charged that Polyface is a charade because it depends on grain from industrial farms to maintain soil fertility. First of all, at Polyface we do not assume that all nutrient movement is anti-environmental. In fact, one of the biggest reasons for animals in nature is to move nutrients uphill, against the natural gravitational flow from high ground to low ground. This is why low lands and valleys are fertile and the uplands are less so. Animals are the only mechanism nature has to defy this natural downward flow. Fortunately, predators make the prey animals want to lounge on high ground (where they can see their enemies), which insures that manure will concentrate on high lookout spots rather than in the valleys. Perhaps this is why no ecosystem exists that is devoid of animals. The fact is that nutrient movement is inherently nature-healing. But, it doesnt move very far. And herein lies the difference between grain used at Polyface and that used by the industry: We care where ours comes from. Its not just a commodity. It has an origin and an ending, start to finish, farmer to eater. The closer we can connect the carbon cycles, the more environmentally normal we will become. Second, herbivores are the exception to the entire negative nutrient flow argument because by pruning back the forage to restart the rapid biomass accumulation photosynthetic engine, the net carbon flow compensates for anything lost through harvest. Herbivores do not require tillage or annuals, and that is why all historically deep soils have been created by them, not by omnivores. ------- So, the Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic's system isn't quite closed, but it is creating topsoil (soil with the highest concentration of organic matter and microorganisms), which other meat producers don't. i still give him high marks for what he does compared to many farmers. he at least does understand the importance of topsoil. he loses marks in that he could be using organic corn for his meat chickens (he complained that his source had too much chaff/cob in it, well duh, get a different supplier or grow your own). So he is really just attenuating the impact of conventional farming. I wonder what we would do differently, if we made the decisions. I mean profit isn't the sole motive, or he'd be running a CAFO. (snip) the most informative about the development and gives interesting info between the lines is the book which includes at the end some of the previous newsletters/sales information that they sent out to their customers. i think it was the _Salad Bar Beef_ book... (more priceless banter snipped) Corporations are obligated to make a profit for their investors. Any action that reduces earnings is considered illegal. They may be able to argue that some actions will avoid legal consequences which in the long run will increase earnings. In other words, being a good neighbor costs a corporation too much. an action which loses money is not illegal as if it were there would be no corporations for very long. i think you are confusing what would be considered corporate malfeasance and misuse of corporate resources, but even some of those actions would also not be considered illegal, just inadvisable... Under eBay v. Newman, the law is as Franken said: "it is literally malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it legally can to maximize its profits." Just ask Jim and Craig; no one disputes it's their company, but they're legally prohibited from taking steps to preserve the profit-alongside-community-service mission that's served them well. Maximize profits, or else. The impact of this duty-to-maximize-profits stretches far beyond mere investments. Under Citizens United, corporations now have the First Amendment right to influence our fragile democracy however they want, since they're "people," just like you and me, albeit profit-maximizing zombies who care not for truth, justice, or the American way. Non-profits are a different animal, except for where earnings are channeled into the managements pockets as compensation. When non-profits do try to mitigate a social problem, which reduce corporate profits, the corporations have more litigation power. Take farm cruelty for example. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/us...y-is-becoming- the-crime.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 yeah, i saw that one. somehow i suspect when it gets challenged in court it will get thrown out. some laws passed are not enforceable when put before a jury and a judge. Like The Supremes? Good luck. Clarence Thomas used to be counsel for Monsanto. ... Terra preta should be encouraged to invigorate soils, and sequester CO2. in some areas it is fine, but it is not a universal answer. remember that albedo plays a role in climate. if we covered the earth with dark materials soaking up the sun's radiation we'd bake. so it cannot be used in areas that are left bare for long periods of time. once an area is put into perennial or permaculture then it's a great thing to have. But anything that grows will have a better chance with terra preta. What could Joel Salatin do with charcoal in his soil? Turns out he does (see above) i didn't see any mention of charcoal or biochar in any of his books. he does claim He doesn't. My error. to sequester carbon in the soil, but it is more the kind of sequestering that happens when creating humus. i.e. if he stops adding composted manures and organic materials then his topsoil will gradually compress down as the organic materials rot faster and turn into humus. if he keeps grazing cattle without amending then his soil can only grow as fast as the bedrock will produce nutrients along with what the rain and dust in the air provide. this will not be an inch a year. i can guarantee that. Just reporting what I read. http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0104saveworld.htm don't get me wrong, he's not stupid and he takes care of his fields well enough to have improved them from their previously degraded state. just that he's doing it along with using extra organic materials brought in from outside areas. he also cuts down trees and chips them to use as bedding material. sequester some percentage of carbon for a longer period than the current method he's using. probably also increase some of the nutrient cycling because of the higher bacterial count in the soil. depending upon how he gets the carbon source would make me rate it better or worse... I suspect that the benefits of lignified wood comes from the amount surface area exposed. i'm not sure what lignified means and can't look it up at the moment. do you mean pyrolized instead? lignified to me would mean wood with added lignin and as far as i know wood already contains some amount of lignin... lignified Botany make rigid and woody by the deposition of lignin in cell walls. if you do mean pyrolized then yes, as it is pyrolized it creates more surface area. the temperature and type of feed stock and several other factors (moisture content, rate of heating, etc.) also influence how much surface area there is in the resulting material along with the percentage of carbon and the amount of leftover compounds are not released. Yes, that is what I meant. I doubt, though that Amazonians put such a fine point on their charcoal. ( Great digression into the "dirty deed"; snipped) i'm not, i'm stating facts that are well known. when it comes down to the final equation where each calorie is critical does it matter who eats the one that tips the balance for another person in another place to starve? you may never actually be able to point to any one situation in that fine a detail, but i think you understand that the carrying capacity is a hard limit that once passed is going to take it's due one way or another. War drought, or floods come to mind. I've read that we throw away 30% of the food that we buy. 30%! i saw that quoted recently at 45%. i know here we don't come close to that. perhaps 1-3%. we're very careful with what we do as i consider it a primary fault to waste food. i grew up on the poor side, so i'm more like my grandmother than my neices or nephews. Ma is the same way. very rare i have to feed anything to the wormies other than trimmings from cooking. which makes me wonder what a worm thinks of a piece of chocolate. Great source of tryptophan! Tryptophan is the amino acid that our brains use to make serotonin, which is the neurotransmitter that provides us with our basic feelings of well-being and self-esteem. (another snip) I think this is where corporate greed comes into the picture again. If we stop consuming, they lose potential profits. Notice how many ads in the media pitch an image, and say very little about the product? PR works. Edward Bernais proved it. Lies can become reality. Noam Chomsky used to write some very interesting things too, but i haven't seen anything from him lately. he might have retired or given up in disgust. i haven't looked either so i just could have missed what he's done. You've just missed what he's done, probably because the corporate press is afraid of him. Most recently he's been agitating for human rights for Palestinians. Pretty amazing considering that he was born in 1928. Religion has meaning for many people, but for the fundamentalists, it is still manipulation. No more go forth and prosper, but waiting for the good ship "Rapture". yeah, i really have a difficult time around people who don't care about the world they are in currently because they are more intersted in where they are supposedly going (and also the amount of effort they spend in trying to figure out where everyone else is going too along with making sure to evangelise). if they put 1/10 of the effort into actually helping others and took better care of themselves the world would be a much better place. but then don't get me started... ...a biochar harvester... The charcoal needs to be where the roots are, and plowing the soil isn't good for it. The charcoal will be covered by the crops, and the non-harvested part of the crop would cover the charcoal after that. around here the non-harvested part is not enough to cover the soil, it's stubble for the most part. this is where i do like some other source of production than annual crops. perennial forms of the same crops would be an interesting change. in some ways i do that already via the alfalfa and birdsfoot trefoil green manure and forage crop, but it's not quite the same as a blueberry bush or a beet tree. i'm very interested in what might eventually happen with genetic tinkering, but we're a long ways from that tinkering being really systemically smart. i'd love to do a Rip Van Winkle for about 500 years... I thought you turned the soil. Good for you, if you don't. You're near a forest aren't you? Can't you gather leaves for mulch? Either way it would get the char out of sight. yes, i do turn some gardens using a shovel. i'd do a lot less digging if it was just me running things. unfortunately, i'm not the manager, i can make suggestions, but i get overruled at times. we are a half mile from the woods but it is a park (not a place that i can harvest materials). the past few years i haven't needed to do that sort of thing anyways as i have a friend in a nearby city who is bringing me the leaves from two lawns plus the shredded bark and wood scraps from their wood cutting. they just had two large trees come down in the neighbor's yard so they are cleaning that up for free which means i might be getting several more yards of stuff to use. they brought a load last week and i'm champing at the bit to get it out on the gardens. along with some wood ashes from their wood stove. whatever i can't use for top mulch or mixing in the clay will be used to raise up areas to help keep the garden above the flood stage. i dig a deep trench and then pack it half full of material then pile the dirt on top. eventually it may rot but that is years in the future. in the meantime i have better drainage and higher ground. later if i need materials and don't have any i can excavate this stuff and use it like peat or leaf mold. (snip) ...CO2, biochar and pyrolysis... How much cellulose would you have to char to heat yourself during winter with H2? no, that's a waste as the heat directly from burning the cellulose would be what you want. not a loss from another layer of processing. also the gas given off and condensed if using the cellulose to produce both heat and charcoal can be stored and used just like gasoline. no need to turn anything into H2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas Wood gas is a syngas fuel which can be used as a fuel for furnaces, stoves and vehicles in place of petrol, diesel or other fuels. During the production process biomass or other carbon-containing materials are gasified within the oxygen-limited environment of a wood gas generator to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide. These gases can then be burnt as a fuel within an oxygen rich environment to produce carbon dioxide, water and heat. What is your reference here? check the wiki under pyrolysis, but i have a list Wiki: While the exact composition of bio-oil depends on the biomass source and processing conditions, a typical composition is as follows: Water 20-28%; Suspended solids and pyrolitic lignin 22-36%; Hydroxyacetaldehyde 8-12%; Levoglucosan 3-8%; Acetic acid 4-8%; Acetol 3-6%; Cellubiosan 1-2%; Glyoxal 1-2%; Formaldehyde 3-4%; Formic acid 3-6%. I'll withhold judgement. of products from the Biochar book (_the Biochar Solution_ by Albert Bates) along with a few other thoughts that i've been compiling for further reading/research: - pyrolysis, cellulose and lignin broken down into phenols, aromatics, methane and CO2 - volatile gases - wood vinegar - char 80% carbon - temperature and feedstock dependent, also the pH varies by feedstock and temperature - 300C, 300-500C (wood vinegar), 500-700C (90% carbon and higher surface area) - heating rate, particle size, moisture content - other outputs mentioned: ethanol, dimethyl ether, heat, steam, hot water, CO2, carbon monoxide... - biomass smoke contains: benzene, butadiene, dioxin, formaldehyde, styrene and methylene chloride (to name a few), so clearly should be made in a closed system where those things can be captured instead of emitted. - 1 gram of soot warms atmosphere as much as 1500watt space heater running for a week (what about the kicked up dust from a dark soil if it was amended with biochar? comparable at what percentage? equivalent to percentage of carbon? or?) - dust settling on snow and ice, makes it melt much faster I just think that if we can seriously cut the amount of CO2 that we're putting into the atmosphere, and encourage reforestation, and the production of charcoal, we have a chance of turning this barge around. Otherwise, when the methane hydrate that lines the Atlantic seashore goes of goes off, the tide will roll in to Raliegh, N.C., and Harrisburg, PA. Of course this will aversely affect the profits of some major corporations, but so will having New York go under water. yeah, the hydrates and the methane from thawing arctic tundra and permafrost are also feedback additions that we have to worry about and counter. add more decomposition of carbon compounds in northern soils as they warm... there is a possibility that the northern areas will grow more trees as a result so the feedback cycle might be very interesting. i still think we need to reduce CO2 below what we are adding so the oceans can recover and increase the pH. corals and shells are important parts of building shoreline erosion breaks. They'll have to grow fast to make up for all the forest that is being cut in the tropics. considering how thinly populated much of the far north is it might be enough if the trees are not cut. however, it also has to offset the trees of the northern forests that are dying off due to disease and climate change. like most of these things it is hard to be sure what is going to happen. it can be a source of fuel for cars/trucks/industry too. my ideal for a farm combine would be that it could use a portion of what it harvests (stems, stalks, cobs) to create the fuel on the fly and leave a trail of buried biochar behind it as it goes. add to it a chopper, disk, and cover crop planting on the same pass and you've almost got a sustainable industrial agriculture. Uh, now you've lost me, monoculture, discing the soil? More food come from interplanting. it could be a mix of planted species, but the result is still the same. we get a portion of buried charcoal from each pass of the harvester/planter and that adds up over time to a significant amount of sequestered CO2. if you have to spread something on the soil wouldn't it be best if it were done by using fuel derived right there instead of from fuel transported in? if we can go perennial plants for cereal grain production (corn, wheat, rice) and also perennial legumes (i ain't giving up my beans bucko ) for adding some nitrogen that still does not get charcoal into the ground. there would still have to be some method of harvesting and spreading the charcoal and it makes the most sense to me if it were to happen as a part of the same process be it from burning the fields once in a while (bad idea as all that energy is then wasted where it could otherwise be used as a food source or a fuel -- not counting the air pollution aspect). My only doubt is with the conversion of the wood to fuel/char. without having worked on anything like this directly i can't say, but you could not do it well as a combined process in one chamber instead you have to divide the materials and one path goes to the burning for fuel/heat/steam and the other is for char and gas production so that the gas can be condensed and then burned or if it is extra it can be saved for fueling the next years tasks, used as winter heating or sold. or to keep the thought experiment running, perhaps just digging a deep enough trench as the harvester goes, burying the dry materials, firing it and piling dirt on it as it goes. so in that way the actual firing chamber is the earth itself and that keeps the smoke, soot, volatiles and some of the CO2 right in the soil. sure it ****es off some of the soil food web for a while, but as soon as it cools off and there is some settling, rains the critters will invade and colonize. with each pass as the years go by it will build the biochar and soil organic materials as you would have some that aren't burned/charred. ... consider for a longer term project where fast growing trees could be planted, then after a few years (seven or less for some poplars i've seen grow here) they could be chopped and left to dry and then chipped and burned on the fly and the charcoal buried at the same time. no crop needed to harvest but there might be a wood gas surplus that could be stored and then used later as fuel. not sure about that though as wood chipping might need a lot more power than dragging a single blade through the soil and spinning some blades and a fan. Europeans plant lots of poplar for firewood. Forests are so thick that you can't see 5 feet into them. i'm sure plenty of it is planted here too. i know the university forestry department has a lot of research going on using them. in some cases trying to breed trees with less lignin making it easier to process for paper products and similar aspects of changing the trees for industrial reasons. ... ...HERE... ... that's a lot of tomatoes! which do you like the best or the least? do you put them up or freeze them? Eyes eats them! It's only about 10 vines in the soil, and 2 in containers. If I was going to put them up I would be planting romas, or San Marzanos. Between salads, sandwiches, and gazpacho there won't be any left over, especially now that I know that I can use green tomatoes in making salsa verde for enchiladas. I hope to have early ripening, mid ripening, and late ripening tomatoes, i.e. a long tomato season. good luck! so far this has been the most normal spring we've had in several years. we actually got rain yesterday and a few minutes ago it was raining again. happiness! that will green up the plants and wake up the wormies. three dry days now would be perfect as i could get things spread and dug in and perhaps even some planting done. last year for us the Roma tomatoes were ok for adding to the salsa to give it some more thickness, but they didn't do much for juice. That's why they're good for making sauce. You don't have to reduce them as much. have you ever tried the viva italia? No, I grow the Juliet which is similar to the viva italia, but about a third the size. do you have a favorite tomato? Probably the "Striped German". A little lower acid than the Brandywine, but is very perfumed, at least it is when grown here. Whether it is location, or nature, I don't know. I was reading, when the perfume of it struck me. I looked up, and my wife was slicing them. ... i've wanted to go back and look at his book on germs and steel, so those will be the next books on the list. You may want to look at http://www.livinganthropologically.c...lture-as-worst -mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race/ too. without having a chance yet to look at the article i still can't agree with the gist of the title completely. i think there are ways of doing agriculture that are sustainable. i'm stuck off-line for a while so i'll have to get back to this later. Agriculture created class divisions, concentration of wealth and inequality, and illness. It's a good read. but back to international waters and fisheries. we as a world have to get agreements and enforcements in place to deal with rogue fleets and overfishing. otherwise it's just not going to be there later as a food source. It won't be either if it is poisoned with carcinogenic confetti of plastic. if we can decrease production of plastics that become poisonous and replace them with materials that safely degrade then that would help a great deal. i'm very much in favor of taxing and regulating plastics based upon how much gets recycled and then using that tax money to fund cleanup efforts to harvest and recycle what is floating on the seas. i'm generally all for any type of program which taxes products and materials based upon the percent that is recyclable and making the taxes both inversely and exponentially tied to the percentage that is recycled. so for things that are 100% recycled there is no additional tax, but for items that are not recycleable the tax is quite large to offset the unsustainable costs of dealing with it. that type of policy would immediately create some jobs for people to work in the recycling processes, but also i'd have bounties for picking up trash that get paid out of fast food and other waste streams that seem to be showing up as debris along the road (or in the air). if only i were king. people would hate me, but i'd sleep at night knowing the world had a more sustainable future. Right on, but the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre was described as nearly the size of Africa in 2005, and it is only one of several gyres. That's a lot of plastic. The plastic, for the most part isn't poisonous, but it is non-polar, and attracts things like polychlorinated biphenyls, and dioxin. money and capital after all are figments of the imagination, so if you can get enough people convinced that CO2 sequestration has value then some kind of market forces will be created along with that determination of value. now though, i think that value needs to be set higher and immediately to get the whole process going. Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. -Lucy Parsons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Parsons who said anything about voting? i'm a benevolent dictator. first order of business is governmental reform and rewriting the constitution to change election laws (there wouldn't be elections any longer it would be representation by random selection). second order of business would be environmental reforms would be to make the USoA the first nation to go 100% recycling, get off oil completely and outlaw *cides and restore the grasslands, wetlands, rivers, to hold back water instead of the current policies which exacerbate the flash flooding and drought low flow patterns. plant more trees, restore marginal lands by using keyline water traps and stacking rocks and then planting trees to help keep things more stable and shaded. soak up CO2, more trees that can be planted in city parks and vacant lots that aren't otherwise claimed for community gardens. third order of business is to get rid of minimum wage laws for unskilled labor. like the above trash bounty type of program that would get trash picked up and recycled or incinerated or turned into biochar. the price can be good enough to make marine floating trash worth the effort. mixed in there are likely to be a good deal of organic materials that could be charred, chipped or otherwise used. i think some folks would like to work but can't because the cost for minimum wages is too much for what the job is actually worth. let's say that a job picking up trash along the road is worth $2/hr and with a bounty on trash that might bump the effort up to $3/hr. that's a good enough wage to get some kids out to earn extra money, or a older or retired person who would like a little extra to help with bills. good exercise, getting paid for it and not having to sit at a desk inside. think about the health benefit from that or even if they wanted to help out in a community garden or a CSA. most of these cannot afford to pay a lot but they might be able to afford a little. subsidized by trash and fast food taxes it would be the best health improvement thing that could be done with a very small shift of money. some of that money then gets taxes as income and some more people get back on the payroll and contributing to social security and medicaide. a bunch of small peanuts in terms of amounts but it adds up in aggregate. if i were a poor country with severely depleted soils in need of an energy source or organic materials to recondition the topsoil i'd be looking into buying some old tankers and then sending them off to harvest a floating goldmine. sunlight can degrade quite a bit of toxic compounds, soil bacteria can do a good job on other and fungi can work on those that don't get taken care of by the first two. short of heavy metals or radioactives i don't think there's much likely to be floating that i'd worry about once it was sorted and processed. any plastics that are too toxic to be reused could be incinerated or cracked into other molecules. a poor country with a lot of heat and sun could use mirrors to concentrate sunlight and cook stuff to dry it and char it. the energy could be used to desalinate water or fuel pumps to move sea water into desalination greenhouses and condenser setups. i'm not sure what works better. they'd have a lot of free plastics to recycle into sheeting to make covers. Ah, back to procreating are we? ...the oceans, floating trash... You have my vote for dictator. Pay everyone a living wage. Enough of this employment of wage slaves. Polyethylene is not biodegraded in any practical time scale. There is no mechanism in the marine environment to biodegrade that long a molecule." Even if photodegradable nets helped marine mammals live, their powdery residue remains in the sea, where the filter feeders will find it. if it is large enough to be filtered out then it is: incorporated in the animal, excreted or the animal is eaten before it has done any of the previous two things. Or moved up the food chain by its predator. it if is a particle it passes through and gets conglomerated and then would settle out. if it can't be degraded then it becomes a substrate (just like mineral grains or humus or other nearly undigestable materials). These are poisonous materials that dissolve in fat. Once in the body, they persist. They get passed from predator to predator, and concentrated in the top predator, us. Best get your fish from down the food chain, not the top. if it is incorporated in the animal then at some point it settles out and gets buried. excreted materials are usually coated with mucous often also with other stuff like bacteria and fungi. i.e. also things that tend to clump and settle. In the predator. where? In the fat tissues. These are unnatural compounds that have no method of being metabolized. That's why they are no longer produced. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persist...nd_toxic_subst ances i don't recall the alimentary canal having a permanent resting place. undigestible stuff goes through. the original claim is that the stuff doesn't have any way of being broken down wasn't it? Maybe not, but if you eat this stuff, you will lose your ass, so to speak. ... songbird Still in the wild, - Billy -- Remember Rachel Corrie http://www.rachelcorrie.org/ Welcome to the New America. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg |
#33
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OT but a welcome bit of brightness
Billy wrote:
.... Besides the BBCs A Farm for a Future, the book , Gaia's Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture (Paperback) by Toby Hemenway http://www.amazon.com/Gaias-Garden-S...culture/dp/160 3580298/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271266976&sr=1-1 (It's at the library) is a good introduction to permaculture. i'll add it to the list, thanks. songbird |
#34
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OT but a welcome bit of brightness
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. http://grist.org/sustainable-farming...e-new-york-tim es-re-sustainable-meat/ While its true that at Polyface our omnivores (poultry and pigs) do eat local GMO (genetically modified organism)-free grain in addition to the forage, the land base required to feed and metabolize the manure is no different than that needed to sustain the same animals in a confinement setting. Even if they ate zero pasturage, the land is the same. The only difference is our animals get sunshine, exercise, fresh pasture salad bars, fresh air, and a respectful life. It has been charged that Polyface is a charade because it depends on grain from industrial farms to maintain soil fertility. First of all, at Polyface we do not assume that all nutrient movement is anti-environmental. In fact, one of the biggest reasons for animals in nature is to move nutrients uphill, against the natural gravitational flow from high ground to low ground. This is why low lands and valleys are fertile and the uplands are less so. Animals are the only mechanism nature has to defy this natural downward flow. Fortunately, predators make the prey animals want to lounge on high ground (where they can see their enemies), which insures that manure will concentrate on high lookout spots rather than in the valleys. Perhaps this is why no ecosystem exists that is devoid of animals. The fact is that nutrient movement is inherently nature-healing. But, it doesnt move very far. And herein lies the difference between grain used at Polyface and that used by the industry: We care where ours comes from. Its not just a commodity. It has an origin and an ending, start to finish, farmer to eater. The closer we can connect the carbon cycles, the more environmentally normal we will become. Second, herbivores are the exception to the entire negative nutrient flow argument because by pruning back the forage to restart the rapid biomass accumulation photosynthetic engine, the net carbon flow compensates for anything lost through harvest. Herbivores do not require tillage or annuals, and that is why all historically deep soils have been created by them, not by omnivores. ------- So, the Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic's system isn't quite closed, but it is creating topsoil (soil with the highest concentration of organic matter and microorganisms), which other meat producers don't. i still give him high marks for what he does compared to many farmers. he at least does understand the importance of topsoil. he loses marks in that he could be using organic corn for his meat chickens (he complained that his source had too much chaff/cob in it, well duh, get a different supplier or grow your own). So he is really just attenuating the impact of conventional farming. I wonder what we would do differently, if we made the decisions. I mean profit isn't the sole motive, or he'd be running a CAFO. well, that is the problem with any sustainable farming effort, that it must work within the broader society and economics to keep going. his farm has to make enough money to support him and his wife and children and the interns that stay there. he can't afford to not have money for taxes and the other basics needed that cannot be provided by the farm. if i were claiming to be a sustainable farmer i'd be working with a supplier to fix the problem. 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. 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. .... Corporations are obligated to make a profit for their investors. Any action that reduces earnings is considered illegal. They may be able to argue that some actions will avoid legal consequences which in the long run will increase earnings. In other words, being a good neighbor costs a corporation too much. an action which loses money is not illegal as if it were there would be no corporations for very long. i think you are confusing what would be considered corporate malfeasance and misuse of corporate resources, but even some of those actions would also not be considered illegal, just inadvisable... Under eBay v. Newman, the law is as Franken said: "it is literally malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it legally can to maximize its profits." Just ask Jim and Craig; no one disputes it's their company, but they're legally prohibited from taking steps to preserve the profit-alongside-community-service mission that's served them well. Maximize profits, or else. i think that is a case where the company should be taken private or turned into a non-profit. if their social aims are broader than being a business then i think that is a more accurate classification for them anyways. The impact of this duty-to-maximize-profits stretches far beyond mere investments. Under Citizens United, corporations now have the First Amendment right to influence our fragile democracy however they want, since they're "people," just like you and me, albeit profit-maximizing zombies who care not for truth, justice, or the American way. i still think you have a bit too jaded a view of corporations. not all are as bad as Monsanto or whatever the devil of the moment is. Non-profits are a different animal, except for where earnings are channeled into the managements pockets as compensation. When non-profits do try to mitigate a social problem, which reduce corporate profits, the corporations have more litigation power. Take farm cruelty for example. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/us...y-is-becoming- the-crime.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 yeah, i saw that one. somehow i suspect when it gets challenged in court it will get thrown out. some laws passed are not enforceable when put before a jury and a judge. Like The Supremes? Good luck. Clarence Thomas used to be counsel for Monsanto. it will be interesting to follow how they talk about "free speech" in one aspect (campaign funding) yet have this other limited speech in another aspect. they might try to justify it but i think the judges and juries are a bit more able to see through this. likely it won't ever see the Supreme Court. too obvious a bonehead law that deserves a spanking. ... Terra preta should be encouraged to invigorate soils, and sequester CO2. in some areas it is fine, but it is not a universal answer. remember that albedo plays a role in climate. if we covered the earth with dark materials soaking up the sun's radiation we'd bake. so it cannot be used in areas that are left bare for long periods of time. once an area is put into perennial or permaculture then it's a great thing to have. But anything that grows will have a better chance with terra preta. What could Joel Salatin do with charcoal in his soil? Turns out he does (see above) i didn't see any mention of charcoal or biochar in any of his books. he does claim He doesn't. My error. it happens. to sequester carbon in the soil, but it is more the kind of sequestering that happens when creating humus. i.e. if he stops adding composted manures and organic materials then his topsoil will gradually compress down as the organic materials rot faster and turn into humus. if he keeps grazing cattle without amending then his soil can only grow as fast as the bedrock will produce nutrients along with what the rain and dust in the air provide. this will not be an inch a year. i can guarantee that. Just reporting what I read. http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0104saveworld.htm ok. don't get me wrong, he's not stupid and he takes care of his fields well enough to have improved them from their previously degraded state. just that he's doing it along with using extra organic materials brought in from outside areas. he also cuts down trees and chips them to use as bedding material. sequester some percentage of carbon for a longer period than the current method he's using. probably also increase some of the nutrient cycling because of the higher bacterial count in the soil. depending upon how he gets the carbon source would make me rate it better or worse... I suspect that the benefits of lignified wood comes from the amount surface area exposed. i'm not sure what lignified means and can't look it up at the moment. do you mean pyrolized instead? lignified to me would mean wood with added lignin and as far as i know wood already contains some amount of lignin... lignified Botany make rigid and woody by the deposition of lignin in cell walls. ok, haha, good to know i wasn't far off in what i thought lignin was involved in. if you do mean pyrolized then yes, as it is pyrolized it creates more surface area. the temperature and type of feed stock and several other factors (moisture content, rate of heating, etc.) also influence how much surface area there is in the resulting material along with the percentage of carbon and the amount of leftover compounds are not released. Yes, that is what I meant. I doubt, though that Amazonians put such a fine point on their charcoal. they may have. hundreds of years experience and tradition of making terra preta they might have had a fairly sophisticated knowledge. unfortunately, we don't have any of their writings. a modern analysis of the layers at an undisturbed site would be very interesting. ....food wastage... very rare i have to feed anything to the wormies other than trimmings from cooking. which makes me wonder what a worm thinks of a piece of chocolate. Great source of tryptophan! Tryptophan is the amino acid that our brains use to make serotonin, which is the neurotransmitter that provides us with our basic feelings of well-being and self-esteem. it's one of several tree crops that i'd like to grow and can't because of the climate. (another snip) I think this is where corporate greed comes into the picture again. If we stop consuming, they lose potential profits. Notice how many ads in the media pitch an image, and say very little about the product? PR works. Edward Bernais proved it. Lies can become reality. Noam Chomsky used to write some very interesting things too, but i haven't seen anything from him lately. he might have retired or given up in disgust. i haven't looked either so i just could have missed what he's done. You've just missed what he's done, probably because the corporate press is afraid of him. Most recently he's been agitating for human rights for Palestinians. Pretty amazing considering that he was born in 1928. he's one of my heroes. i wish him many more years of cranky intellectual poking. .... ...CO2, biochar and pyrolysis... How much cellulose would you have to char to heat yourself during winter with H2? no, that's a waste as the heat directly from burning the cellulose would be what you want. not a loss from another layer of processing. also the gas given off and condensed if using the cellulose to produce both heat and charcoal can be stored and used just like gasoline. no need to turn anything into H2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas Wood gas is a syngas fuel which can be used as a fuel for furnaces, stoves and vehicles in place of petrol, diesel or other fuels. During the production process biomass or other carbon-containing materials are gasified within the oxygen-limited environment of a wood gas generator to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide. These gases can then be burnt as a fuel within an oxygen rich environment to produce carbon dioxide, water and heat. What is your reference here? check the wiki under pyrolysis, but i have a list Wiki: While the exact composition of bio-oil depends on the biomass source and processing conditions, a typical composition is as follows: Water 20-28%; Suspended solids and pyrolitic lignin 22-36%; Hydroxyacetaldehyde 8-12%; Levoglucosan 3-8%; Acetic acid 4-8%; Acetol 3-6%; Cellubiosan 1-2%; Glyoxal 1-2%; Formaldehyde 3-4%; Formic acid 3-6%. I'll withhold judgement. bio-oil is a different topic. i'm not going there as i don't have petrochemical or specific refinery knowledge in detail (i do know something about refineries, distillations, catalysts and such, but that's about it). .... ...HERE... .... I hope to have early ripening, mid ripening, and late ripening tomatoes, i.e. a long tomato season. good luck! so far this has been the most normal spring we've had in several years. we actually got rain yesterday and a few minutes ago it was raining again. happiness! that will green up the plants and wake up the wormies. three dry days now would be perfect as i could get things spread and dug in and perhaps even some planting done. now it's looking like it will be too wet for a while longer. days and days of rain. my water catches have gotten a good workout. last year for us the Roma tomatoes were ok for adding to the salsa to give it some more thickness, but they didn't do much for juice. That's why they're good for making sauce. You don't have to reduce them as much. have you ever tried the viva italia? No, I grow the Juliet which is similar to the viva italia, but about a third the size. smaller works out better for ripening in uncertain times too as far as i'm concerned. do you have a favorite tomato? Probably the "Striped German". A little lower acid than the Brandywine, but is very perfumed, at least it is when grown here. Whether it is location, or nature, I don't know. I was reading, when the perfume of it struck me. I looked up, and my wife was slicing them. as we put up most of the tomatoes we grow we need a regular acid tomato. ... i've wanted to go back and look at his book on germs and steel, so those will be the next books on the list. You may want to look at http://www.livinganthropologically.c...lture-as-worst -mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race/ too. i did, finally, and ran away with my nose plugged and wishing i had tongs. it seems that Jared gets the anthropologists upset. without having a chance yet to look at the article i still can't agree with the gist of the title completely. i think there are ways of doing agriculture that are sustainable. i'm stuck off-line for a while so i'll have to get back to this later. Agriculture created class divisions, concentration of wealth and inequality, and illness. It's a good read. i don't see agriculture as a cause of things as i think that agriculture, cities and specialization came about all together as groupings of humans got larger. why they got larger is also a combination of many factors. one of those might simply be because it's more fun to hang with more people than to be alone for most people. loners are a minority. another reason could have also been for protection from other groups, i.e. weaponization when stone tools used to be the greatest risk a person had to face it wasn't quite the same thing but then slings, arrows, spears, and armor started showing up and people banded together as armies then in order to be safe you needed your homies at your back. out on the range no longer is as appealing when you might get run over by an army and your farm ransacked. so, no, i don't put the ills of modern society on agriculture. but back to international waters and fisheries. we as a world have to get agreements and enforcements in place to deal with rogue fleets and overfishing. otherwise it's just not going to be there later as a food source. It won't be either if it is poisoned with carcinogenic confetti of plastic. if we can decrease production of plastics that become poisonous and replace them with materials that safely degrade then that would help a great deal. i'm very much in favor of taxing and regulating plastics based upon how much gets recycled and then using that tax money to fund cleanup efforts to harvest and recycle what is floating on the seas. i'm generally all for any type of program which taxes products and materials based upon the percent that is recyclable and making the taxes both inversely and exponentially tied to the percentage that is recycled. so for things that are 100% recycled there is no additional tax, but for items that are not recycleable the tax is quite large to offset the unsustainable costs of dealing with it. that type of policy would immediately create some jobs for people to work in the recycling processes, but also i'd have bounties for picking up trash that get paid out of fast food and other waste streams that seem to be showing up as debris along the road (or in the air). if only i were king. people would hate me, but i'd sleep at night knowing the world had a more sustainable future. Right on, but the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre was described as nearly the size of Africa in 2005, and it is only one of several gyres. That's a lot of plastic. well then, clearly time to get started on such a large project. The plastic, for the most part isn't poisonous, but it is non-polar, and attracts things like polychlorinated biphenyls, and dioxin. incineration or refining could change or destroy those compounds. ....if only i were king... the energy could be used to desalinate water or fuel pumps to move sea water into desalination greenhouses and condenser setups. i'm not sure what works better. they'd have a lot of free plastics to recycle into sheeting to make covers. Ah, back to procreating are we? plant propagation or water desalinization wise. i mean green house covers. ...the oceans, floating trash... You have my vote for dictator. Pay everyone a living wage. Enough of this employment of wage slaves. what if a person doesn't need that much? isn't a part of the destruction of resources by a greedy society the problem that people don't learn moderation? or that they aren't allowed to adjust their own demands because the system has a one-size fits all mentality (super-size me bucko)? i dislike minimum wage legislation. since when do i want the government telling me what my labor is worth? what if i want to work for less for a charity or non-profit? i don't need a minimum wage. i need the government to get out of my way. right now there are a lot of low skilled jobs that get done by sub-contractors or individuals and they are being paid cash. so no taxes are being collected for social security or medicare for those workers. they may never be in the position to become a full time worker. ....polyethylene plastic particles... Or moved up the food chain by its predator. it if is a particle it passes through and gets conglomerated and then would settle out. if it can't be degraded then it becomes a substrate (just like mineral grains or humus or other nearly undigestable materials). These are poisonous materials that dissolve in fat. Once in the body, they persist. They get passed from predator to predator, and concentrated in the top predator, us. Best get your fish from down the food chain, not the top. i don't eat that much fish any longer. i used to eat sardines a few times a week or canned tuna. then i discovered sashimi and lost my taste for canned tuna and the price of sardines went up too and i found out i'd much rather grow and put up as much of my own food as possible. instead of buying fish from thousands of miles away i'm eating more from foods grown a few feet away. if it is incorporated in the animal then at some point it settles out and gets buried. excreted materials are usually coated with mucous often also with other stuff like bacteria and fungi. i.e. also things that tend to clump and settle. In the predator. where? In the fat tissues. These are unnatural compounds that have no method of being metabolized. That's why they are no longer produced. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persist...nd_toxic_subst ances yes, i know about those. i've also heard it being a method of cleaning up an environment by harvesting the bioaccumulators of such things and then incinerating them too. yuck. this sort of problem is why i'm very much in favor of testing of all materials in use and recycling taxes. so we have the means for getting things cleaned up and taken care of. i don't recall the alimentary canal having a permanent resting place. undigestible stuff goes through. the original claim is that the stuff doesn't have any way of being broken down wasn't it? Maybe not, but if you eat this stuff, you will lose your ass, so to speak. i wouldn't eat parts of plastic knowingly. i try to avoid buying things packed in plastic. as for pollution and plastic, you know i'd get on with cleaning it up no matter how much of it there is or how long it took. a 3000 sq mile floating mass is unlikely to be thick so perhaps it would be 3000 trips of a large tanker? get 100 tankers and that becomes 30 trips. processing and sorting would be a lot of work. yay for real jobs. songbird |
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OT but a welcome bit of brightness
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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. (snipped for brevity) i still give him high marks for what he does compared to many farmers. he at least does understand the importance of topsoil. he loses marks in that he could be using organic corn for his meat chickens (he complained that his source had too much chaff/cob in it, well duh, get a different supplier or grow your own). So he is really just attenuating the impact of conventional farming. I wonder what we would do differently, if we made the decisions. I mean profit isn't the sole motive, or he'd be running a CAFO. well, that is the problem with any sustainable farming effort, that it must work within the broader society and economics to keep going. his farm has to make enough money to support him and his wife and children and the interns that stay there. he can't afford to not have money for taxes and the other basics needed that cannot be provided by the farm. if i were claiming to be a sustainable farmer i'd be working with a supplier to fix the problem. 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. 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. ... Corporations are obligated to make a profit for their investors. Any action that reduces earnings is considered illegal. They may be able to argue that some actions will avoid legal consequences which in the long run will increase earnings. In other words, being a good neighbor costs a corporation too much. an action which loses money is not illegal as if it were there would be no corporations for very long. i think you are confusing what would be considered corporate malfeasance and misuse of corporate resources, but even some of those actions would also not be considered illegal, just inadvisable... Under eBay v. Newman, the law is as Franken said: "it is literally malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it legally can to maximize its profits." Just ask Jim and Craig; no one disputes it's their company, but they're legally prohibited from taking steps to preserve the profit-alongside-community-service mission that's served them well. Maximize profits, or else. i think that is a case where the company should be taken private or turned into a non-profit. if their social aims are broader than being a business then i think that is a more accurate classification for them anyways. $$$$$$$$ won't permit. The impact of this duty-to-maximize-profits stretches far beyond mere investments. Under Citizens United, corporations now have the First Amendment right to influence our fragile democracy however they want, since they're "people," just like you and me, albeit profit-maximizing zombies who care not for truth, justice, or the American way. i still think you have a bit too jaded a view of corporations. not all are as bad as Monsanto or whatever the devil of the moment is. See the movie, "The Corporation", it's on DVD. It's also on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw Non-profits are a different animal, except for where earnings are channeled into the managements pockets as compensation. When non-profits do try to mitigate a social problem, which reduce corporate profits, the corporations have more litigation power. Take farm cruelty for example. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/us...y-is-becoming- the-crime.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 yeah, i saw that one. somehow i suspect when it gets challenged in court it will get thrown out. some laws passed are not enforceable when put before a jury and a judge. Like The Supremes? Good luck. Clarence Thomas used to be counsel for Monsanto. it will be interesting to follow how they talk about "free speech" in one aspect (campaign funding) yet have this other limited speech in another aspect. they might try to justify it but i think the judges and juries are a bit more able to see through this. likely it won't ever see the Supreme Court. too obvious a bonehead law that deserves a spanking. The history of the Supreme court shows it is very susceptible to wealthy interests. I wish us all good luck. ... Terra preta should be encouraged to invigorate soils, and sequester CO2. in some areas it is fine, but it is not a universal answer. remember that albedo plays a role in climate. if we covered the earth with dark materials soaking up the sun's radiation we'd bake. so it cannot be used in areas that are left bare for long periods of time. once an area is put into perennial or permaculture then it's a great thing to have. But anything that grows will have a better chance with terra preta. What could Joel Salatin do with charcoal in his soil? Turns out he does (see above) i didn't see any mention of charcoal or biochar in any of his books. he does claim He doesn't. My error. it happens. So my wife tells me ;o( to sequester carbon in the soil, but it is more the kind of sequestering that happens when creating humus. i.e. if he stops adding composted manures and organic materials then his topsoil will gradually compress down as the organic materials rot faster and turn into humus. if he keeps grazing cattle without amending then his soil can only grow as fast as the bedrock will produce nutrients along with what the rain and dust in the air provide. this will not be an inch a year. i can guarantee that. Just reporting what I read. http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0104saveworld.htm ok. don't get me wrong, he's not stupid and he takes care of his fields well enough to have improved them from their previously degraded state. just that he's doing it along with using extra organic materials brought in from outside areas. he also cuts down trees and chips them to use as bedding material. sequester some percentage of carbon for a longer period than the current method he's using. probably also increase some of the nutrient cycling because of the higher bacterial count in the soil. depending upon how he gets the carbon source would make me rate it better or worse... I suspect that the benefits of lignified wood comes from the amount surface area exposed. i'm not sure what lignified means and can't look it up at the moment. do you mean pyrolized instead? lignified to me would mean wood with added lignin and as far as i know wood already contains some amount of lignin... lignified Botany make rigid and woody by the deposition of lignin in cell walls. ok, haha, good to know i wasn't far off in what i thought lignin was involved in. if you do mean pyrolized then yes, as it is pyrolized it creates more surface area. the temperature and type of feed stock and several other factors (moisture content, rate of heating, etc.) also influence how much surface area there is in the resulting material along with the percentage of carbon and the amount of leftover compounds are not released. Yes, that is what I meant. I doubt, though that Amazonians put such a fine point on their charcoal. they may have. hundreds of years experience and tradition of making terra preta they might have had a fairly sophisticated knowledge. unfortunately, we don't have any of their writings. a modern analysis of the layers at an undisturbed site would be very interesting. The grain of the wood and the heat applied to it is also important in making black powder. (another snip) I think this is where corporate greed comes into the picture again. If we stop consuming, they lose potential profits. Notice how many ads in the media pitch an image, and say very little about the product? PR works. Edward Bernais proved it. Lies can become reality. Noam Chomsky used to write some very interesting things too, but i haven't seen anything from him lately. he might have retired or given up in disgust. i haven't looked either so i just could have missed what he's done. You've just missed what he's done, probably because the corporate press is afraid of him. Most recently he's been agitating for human rights for Palestinians. Pretty amazing considering that he was born in 1928. he's one of my heroes. i wish him many more years of cranky intellectual poking. You may enjoy his encounter with William F. Buckley. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbTxLmbCoo4 ... ...CO2, biochar and pyrolysis... How much cellulose would you have to char to heat yourself during winter with H2? no, that's a waste as the heat directly from burning the cellulose would be what you want. not a loss from another layer of processing. also the gas given off and condensed if using the cellulose to produce both heat and charcoal can be stored and used just like gasoline. no need to turn anything into H2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas Wood gas is a syngas fuel which can be used as a fuel for furnaces, stoves and vehicles in place of petrol, diesel or other fuels. During the production process biomass or other carbon-containing materials are gasified within the oxygen-limited environment of a wood gas generator to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide. These gases can then be burnt as a fuel within an oxygen rich environment to produce carbon dioxide, water and heat. What is your reference here? check the wiki under pyrolysis, but i have a list Wiki: While the exact composition of bio-oil depends on the biomass source and processing conditions, a typical composition is as follows: Water 20-28%; Suspended solids and pyrolitic lignin 22-36%; Hydroxyacetaldehyde 8-12%; Levoglucosan 3-8%; Acetic acid 4-8%; Acetol 3-6%; Cellubiosan 1-2%; Glyoxal 1-2%; Formaldehyde 3-4%; Formic acid 3-6%. I'll withhold judgement. bio-oil is a different topic. i'm not going there as i don't have petrochemical or specific refinery knowledge in detail (i do know something about refineries, distillations, catalysts and such, but that's about it). ... ...HERE... ... I hope to have early ripening, mid ripening, and late ripening tomatoes, i.e. a long tomato season. good luck! so far this has been the most normal spring we've had in several years. we actually got rain yesterday and a few minutes ago it was raining again. happiness! that will green up the plants and wake up the wormies. three dry days now would be perfect as i could get things spread and dug in and perhaps even some planting done. now it's looking like it will be too wet for a while longer. days and days of rain. my water catches have gotten a good workout. Our squash are in the ground i.e. 2 Portofinos, 2 Crookneck, and 2 Zucchini Romanescos. There are also some bitter melons, and zucchini replicante, that aren't ready yet for planting. last year for us the Roma tomatoes were ok for adding to the salsa to give it some more thickness, but they didn't do much for juice. That's why they're good for making sauce. You don't have to reduce them as much. have you ever tried the viva italia? No, I grow the Juliet which is similar to the viva italia, but about a third the size. smaller works out better for ripening in uncertain times too as far as i'm concerned. It sets in about 70 days, a prolific plant, and even though it is a hybrid, it's off spring are very similar to the parents. do you have a favorite tomato? Probably the "Striped German". A little lower acid than the Brandywine, but is very perfumed, at least it is when grown here. Whether it is location, or nature, I don't know. I was reading, when the perfume of it struck me. I looked up, and my wife was slicing them. 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. ... i've wanted to go back and look at his book on germs and steel, so those will be the next books on the list. You may want to look at http://www.livinganthropologically.c...lture-as-worst -mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race/ too. i did, finally, and ran away with my nose plugged and wishing i had tongs. it seems that Jared gets the anthropologists upset. While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so called primitive people, like the Kalahari Bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only twelve to nineteen hours for one group of Bushmen, fourteen hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and ninety-three grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. 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. 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. 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. 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) without having a chance yet to look at the article i still can't agree with the gist of the title completely. i think there are ways of doing agriculture that are sustainable. i'm stuck off-line for a while so i'll have to get back to this later. Agriculture created class divisions, concentration of wealth and inequality, and illness. It's a good read. i don't see agriculture as a cause of things as i think that agriculture, cities and specialization came about all together as groupings of humans got larger. why they got larger is also a combination of many factors. one of those might simply be because it's more fun to hang with more people than to be alone for most people. loners are a minority. another reason could have also been for protection from other groups, i.e. weaponization when stone tools used to be the greatest risk a person had to face it wasn't quite the same thing but then slings, arrows, spears, and armor started showing up and people banded together as armies then in order to be safe you needed your homies at your back. out on the range no longer is as appealing when you might get run over by an army and your farm ransacked. so, no, i don't put the ills of modern society on agriculture. Read above. but back to international waters and fisheries. we as a world have to get agreements and enforcements in place to deal with rogue fleets and overfishing. otherwise it's just not going to be there later as a food source. It won't be either if it is poisoned with carcinogenic confetti of plastic. (snip) if only i were king. people would hate me, but i'd sleep at night knowing the world had a more sustainable future. Right on, but the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre was described as nearly the size of Africa in 2005, and it is only one of several gyres. That's a lot of plastic. well then, clearly time to get started on such a large project. The plastic, for the most part isn't poisonous, but it is non-polar, and attracts things like polychlorinated biphenyls, and dioxin. incineration or refining could change or destroy those compounds. ...if only i were king... the energy could be used to desalinate water or fuel pumps to move sea water into desalination greenhouses and condenser setups. i'm not sure what works better. they'd have a lot of free plastics to recycle into sheeting to make covers. Ah, back to procreating are we? plant propagation or water desalinization wise. i mean green house covers. Awwww. Spoil sport. ...the oceans, floating trash... You have my vote for dictator. Pay everyone a living wage. Enough of this employment of wage slaves. what if a person doesn't need that much? isn't a part of the destruction of resources by a greedy society the problem that people don't learn moderation? or that they aren't allowed to adjust their own demands because the system has a one-size fits all mentality (super-size me bucko)? You would like B.F. Skinner's book, "Walden II". People who tended flower beds got one wage. Those who worked in the sewers got several times more. i dislike minimum wage legislation. since when do i want the government telling me what my labor is worth? what if i want to work for less for a charity or non-profit? i don't need a minimum wage. i need the government to get out of my way. You would think that since all work deserves respect, that all work would give at least a living wage. right now there are a lot of low skilled jobs that get done by sub-contractors or individuals and they are being paid cash. so no taxes are being collected for social security or medicare for those workers. they may never be in the position to become a full time worker. ...polyethylene plastic particles... Or moved up the food chain by its predator. it if is a particle it passes through and gets conglomerated and then would settle out. if it can't be degraded then it becomes a substrate (just like mineral grains or humus or other nearly undigestable materials). These are poisonous materials that dissolve in fat. Once in the body, they persist. They get passed from predator to predator, and concentrated in the top predator, us. Best get your fish from down the food chain, not the top. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/gene...ing_away_the_p oison Packing Away The Poison Genetic mutation allows Hudson River fish to adapt to PCBs, Dioxins 2/17/2011 Some fish in New York's Hudson River have become "resistant" to several of the waterway's more toxic pollutants. Instead of getting sick from dioxins and related compounds including some polychlorinated biphenyls, Atlantic tomcod harmlessly store these poisons in fat, a new study finds. i don't eat that much fish any longer. i used to eat sardines a few times a week or canned tuna. then i discovered sashimi and lost my taste for canned tuna and the price of sardines went up too and i found out i'd much rather grow and put up as much of my own food as possible. instead of buying fish from thousands of miles away i'm eating more from foods grown a few feet away. if it is incorporated in the animal then at some point it settles out and gets buried. excreted materials are usually coated with mucous often also with other stuff like bacteria and fungi. i.e. also things that tend to clump and settle. In the predator. where? In the fat tissues. These are unnatural compounds that have no method of being metabolized. That's why they are no longer produced. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persist...nd_toxic_subst ances yes, i know about those. i've also heard it being a method of cleaning up an environment by harvesting the bioaccumulators of such things and then incinerating them too. yuck. this sort of problem is why i'm very much in favor of testing of all materials in use and recycling taxes. so we have the means for getting things cleaned up and taken care of. http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...mical-controls April 2010, Scientific American p. 30 Chemical Controls Consequently, of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the U.S., only five have been either restricted or banned. Not 5 percent, five. The EPA has been able to force health and safety testing for only around 200. i don't recall the alimentary canal having a permanent resting place. undigestible stuff goes through. the original claim is that the stuff doesn't have any way of being broken down wasn't it? Maybe not, but if you eat this stuff, you will lose your ass, so to speak. i wouldn't eat parts of plastic knowingly. i try to avoid buying things packed in plastic. Compounds that have a charge separation like water H+ H+ \ / O -- are called polar compounds. H H Chemicals like ethylene H-C-C-H have no charge separation and are H H called non-polar compounds. In chemistry like dissolves like. Water will mix with vinegar, but not a polar compound like oil. Oil will dissolve grease. Soap has a polar end, and a non-polar end. The polar end will go away with water, dragging the oil, or grease with it. Dioxin, and PCBs are non-polar, and will accumulate, and concentrate these toxins. as for pollution and plastic, you know i'd get on with cleaning it up no matter how much of it there is or how long it took. a 3000 sq mile floating mass is unlikely to be thick so perhaps it would be 3000 trips of a large tanker? get 100 tankers and that becomes 30 trips. processing and sorting would be a lot of work. yay for real jobs. songbird That's my dictator ;o) -- Remember Rachel Corrie http://www.rachelcorrie.org/ Welcome to the New America. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg |
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In article ,
songbird wrote: i don't eat that much fish any longer. i used to eat sardines a few times a week or canned tuna. then i discovered sashimi and lost my taste for canned tuna and the price of sardines went up too and i found out i'd much rather grow and put up as much of my own food as possible. instead of buying fish from thousands of miles away i'm eating more from foods grown a few feet away. Depending on local laws (they are verboten as possible invasives if they escaped in some places) you might look at tilapia. They do well in small-ish container aquaculture systems, breed like rabbits (the invasive if escaped argument is not void - don't let them escape) are omnivorous and grow fast. Or check with your ag extension people to see what they suggest and/or what's legal in your state. Hybrid aquaculture/hydoponic arrangements seem to work as well. Be sure to eat one before you commit to raising any, but fairly decent flavor (to most people who eat fish) is part of their appeal. Trout are fine if you have the conditions, but few people do, and providing them with happy circumstances artificially is expensive. -- Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by Please don't feed the trolls. Killfile and ignore them so they will go away. |
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Ecnerwal wrote:
.... Depending on local laws (they are verboten as possible invasives if they escaped in some places) you might look at tilapia. They do well in small-ish container aquaculture systems, breed like rabbits (the invasive if escaped argument is not void - don't let them escape) are omnivorous and grow fast. Or check with your ag extension people to see what they suggest and/or what's legal in your state. Hybrid aquaculture/hydoponic arrangements seem to work as well. Be sure to eat one before you commit to raising any, but fairly decent flavor (to most people who eat fish) is part of their appeal. Trout are fine if you have the conditions, but few people do, and providing them with happy circumstances artificially is expensive. i'll pass, thanks, i'm not that much into aquaculture and even if i were this isn't a site well suited for it. i'm much happier not having to deal with most of the farm animals. worms are good enough for me. i like that they don't need a huge amount of care. it fits well with my keep it simple approach to gardening. songbird |
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On Thursday, April 11, 2013 12:01:24 PM UTC-6, songbird wrote:
Billy wrote: ... Besides the BBCs A Farm for a Future, the book , Gaia's Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture (Paperback) by Toby Hemenway http://www.amazon.com/Gaias-Garden-S...culture/dp/160 3580298/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271266976&sr=1-1 (It's at the library) is a good introduction to permaculture. i'll add it to the list, thanks. songbird That link didn't wrap correctly. here it is as I see it: http://www.amazon.com/Gaias-Garden-S...6976&sr=1-1%3E ==== |
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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. i'm not buying the claim as being true. (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. 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. ... Corporations are obligated to make a profit for their investors. Any action that reduces earnings is considered illegal. They may be able to argue that some actions will avoid legal consequences which in the long run will increase earnings. In other words, being a good neighbor costs a corporation too much. an action which loses money is not illegal as if it were there would be no corporations for very long. i think you are confusing what would be considered corporate malfeasance and misuse of corporate resources, but even some of those actions would also not be considered illegal, just inadvisable... Under eBay v. Newman, the law is as Franken said: "it is literally malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it legally can to maximize its profits." Just ask Jim and Craig; no one disputes it's their company, but they're legally prohibited from taking steps to preserve the profit-alongside-community-service mission that's served them well. Maximize profits, or else. i think that is a case where the company should be taken private or turned into a non-profit. if their social aims are broader than being a business then i think that is a more accurate classification for them anyways. $$$$$$$$ won't permit. it happens, companies do go private. The impact of this duty-to-maximize-profits stretches far beyond mere investments. Under Citizens United, corporations now have the First Amendment right to influence our fragile democracy however they want, since they're "people," just like you and me, albeit profit-maximizing zombies who care not for truth, justice, or the American way. i still think you have a bit too jaded a view of corporations. not all are as bad as Monsanto or whatever the devil of the moment is. See the movie, "The Corporation", it's on DVD. It's also on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw links don't help, i'm not always on-line, it is like a rock sitting in the conversational road. .... ...HERE... ... I hope to have early ripening, mid ripening, and late ripening tomatoes, i.e. a long tomato season. good luck! so far this has been the most normal spring we've had in several years. we actually got rain yesterday and a few minutes ago it was raining again. happiness! that will green up the plants and wake up the wormies. three dry days now would be perfect as i could get things spread and dug in and perhaps even some planting done. now it's looking like it will be too wet for a while longer. days and days of rain. my water catches have gotten a good workout. Our squash are in the ground i.e. 2 Portofinos, 2 Crookneck, and 2 Zucchini Romanescos. There are also some bitter melons, and zucchini replicante, that aren't ready yet for planting. 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! .... 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. without having a chance yet to look at the article i still can't agree with the gist of the title completely. i think there are ways of doing agriculture that are sustainable. i'm stuck off-line for a while so i'll have to get back to this later. Agriculture created class divisions, concentration of wealth and inequality, and illness. It's a good read. i don't see agriculture as a cause of things as i think that agriculture, cities and specialization came about all together as groupings of humans got larger. why they got larger is also a combination of many factors. one of those might simply be because it's more fun to hang with more people than to be alone for most people. loners are a minority. another reason could have also been for protection from other groups, i.e. weaponization when stone tools used to be the greatest risk a person had to face it wasn't quite the same thing but then slings, arrows, spears, and armor started showing up and people banded together as armies then in order to be safe you needed your homies at your back. out on the range no longer is as appealing when you might get run over by an army and your farm ransacked. so, no, i don't put the ills of modern society on agriculture. Read above. i did, i don't agree with too many of his assumptions. .... ...the oceans, floating trash... You have my vote for dictator. Pay everyone a living wage. Enough of this employment of wage slaves. what if a person doesn't need that much? isn't a part of the destruction of resources by a greedy society the problem that people don't learn moderation? or that they aren't allowed to adjust their own demands because the system has a one-size fits all mentality (super-size me bucko)? You would like B.F. Skinner's book, "Walden II". People who tended flower beds got one wage. Those who worked in the sewers got several times more. no sewers in a compost world. i dislike minimum wage legislation. since when do i want the government telling me what my labor is worth? what if i want to work for less for a charity or non-profit? i don't need a minimum wage. i need the government to get out of my way. You would think that since all work deserves respect, that all work would give at least a living wage. i think a person deserves more respect in his stated need and desires far above any formula that some other person at a distance has come up with. if i say i can get by on $2/hr who are you to say i can't? right now there are a lot of low skilled jobs that get done by sub-contractors or individuals and they are being paid cash. so no taxes are being collected for social security or medicare for those workers. they may never be in the position to become a full time worker. .... http://www.sciencenews.org/view/gene...ing_away_the_p oison Packing Away The Poison Genetic mutation allows Hudson River fish to adapt to PCBs, Dioxins 2/17/2011 Some fish in New York's Hudson River have become "resistant" to several of the waterway's more toxic pollutants. Instead of getting sick from dioxins and related compounds including some polychlorinated biphenyls, Atlantic tomcod harmlessly store these poisons in fat, a new study finds. oh, so they're not poisons after all? no, i'm just making a joke. i much prefer my food to be dioxin free... .... Compounds that have a charge separation like water H+ H+ \ / O -- are called polar compounds. H H Chemicals like ethylene H-C-C-H have no charge separation and are H H called non-polar compounds. In chemistry like dissolves like. Water will mix with vinegar, but not a polar compound like oil. Oil will dissolve grease. Soap has a polar end, and a non-polar end. The polar end will go away with water, dragging the oil, or grease with it. Dioxin, and PCBs are non-polar, and will accumulate, and concentrate these toxins. i've had basic chemistry. i don't see any perpetual mechanism for larger molecules or particles to hold together in the face of being soaked up and settled out or being degraded by the sun, beaten on the shore, coated by bacteria, fungi, etc. how can you conclude these compounds persist indefinitely if we were to stop making more of them? as for pollution and plastic, you know i'd get on with cleaning it up no matter how much of it there is or how long it took. a 3000 sq mile floating mass is unlikely to be thick so perhaps it would be 3000 trips of a large tanker? get 100 tankers and that becomes 30 trips. processing and sorting would be a lot of work. yay for real jobs. That's my dictator ;o) non-prophet, no-return, rapture free range nut, all minions adored, this week's special includes gluten free t-shirts, just clip this coupon and redeem... songbird |
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In article ,
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. i'm not buying the claim as being true. That's your prerogative. 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. (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. 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. ... Corporations are obligated to make a profit for their investors. Any action that reduces earnings is considered illegal. They may be able to argue that some actions will avoid legal consequences which in the long run will increase earnings. In other words, being a good neighbor costs a corporation too much. an action which loses money is not illegal as if it were there would be no corporations for very long. i think you are confusing what would be considered corporate malfeasance and misuse of corporate resources, but even some of those actions would also not be considered illegal, just inadvisable... Under eBay v. Newman, the law is as Franken said: "it is literally malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it legally can to maximize its profits." Just ask Jim and Craig; no one disputes it's their company, but they're legally prohibited from taking steps to preserve the profit-alongside-community-service mission that's served them well. Maximize profits, or else. i think that is a case where the company should be taken private or turned into a non-profit. if their social aims are broader than being a business then i think that is a more accurate classification for them anyways. $$$$$$$$ won't permit. it happens, companies do go private. They go private so that they won't have to show their books to the public. The impact of this duty-to-maximize-profits stretches far beyond mere investments. Under Citizens United, corporations now have the First Amendment right to influence our fragile democracy however they want, since they're "people," just like you and me, albeit profit-maximizing zombies who care not for truth, justice, or the American way. i still think you have a bit too jaded a view of corporations. not all are as bad as Monsanto or whatever the devil of the moment is. See the movie, "The Corporation", it's on DVD. It's also on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw links don't help, i'm not always on-line, it is like a rock sitting in the conversational road. Wierd, I'm using Firefox, and it goes right to it, as does Safari, and E.I. ... ...HERE... ... I hope to have early ripening, mid ripening, and late ripening tomatoes, i.e. a long tomato season. good luck! so far this has been the most normal spring we've had in several years. we actually got rain yesterday and a few minutes ago it was raining again. happiness! that will green up the plants and wake up the wormies. three dry days now would be perfect as i could get things spread and dug in and perhaps even some planting done. now it's looking like it will be too wet for a while longer. days and days of rain. my water catches have gotten a good workout. Our squash are in the ground i.e. 2 Portofinos, 2 Crookneck, and 2 Zucchini Romanescos. There are also some bitter melons, and zucchini replicante, that aren't ready yet for planting. 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. ... 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? without having a chance yet to look at the article i still can't agree with the gist of the title completely. i think there are ways of doing agriculture that are sustainable. i'm stuck off-line for a while so i'll have to get back to this later. Agriculture created class divisions, concentration of wealth and inequality, and illness. It's a good read. i don't see agriculture as a cause of things as i think that agriculture, cities and specialization came about all together as groupings of humans got larger. why they got larger is also a combination of many factors. one of those might simply be because it's more fun to hang with more people than to be alone for most people. loners are a minority. another reason could have also been for protection from other groups, i.e. weaponization when stone tools used to be the greatest risk a person had to face it wasn't quite the same thing but then slings, arrows, spears, and armor started showing up and people banded together as armies then in order to be safe you needed your homies at your back. out on the range no longer is as appealing when you might get run over by an army and your farm ransacked. so, no, i don't put the ills of modern society on agriculture. Read above. 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? The word civilization comes from the Latin civitas, meaning city or city-state. You saw his argument on hunter/gatherers superior health? ... ...the oceans, floating trash... You have my vote for dictator. Pay everyone a living wage. Enough of this employment of wage slaves. what if a person doesn't need that much? isn't a part of the destruction of resources by a greedy society the problem that people don't learn moderation? or that they aren't allowed to adjust their own demands because the system has a one-size fits all mentality (super-size me bucko)? You would like B.F. Skinner's book, "Walden II". People who tended flower beds got one wage. Those who worked in the sewers got several times more. no sewers in a compost world. The point was that wages were tied to the desirability of the job. The more desirable it was, the less it paid. The less desirable it was, the more it paid. This isn't the only algorithm to arrive a reasonable wage. The one we have now is individual greed and exploitation of the society where they are. i dislike minimum wage legislation. since when do i want the government telling me what my labor is worth? what if i want to work for less for a charity or non-profit? i don't need a minimum wage. i need the government to get out of my way. You would think that since all work deserves respect, that all work would give at least a living wage. i think a person deserves more respect in his stated need and desires far above any formula that some other person at a distance has come up with. if i say i can get by on $2/hr who are you to say i can't? If I say you can get by on $2/day, who are you to argue? right now there are a lot of low skilled jobs that get done by sub-contractors or individuals and they are being paid cash. so no taxes are being collected for social security or medicare for those workers. they may never be in the position to become a full time worker. ... http://www.sciencenews.org/view/gene...ing_away_the_p oison Packing Away The Poison Genetic mutation allows Hudson River fish to adapt to PCBs, Dioxins 2/17/2011 Some fish in New York's Hudson River have become "resistant" to several of the waterway's more toxic pollutants. Instead of getting sick from dioxins and related compounds including some polychlorinated biphenyls, Atlantic tomcod harmlessly store these poisons in fat, a new study finds. oh, so they're not poisons after all? no, i'm just making a joke. i much prefer my food to be dioxin free... ?? Yeah, sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. ... Compounds that have a charge separation like water H+ H+ \ / O -- are called polar compounds. H H Chemicals like ethylene H-C-C-H have no charge separation and are H H called non-polar compounds. In chemistry like dissolves like. Water will mix with vinegar, but not a polar compound like oil. Oil will dissolve grease. Soap has a polar end, and a non-polar end. The polar end will go away with water, dragging the oil, or grease with it. Dioxin, and PCBs are non-polar, and will accumulate, and concentrate these toxins. i've had basic chemistry. i don't see any perpetual mechanism for larger molecules or particles to hold together in the face of being soaked up and settled out or being degraded by the sun, beaten on the shore, coated by bacteria, fungi, etc. As was pointed out, they are incorporated into the food chain, or they can settle out like mercury, only to be methylated and introduced into the food chain (or web, if you will). how can you conclude these compounds persist indefinitely if we were to stop making more of them? Not indefinitely, maybe only 100,000 years, but not indefinitely, unless they are incorporated into sedimentary rock. as for pollution and plastic, you know i'd get on with cleaning it up no matter how much of it there is or how long it took. a 3000 sq mile floating mass is unlikely to be thick so perhaps it would be 3000 trips of a large tanker? get 100 tankers and that becomes 30 trips. processing and sorting would be a lot of work. yay for real jobs. That's my dictator ;o) non-prophet, no-return, rapture free range nut, all minions adored, this week's special includes gluten free t-shirts, just clip this coupon and redeem... songbird Two for the price of one? The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people. You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl. The revolution will not go better with Coke. The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath. The revolution will put you in the driver's seat. The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised. The revolution will be no re-run brothers; The revolution will be live. ------- So what's it to be, Hinayana, or Mahayana? -- Remember Rachel Corrie http://www.rachelcorrie.org/ Welcome to the New America. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg |
#41
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OT but a welcome bit of brightness
In article ,
songbird wrote: See the movie, "The Corporation", it's on DVD. It's also on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw links don't help, i'm not always on-line, it is like a rock sitting in the conversational road. Sorry, I miss conscrewed what you said. Get the DVD. -- Remember Rachel Corrie http://www.rachelcorrie.org/ Welcome to the New America. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg |
#42
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OT but a welcome bit of brightness
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote: See the movie, "The Corporation", it's on DVD. It's also on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw links don't help, i'm not always on-line, it is like a rock sitting in the conversational road. Sorry, I miss conscrewed what you said. Get the DVD. can you write a summary for the link so i know what you're talking about or referencing? most of the longer messages and replies are written when i'm offline so i'm not usually going to follow a link or look at video. songbird |
#43
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OT but a welcome bit of brightness
In article ,
songbird wrote: Billy wrote: songbird wrote: See the movie, "The Corporation", it's on DVD. It's also on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw links don't help, i'm not always on-line, it is like a rock sitting in the conversational road. Sorry, I miss conscrewed what you said. Get the DVD. can you write a summary for the link so i know what you're talking about or referencing? ???????? Oh, OK. "The Corporation" is on YouTube in 23 installments. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFA50FBC214A6CE87 It is the same as the DVD. I think you'd be better off with the DVD, all things considered. The Corporation 2003 NR 145 minutes Filmmakers Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott explore the genesis of the American corporation, its global economic supremacy and its psychopathic leanings, with social critics like Noam Chomsky and Milton Friedman lending insight in this documentary. Cast: Mikela J. Mikael, Noam Chomsky, Milton Friedman, Michael Moore Director: Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott Genres: Documentary, Social & Cultural Documentaries, Political Documentaries This movie is: Cerebral, Controversial Format: DVD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_%28film%29 The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary examines the modern-day corporation, considering its legal status as a class of person and evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a psychiatrist might evaluate an ordinary person. This is explored through specific examples. Bakan wrote the book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, during the filming of the documentary. Film critics gave the film generally favorable reviews. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 91% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 104 reviews.[3] Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 73 out of 100, based on 28 reviews. http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-Cor...id=975545367_0 _0&strackid=6395b8cdbaf6f550_0_srl&trkid=222336 MEMBER REVIEW This is a wonderfully edited documentary about the effects that corporations have on society. It's highly informative without being boring. The first point that should be made is that everyone should see this film because the topics in it effect all of us. It doesn't matter what your political, economic, or religious status is- if you live on this planet, you will be directly effected by corporations for your entire life. Far from being the benevolent providers of goods and services that make our lives worth living, corporations are by definition voracious predators who must continually feed their appetite for more. This movie is not necessarily anti-corporate. It's pretty objective and presents the truth straight from the CEO's mouth. The single most important thing that you walk away from this film with is the understanding of why things are the way they are in America and other capitalist societies. Most people don't think about these topics very often, but when you start to put the puzzle pieces together, you realize that our way of life can't possibly be sustained. This raises important questions about what we are going to do about it. Further, the movie gives you a pretty good understanding of the laws governing corporations. These laws basically force companies to continually grow, whether or not it is sustainable. To most people, the idea that a company has to continually grow larger seems to make sense. But what if that company harvests resources that belong to all people and are in extremely short supply? You know, things like air, water, trees...the stuff that the creator gave to all mankind. You will be watching nature get pillaged to benefit the few until society awakens from it's haze of denial. This film is the start of that awakening. Voila, the concise summary. most of the longer messages and replies are written when i'm offline so i'm not usually going to follow a link or look at video. songbird -- Remember Rachel Corrie http://www.rachelcorrie.org/ Welcome to the New America. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg |
#44
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OT but a welcome bit of brightness
Billy wrote:
....summary please... "The Corporation" is on YouTube in 23 installments. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFA50FBC214A6CE87 It is the same as the DVD. I think you'd be better off with the DVD, all things considered. ... thanks, i'll put it on the list for next winter. it's a far tangent from what i'm getting into this spring and summer. Mark Achbar has some interesting movie credits, _Manufacturing Consent_ and another about water, both are also likely to be interesting. songbird |
#45
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OT but a welcome bit of brightness
In article ,
songbird wrote: Billy wrote: ...summary please... "The Corporation" is on YouTube in 23 installments. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFA50FBC214A6CE87 It is the same as the DVD. I think you'd be better off with the DVD, all things considered. ... thanks, i'll put it on the list for next winter. it's a far tangent from what i'm getting into this spring and summer. Mark Achbar has some interesting movie credits, _Manufacturing Consent_ and another about water, both are also likely to be interesting. songbird The first one has Noam Chomsky, so you can hardly fail to learn something new. -- Remember Rachel Corrie http://www.rachelcorrie.org/ Welcome to the New America. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg |
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