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OT but a welcome bit of brightness
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songbird wrote: Billy wrote: songbird wrote: Billy wrote: songbird wrote: Billy wrote: songbird wrote: Billy wrote: fascinating but expendable conversation snipped Top soil can be regenerated. Joel Salatin is doing it at the rate of 1"/year. http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0104saveworld.htm i've read most of what he's published. he is not building topsoil, he amends it heavily with organic materials that he brings in by the truckload. they get run through the cow barn, the pigs, chickens, before they get scattered on the fields. ... Thanks, but why do you say he's not building topsoil. He has picked up the pace, but this is how soil is built. he is taking materials from other places. these materials are what would eventually become a part of the topsoil in those locations. he's mining topsoil components from other locations. Seems like splitting hairs. The claim is that he is conjuring up 1" of topsoil/year. That's still pretty impressive. it's an important hair to split if you're talking about sustainable agriculture over the long term. if it takes materials from other locations to keep a farm's topsoil going then it becomes a larger question about how sustainably those materials are grown. as it is pretty sure the soils in that area are already heavily depleted by tobacco farming it is a critical question and one i'm surprised you're just ready to accept as not really important. Did the bison poop where exactly where they consumed the buffalo grass, or was it a couple of hundred yards away? I didn't say that Salatin was making 1" of top soil in a closed system. Like all other news, I get it second or third hand, through reporters I trust, or from enough reporters to make it plausible. " Their system is based on native pastures, without cultivation or new, ³improved² pasture species. The only input has been the feed for the poultry. This multi-species rotational grazing system builds one inch of soil a year and returns the family 15 times the income per acre than is received by neighbouring farms using a set stocking of cattle." - Andre Leu President of the Organic Producers Association of Queensland and vice chair of the Organic Federation of Australia The above statement, and the praise from Michael Pollan gives me confidence that the statement is probably true. the above statement is wrong. "The only input" is incorrect. Would you amplify that response? What other inputs? i'm not buying the claim as being true. That's your prerogative. What is the source of your doubt? Who claims otherwise? i'm still king... Just let me adjust the "Sword of Damcles" for you. My computer's dictionary lists "Make the most efficient use of non-renewable resources and on-farm resources and integrate, where appropriate, natural biological cycles and controls", as one of the attributes of sustainable agriculture. i have stated multiple times that i consider Salatin's efforts as _more_ sustainable than most conventional agriculture. other than that i couldn't say how sustainable or how it impacts the surrounding area. mostly i think it is ok. i'd rather live near his farm than many others. Not to put too fine a point on it, your arguments sound as if they are based on faith. (snipped for brevity) ... returning to my more local issue as one with a limited amount of land in trying to be as sustainable as possible i cannot raise both enough veggies in the current gardens and sell them to raise enough money to cover the taxes on the land let alone the other expenses of having this place. I have no familiarity with that. What I have is a marginal growing environment, and I simply try too get more from what I'm given. Clear plastic over the mulch, and drip irrigation seem to be a good way to heat the soil and promote earlier harvests, but if you have a cool summer, there's not much you can do. put in some cooler weather plants. peas/peapods are my favorites here. for arid climates tepary beans are one possibility, but i'm not sure how they do with cool weather. Doesn't help if you want to grow sweet corn, or melons. If all the stars line up, we can grow these things, but we have had cool summers for nearly a decade now, i.e. only 1 - 3 days of temps over 100F, whereas in the bad ol' days we'd get 6 - 12 100F days. good luck! have you ever tried the smaller baby corn plants? i'm not a corn guru. around here all corn that isn't well protected is raccoon food. One year I had a really good stand of dent corn, but the sweet corn just petered out. Yeah, I've tried the 60 day wonder corn, but still no go. I'll probably try the "Golden Bantum" corn again. I figure I can let rocky the rascally raccoon have a portion of what I grow, after all, he and his kin were here first. for some people property and other taxes are reasons behind extractive agricultural practices. if property isn't taxed then it takes some pressure off people to exploit it. Duh. Federal land is nearly free, but it is exploited by ranchers, and mineral extractors. well yeah, our country doesn't care about sustainable practices enough as of yet. in time it will be forced to. Too bad the government can't make federal land available for for sustainable agriculture. i'm not sure what land you are talking about but most land i'm aware of that the government owns is either in cities, military, nuclear testing, or sparse rangeland that should not be used for any soil disturbing agriculture. How about mountain top removal, or strip mining, or just plain ol' mining? Military bases are being closed. They would be one place to develope. Agriculture can take place without plows. Any land that is leased, should have a remediation plan. for a longer term project i'd want ownership. Of public lands? out west in arid places i'd also require water rights. it doesn't make any sense to do long term projects if you can't harvest rain water to hold back and use and if you aren't sure how long you'll be there. What about downstream users? that is what makes most property taxes so nasty. it's almost impossible to do a longer term project that doesn't turn into yet another exploitive system. Exploitive systems-R-us. The business model is "privatize the profits", and "socalize the costs" be if foul air, diry water, or sick employees. ... it happens, companies do go private. They go private so that they won't have to show their books to the public. you can think that, but i'm sure in many cases that is wrong. Since the dot-com bubble of 1999, more public companies go private each year, according to financial sources like "Business Week" and CNN. Reasons for changing the business structure of major corporations vary from company to company. However, a general trend seems to be because private companies are subject to less regulatory oversight. if you really have such a negative opinion of so many others how do you manage to drive down the road or buy food at the store or do much of anything other than huddle in a cave waiting for the boogeyman? You mean Koch Industries, Bechtel, Cargill, Publix, Pilot Corp., one of the members of the Big Four accounting firms, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Hearst Corporation, S. C. Johnson, and Mars which are among the largest privately held companies in the United States? Oh, ja, you betcha. You're a regular Pollyanna, aren't you? ... as we put up most of the tomatoes we grow we need a regular acid tomato. I only have about 600 sq. ft. for everything. oy! Oy, indeed. good luck! Luck doesn't have much to do with it. It's just tinkering to maximize what I've got. It's a small garden, but it has given me a great education. ... Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice? (Search for it on the web: mistake_jared_diamond.pdf) well, i'll say i don't agree with many of his assumptions and so that won't lead me to much harmony with his conclusions. Wouldn't want to amplify on that would you? You disagree with what assumptions? that agriculture was the cause of class divisions. that he's making valid comparisons between cultures on the whole. that he's doing much other than picking what suits the conclusions he's already made. There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate plants--wheat, rice, and corn--provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities. Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter- gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, nonproducing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c.1500 B.C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A.D. 1000, the elite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease. If we consider a twenty-four hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. It the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day,from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p.m., we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade and that have so far eluded us? ... i did, i don't agree with too many of his assumptions. What, that a division between the people who did the actual work, and the planners didn't lead to a stratification of society? i'll repeat myself. all groups stratify. period. full stop. end of statement. And your example of that in a hunter/gatherer group would be . . . ? It used to be, if you didn't like your neighbors, or the local strong man, you walked away. The food was there for the taking anyway. function of the species/brain. we group, divide up, regroup, etc. constantly. even the most rigid of the religious societies fragment and divide once the charismatic leader dies or something happens which sets enough people off into another direction. it's just what we do. any group of people of more than one person has a class system, rankings, etc. they may be unspoken and there are likely many different ones in operation. The word civilization comes from the Latin civitas, meaning city or city-state. You saw his argument on hunter/gatherers superior health? and i don't agree, he's sweeping a lot of things under the rug. Such as? read any modern text on microbiology and parasitology. read any collection of actual studies by anthropologists of many different groups. there are no utopian societies in the past. all have their challenges and troubles. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early Indian farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the huntergatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly fifty percent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the preagricultural community was about twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the postagricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive." [T]he mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice? having read 1491, etc. recently how can you accept this comparison as being right? if you took a group from a European area in 1490s and compared that to a group from the Amazon area at that time you'd find the Amazons decimated by diseases. Brought from Europe. Neither groupe was hunter/gatherers. The Amazonians tended huge orchards, which is where most of the terra preta was found. ...rest snipped, gotta get out for a walk before the rains come... songbird And I have ivy that needs pulling, plants that need water, and lettuce, and flowers to plant. If I have time, maybe I'll start a new tray of seeds for germination. Just have to have it done by 6:30 PM, which is when I plop in front of the TV, margarita in hand, to watch the news, on Deutsche Welle. Simple tariyaki chicken dinner tonight. Ten minutes to prep, and then cooks for an hour, and serve. Not sure whether I'll make a salad, or steam a couple of artichokes (they're huge). Chives from the garden for the baked potato. ˆ la table! -- Remember Rachel Corrie http://www.rachelcorrie.org/ Welcome to the New America. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg |
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