But isn't it possible to grow oil-producing plants, like peanuts or
sunflowers or canola, and get calory-rich oils from them?
====================
Sure, but then you're taking up space and time needed to grow the food
you'll need to survvive the year. It's far easier to get the fats from an
animal source. In some cases not much work or time is needed at all.

If you're talking about raising livestock confined to your own acreage,
it's ALWAYS more efficient to raise crops that you can eat directly,
rather than crops that you have to process through some other animal
first. If you can raise your animals on acreage that you can't (for whatever
reason) crop, then that's different. Personally,
I'd try for coastal property, so that any agrarian effort could be
supplemented by fishing (using traps, where legal).
And seaweed makes pretty good fertilizer, once you've let it soak in the
rain and rot for a year. It *DOES* make for some pretty foul tasting
honey, if your bees get at it, though.

--Goedjn

"default" wrote in message
...

But isn't it possible to grow oil-producing plants, like peanuts or
sunflowers or canola, and get calory-rich oils from them?
====================
Sure, but then you're taking up space and time needed to grow the food
you'll need to survvive the year. It's far easier to get the fats from
an
animal source. In some cases not much work or time is needed at all.

If you're talking about raising livestock confined to your own acreage,
it's ALWAYS more efficient to raise crops that you can eat directly,
rather than crops that you have to process through some other animal
first.
------------------------
What 'crops' *must* you raise for feeding to animals? You must be one of
the vegan loons that believe all the nonsense that cows only eat grains.



If you can raise your animals on acreage that you can't (for whatever
reason) crop, then that's different.
=======================
Why? If you have more than you can plant, grasses will grow just fine
without any input of mechinazation, fertilizers, time, or labor. Game
animals are bound to be around. Again, obtaining meat for the most part
would be a far easier, less labor consuming chore than growing every calorie
you'd need. Vegan's have a hard time with that, but then, they have a hard
time with any truth and reality.


Personally,
I'd try for coastal property, so that any agrarian effort could be
supplemented by fishing (using traps, where legal).
=======================
Coastal fishing? I'd daresay you'd require far more equipment and time that
if you just lived along a lake or stream.


And seaweed makes pretty good fertilizer, once you've let it soak in the
rain and rot for a year.
=======================
So does the 'by-products' of the animals you can keep. And, no special
equipment needed to go get it like with your seaweed.



It *DOES* make for some pretty foul tasting
honey, if your bees get at it, though.


--Goedjn

"Andrew Ostrander" wrote in message
...
But isn't it possible to grow oil-producing plants, like peanuts or
sunflowers or canola, and get calory-rich oils from them?

maybe. but wouldn't it be muich simpler to just grow some pigs and cows?


"Richard A. Lewis" wrote in message
ink.net...
(Tallgrass) wrote:

It's not that hard to burn that many calories when using hand tools,
bucking bales, turning soil by hand, and especially if cutting lumber.

It was once a common topic on the misc.survivalism group....how many
acres would it take to grow a year's food and all that. The bottom
line was that if you plan *nothing but a veggan diet*, you pretty much
have resigned yourself to a slow death.

Most of our folks had heard or believed that it was possible to grow
enough food on an acre, but it never stood up to scrutiny.

I have a feeling I just started the argument again on these
cross-posted groups as well. You gardening folks have fun

We on ms had gone so far as to plan out and critique pretty much every
possible diet and analized the requirements vs the benefits etc and we
came out with, at most, two possible ones (nothing but grains and
beans etc) and dozens of proven impossible ones.

One person, using a minimum 3,000 cal a day diet (necessary to produce
those taters after all....gasoline engines don't last long in a
survival situation) would have to eat between 12-15 pounds of taters
per day depending on the type to get the necessary cals.

Of course, as that one fellow pointed out above, you won't be trying
to live on potatoes alone. We added spinach, onions, apples, corn,
beans, cabbage, lettuce, carrots, peas, squash etc etc etc in equal
amounts and in pretty much every case, the required poundage simply
went up. (We tried that menu above and it came out to approx
seventeen pounds a day if I recall correctly.)

""If you add corn to that diet of taters in equal proportions, you
come
out with a diet that consists of 17 large ears of corn and 13 potatoes
to make 3000 calories a day. Want to know how much that weighs?""

It's thus not a question of how much food you have to grow, it's a
question of how much food you have to eat and *NOBODY* can live by
eating fifteen pounds of veggies a day.

Right about now, someone on the gardening groups will be typing out an
irate "but my family did it during the Depression and I grew up just
fine". Problem is that their families, just like the Irish, the
Europeans, and the Russians (all limited diets) all survived by eating
massive amounts of fat. Why do you reckon fried foods were and are so
popular in the US? Why do you think the Russian moms will stand in
line for four hours to buy a pound of lard sold as "sausage"? Linda
H. hit that nail on the head.

ral

Most people will not eat all of that in carbohydrates, tho, but make
up a fair amount of those calories in animal fat. Bacon, butter,
gravy, lard used in cooking.

One can find caloric requirements of particular job types. It is very
interesting to read.

Linda H., M.D.

"rick etter" wrote in message ...
"Andrew Ostrander" wrote in message
...
But isn't it possible to grow oil-producing plants, like peanuts or
sunflowers or canola, and get calory-rich oils from them?
====================
Sure, but then you're taking up space and time needed to grow the food
you'll need to survvive the year. It's far easier to get the fats from an
animal source. In some cases not much work or time is needed at all.
snipped

Most people will not eat all of that in carbohydrates, tho, but make
up a fair amount of those calories in animal fat. Bacon, butter,
gravy, lard used in cooking.

One can find caloric requirements of particular job types. It is very
interesting to read.

Linda H., M.D.

It comes down to the biochemistry of the carbon bonds in vegetable
fats vs. those in animal fats. The animal fats are saturated
fats...two bonds between the carbon atoms. The vegetable fats are
often Unsaturated fats...one bond between the carbon atoms.
Breaking/metabolising the bonds produces energy; More bonds means more
energy to release per quantity of fat. Saturated fats have more
energy/calories than unsaturated fats.

If the OP is willing to be a lact-ovo vegan, they would be better
served to keep those critters that lac-tate and produce "ovos"/eggs.

More than you ever wanted to know, I am sure...
Linda H., M.D.

"paghat" wrote in message
In article "Fran" wrote:
"paghat" wrote in message
In article "Fran" wrote:

[clips]

I've grown spuds in tyres and I live in a house that friends who
live in
the
city think is quite posh.
So how often do you encounter this sort of thing? Or more to the
point,
why
do you live in an area with such slummy places or go to such slummy
places?

Hey, YOU'RE the one who lives where it's "posh" to stack used tires in
your front yard.

You aren't reading what I wrote. I don't live where it is "posh" to
grow
spuds in tyres. I live in a house which others have described as
"posh". I
also happen to have grown potatoes in tyre stacks.

I don't put these tyre stacks in my front yard. The previous poster did
not
mention growing spuds in tyres in his front yard either.

You are the one that assumes that anyone who DOES grow spuds in tyres is
a
"trashoid".

And you've reinforced the truth of it. When you said you "hide" the tires
with other plants (such as rubarb, I'm sure that's a year-round disguise
of a wondrous sort) you pretty much admitted even you can tell that a
stack of tires in the yard still looks like garbage & needs to be hidden.

Yet again you are displaying problems reading and understanding English.
You are also continuing to build your stereotypes to suit what you think
makes a "trashoid". As usual you've made a pigs ear of it and sound even
sillier.

I DO NOT hide tyre stacks of spuds behind rhubarb. NOR did I ever say that
I did that. You have made up your own story and not read what was written.

I wrote: "Putting a stack of car tyres behind a big healthy rhubarb plant
isn't going
to cause any real offence". I wrote that, so that you, as a stereotyper of
others, could perhaps manage to take it into your stereotyping brain and
could perhaps understand that even if one does recycle then it is possible
to disguise what one does in a way that even the most anal retentive
neatoids could possibly understand.

When I have grown spuds in tyres they have been right out in the open in the
middle of the veggie patch. I don't have a "thing" about what others think
of my growing practices. I like to experiment and if the spuds don't object
to tyres then I see no reason why I should.

So you lack sufficient aesthetic to care; I'm not saying people SHOULDN'T
live like that, I'm just saying it takes trashoids to do so.

LOL. Don't let the facts get in the way of your prejudices will you?

But when I
make a planter, or a trellis, or any garden ornamentation, it doesn't need
to be hidden; if it slowly does vanish behind vines or shrubs, it wasn't
because it was butt-ugly & needed hiding.

But of course. Given your rants, it is on the cards that you would consider
yourself the queen of "aesthetics". That others might not find you so would
never even occur to you.

Just in case you aren't aware of it, many tips (or dumps) around the
world
are now becoming very well cared for and have permananet tip attendants.

I know a great deal about recycling, but if you think keeping piles of
tires in the yard is comparable to municiple composts, then there's just
no easy communication between the earth I'm living on & your Tireland
residence on Alpha Centauri.

There you go again. Another bout of hysteria. You don't know how may tyres
I may have in my garden but to you I live in "Tireland".

But if you think that steroetyping, making up facts and being hysterical
means you are in touch with reality then I'd have to say that I'm more than
happy to be on Alpha Centauri. At least here where I dwell I am not
surrounded by those who have the type of imagination that creates bogey men
from the air or who have to bend the facts to suit the story.

No one is compelling you to recycle anything but there is simply no call
to
leap to the worst possible scenario simply because someone does try to
make
use of discarded items.

Keeping garbage in your yard is NOT recycling --

Well at least we can agree on something even if you do like to create your
own facts.

Keeping garbage in the yard certainly couldn't be described as recylcing.
But then I'm sure that to any normal person who isn't anally retentive,
keeping a few tyres to use to grow spuds wouldn't be considered to be
garbage.

However, since we are on the point of what people DO keep, what do you keep
that you consider to be recyled and that others would see as junk? Or, are
you the arbiter of what is recycling and what is junk? Junk only being what
others keep but not what you keep?

no more than tossing
whiskey & beer bottles out your back window means they're "recycled" into
a lovely pile that bindweed can "hide" for a couple months out of the
year.

You must still be hanging round slums. No one here that I know does that.
Or are you just stereotyping or fantasising again?

Our household uses as little as possible of anything that even needs
to be thrown out or recycled by any means other than our own compost -- so
in our case we don't have the city cart off very much (our weekly garbage
pick-up is rarely more than a third full can, sometimes entirely empty, &
it's mildly annoying that those of us who DO NOT GENERATE much garbage
have to pay the same rates as people who cram their cans full every week,
most of it for a landfill). If you care about the environment, give up
your car & whatever else generates huge amounts of difficult-to-recycle
waste, but don't convince yourself that leaving parts of your car in the
garden & trying to hide it with rhubarb is ecofriendly. Eco is not spelled
u-g-l-y.

You really do get yourself into such stupid corners with your stereotyping
don't you?

You know nothing about where I live, how much garbage I do or don't
generate, how my garbage is disposed of, whether I make my own shopping
bags, whether I take plastic containers to my butchers so that he can put
the meat directly in that rather than in a plastic bag or anything else
about my eco credentials but you sure do run off at the mouth.

Just for your information Stereotype Girl, I no longer grow spuds in tyres
as I have now found an easier way of growing spuds. I grow them as I have
already described in mounds of old hay, wilted weeds, old leaves etc etc. I
haul my own garbage to the tip. I drive a vehicle because I live in the deep
deep country and I have NO other pratical form of transport in either public
or private mode. I do use my push bike but when I ride it for 15 kilometres
I do it for excercise and not to haul back groceries. I have to haul my own
garbage to the tip therefore I know very well what happens at my tip and who
the regular scavengers are. Someone I know found the most beautiful brass
and porcelain bed at the tip and it now takes pride of place in her guest
bedroom. Only a complete prat would be offended by knowing where that
particular beautiful item came from.

But what about you Steroetype Girl? If you were REALLY sincere about how
eco friendly you are, you wouldn't be using a computer would you Stereotype
Girl? If you know as much as you claim to about being eco friendly then you
would know that computers are EVEN more nasty for the environment that Tyres
(which can and are recycled here).

You are being hypocritical and hysterical to boot.

They do not become your "trashoids" simply because
they have discovered a good method to use for growing something in a
tight
space. The trashoids are in your mind.

A couple things are just not rationally deniable, such as anyone who lines
up "fancy" whiskey bottles of colored water in their window sills as
"decorations," or uses tires for planters in their garden, really are
going to be trash, even if most won't be able to know they're trash (or
they wouldn't've mistaken old tires for a garden decorations to begin
with). Some few are proud to be trash & good for them; if one's life is a
living satire & that person knows it, that's just about admirable.

I assume you mean a "couple OF things" as the other is obviously missing a
participle.

But, how (or perhaps more to the point, why) do your friends tolerate your
superiority complex?

The only possible exception would be a garden
intentionally automobile oriented. I visited a garden decorated with
vintage gasoline pumps with lovely winding paths amidst beautiful shrubs.
Being aesethetic people they did NOT include tire planters nor even rusty
cars up on blocks -- but I could imagine how tires MIGHT have been used
in that context (in a satiric manner at least) given their collection of
gas-station kitsch & the gorgeous old gasoline pumps.

Snort! I would be quite prepared to lay a bet that the owners of that
particular kitsch ridden garden also had significant amounts of money. It's
amazing how often what is deplorable in the poor becomes highly desirable
when done by the moneyed.

"Richard A. Lewis" wrote in message
"Fran" wrote:

Boy, I don't think I've ever seen anyone drop so quickly into
stereotyping
about such a simple thing.

I have. Happened in one of the subs of this thread just above. Think
it was written by you, in fact.

:-))) You would think that, but don't forget your lack of comprehension
skills are out there for the world to see and now you have added the fact
that you don't understand the difference between stereotyping and critique.

"Bob Peterson" wrote in message

However, the OP (and several subsequent posters) seemed to indicate no
need
for animal products. This is just totally unrealistic in my view.

Nope, the OP didn't indicate no need for animal products. In fact the OP
specifically included certain animals and stated a "preference" for
vegetarian (ova-lacto vegetarian and NOT vegan) but only a "preference" and
not an exclusion.

As usual it was subsequent posters who climbed onto their own particular
hobby horses for a quick gallop into fantasyland.

"Richard A. Lewis" wrote in message
"Fran" wrote:

Oh for Heavens sake! You are being patronising and heading off the track
into pure fantasy. Bucket asked about a self sufficient lifestyle.
Bucket
did NOT ask about a vegan lifestyle or what the many froot loops at
misc.survivalism go on about when they congregate for a fantasy session.

Sorry, Fran. I don't know who the hell "Bucket" is nor do I really
care.

As you very well know Bucket was the OP and you have previously managed to
go back into the thread and include a quote from his/her original post in
response to one of my posts. You either have deliberately told a lie or you
have an extremely short retention span.

I was replying to Dan, Linda, Noah, Gunner etc.

Bull. If you had been replying to them then there was no need to even
mention the gardening groups. You were doing a bit of grandstanding but I'm
the only one who bit. I like pricking bullshit balloons.

Snipped a bunch of useless bullshit....

I remember once asking how many gardeners there were in misc.survivalism
and
there were about 3 who admitted to it

Ask how many gardeners in your group know how to treat a colicky mare
or how to go about butchering a hog and I'd venture a guess that not
many care to know. One such as yourself could argue that it's "a part
of farming"....

Then you would venture quite wrongly. At the moment misc.rural is infested
by one particular troll and all the ratty cross posts so the regulars are a
bit quiet, however if one asked that questiont here in misc.rural when the
troll element was bit lowere then there would be no lack of responses and
they would all be based on direct experience of the animals and not on some
fantasy persona the poster was trying to project or on some wierd theory.

In misc.survivalism, only the absolute hardcore folks bother to plan
or prep for your Doomsday....most, plan and prep for the next blizzard
or thunderstorm etc.

You forget that I used to read that group too and for a long time. I well
remember your name and you were not rated as one of those who I considered
worth reading. Gunner and Noah were in the readable (for most of the time).

I know very well what the majority of the posters at misc.survivalism were
on about and most (not the sanest of course, but certainly the majority)
would whip themselves into an orgy of disaster lust at any event of world
news that could spell potential world wide disaster. They were desperate
for a cataclysmic event so they could go out and prove themselves as being
the best equipped (guns not food), the toughest and the most rugged. All
quite amusing till the bullshit factor really got up ones left nostril.

The few resident sane and experienced ones are constantly outweighed by the
"gimme a test, gimme a disaster" element

No mention of eating only spuds or even adding the odd cauliflower or bit
of
corn. Fantasy can be fun at times but all you are doing is restricting
the
topic to one hobby horse involving a restricted set of annual vegetables.

No....I was answering a fellow who made the implied claim that growing
a year's worth of food in a garden was easy. Was I wrong?

Yes. But then explaining something to those who have no idea of what is
involved is a waste of time. Read ratgirl on how she managed to produce
from a garden and from the wild: you may understand but I won't bet on it.

The one thing about a garden is that the more one does it the easier it
becomes. It is new gardens with low fertility and made on 'new' ground that
are very hard work. As the years go on and as one begins to understand
about perennial veg and fruit trees and fruiting bushes edible weeds and
garden 'ornamentals' that it all becomes much easier.

"Andrew Ostrander" wrote in message ...
But isn't it possible to grow oil-producing plants, like peanuts or
sunflowers or canola, and get calory-rich oils from them?

That can best be answered in terms of location, resources, and local
culture. In some areas, a fence or hedge would be destroyed in the
middle of the night so the local, free ranging livestock can devour
the plants, just as an example, and my location (rain forest) as
another. None of those oil rich plants will grow here.

Let's say that you would need 2hrs average per day to take care of
your garden OR one hour to take care of small livestock. That is
*total* time involved. 3 hrs/day total?

No. Part of the time budget and personal caloric expenditure would be
in proper disposal of waste from either. If you have both, you can
"feed" waste from one to the other and so "sharing" the calories and
time between the two. Total time required would drop to about 2.5
hrs/day. I'm arguing the pattern, not the numbers.

Same for land requirements. Humans cannot eat all of what grows in a
garden, but various animals can eat parts humans cannot, and that
reduces the total land required to feed the combination of humans and
livestock.

Going to a plant only diet would result in an absurd waste of
resources as the parts of the plants not usable by humans end up in
the compost heap instead of being fed to animals. Not to suggest that
the present methods used by the meat industry is all that economical
of resources. I wouldn't know.

"Fran" wrote in message . au...

I've read about ice fishing and it certainly wouldn't suit me. Fall asleep
and you could freeze to death!

That "fall asleep and die" bit is false. (sigh) City people.

Those that fall asleep and die are passing out and dying from
exposure, just as they would from heat. There is a risk from carbon
monoxide in the ice shanty, and anyone ice fishing should know the
signs.

"Fran" wrote in message
u...
for me. I hate being confined by bad weather (too hot, too cold too wet)
and get outside as often as I can.



It definitely gets too hot, too cold, too wet around here, but I'm outside
anyways.

I hate winter. By the time I get dressed to go out and work, I feel like
I've gained about 50 pounds.

Jena

"Bob Peterson" wrote:


"Andrew Ostrander" wrote in message
...
But isn't it possible to grow oil-producing plants, like peanuts or
sunflowers or canola, and get calory-rich oils from them?

maybe. but wouldn't it be muich simpler to just grow some pigs and cows?

Animals can be seen as basically nothing more than calorie
accumulators in that their one real function is to eat massive amounts
of relatively low cal fodder and process/condense it into high cal
food for you with, hopefully, as little of your time as possible
invested. Wild animals are as close to perfect as you can get for the
role since you have nothing invested except a hunting trip. Anything
else, domesticated livestock and such, starts to force a tradeoff in
terms of the total cals spent obtaining the cals vs how much they
return.

The same holds true for vegetable oils/nuts etc.

Grains are another great example. In theory, they provide lots of
concentrated cals in a very dense food that seems to be perfect. In
reality, they take so much extra time and effort to process them into
food that they lose much of their advantage. One can easily say "I'll
simply eat three loaves of bread a day" and it sounds logical....but
that would be dismissing the 600 cals per loaf work that it took to
get that bread to your table.

Self-sufficiency *sounds* easy....but in reality, our ancestors, who
had far more experience at it than we do, tended to starve to death on
a regular basis.

ral

"Jim Dauven" wrote in message
...
SNIP
Once you let your body aclimated to sub zero temps, your
metabolism
increases to the level of 4000 to 5000 calories a day just to
provide the heat to keep you warm
SNIP

So THAT'S what I'm doing wrong! I'll turn off my furnace and eat lots of
French fries! And cheesecake! Yeah!

(Just kidding. I'm currently holding a celery stick and not enjoying my new
diet very much . . . but the thermostat *is* a comfy 70 degrees . . .
Hmmmm . . . .)

LOL,

-- pelirojaroja

"Fran" wrote:

:-))) You would think that, but don't forget your lack of comprehension
skills are out there for the world to see and now you have added the fact
that you don't understand the difference between stereotyping and critique.

I have a "lack of comprehension skills"?

Funny. I'd say that nothing that you've written so far was beyond a
third grade level....it certainly takes no great skill to understand
you.

You, on the other hand, confused "stereotyping" (which you did to the
MS group as a whole) with "critique" of me. perhaps you might want to
look up both of those words before you misuse them the next time.

ral

Gunner wrote in message . ..
On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 01:41:00 -0800,
(paghat) wrote:

If you care about the environment, give up
your car & whatever else generates huge amounts of difficult-to-recycle
waste, but don't convince yourself that leaving parts of your car in the
garden & trying to hide it with rhubarb is ecofriendly. Eco is not spelled
u-g-l-y.

Got to love this girl. Retarded in many ways..but sharp in others. I
think this is called idiot savant.

Gunner, who lives in beautiful So.California..where all the beautiful
homes are sterile and look like ticky tac and have no charector.

Yes, the ghastly "MacMansions". Imagine paying top dollar to live in
those horrors.

Give me my somewhat shaggy little farm any day. I suppose if someone
found the tire stack potato garden to be unattractive...they could
always fence it off.