> Billy wrote:
> >
> > I'm not arguing for local food because it tastes better or because it's
> > better for you. I'm arguing that we have no choice. In a world more
> > prone to drought and flood, we need the resilience that comes with three
> > dozen different crops in one field, not a vast ocean of corn or
> > soybeans. In a world where warmth spreads pests more efficiently, we
> > need the resilience of many local varieties and breeds. And in a world
> > with less oil, we need the kind of small, mixed farms that can provide
> > their own fertilizer and build their own soil.
>
> Before the specialization trend that led to corporate agribusiness
> manure from the critters in the barn was not toxic waste because there
> wasn't too much of it. There was enough to spread on the fields as
> fertilizer without polluting the ground water.
That is exactly the case, Doug. With Concentrated Animal Feeding
Operations (CAFO) the animals waste is pumped into foul smelling
lagoons, waiting to be hauled to land fills. The animals are raised in
filth and terror. They are in such tight spaces that they need
antibiotics to keep diseases from killing the herd. The bacteria then
develop resistance to the antibiotics, rendering the antibiotics useless
to human beings. The killer E. coli, like 0157:H7 come from feed lots.
Never existed before and are now a threat to human health. The conveyor
belts move so fast at packing plants that the work is quick and sloppy
(and extremely dangerous) and the meat comes out with fecal matter on it.
Meat packers want to irradiate the meat to disinfect it, but as Marion
Nestle has said,"Sterilized shit is still shit."
In pastures steer manure, can make topsoil, and the entire operation
would greatly reduce the need for antibiotics, and the animals wouldn't
be covered in their own filth.
>
> Written in gardening and small farming terms does it come across more
> like preaching to the choir on a gardening group?
We got all kinds here. Some (I know I'm leaving people out) like Pat and
Emilie, seem to know everything, the rest of us know some, and are just
trying to fill in the gaps. Everybody starts at the beginning.
Welcome.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/2/maude
http://english.aljazeera.net/video/middleeast/2010/07/201072816515308172.html
> In
>
> > I'm not arguing for local food because it tastes better or because
> > it's better for you. I'm arguing that we have no choice. In a world
> > more prone to drought and flood, we need the resilience that comes
> > with three dozen different crops in one field, not a vast ocean of
> > corn or soybeans. In a world where warmth spreads pests more
> > efficiently, we need the resilience of many local varieties and
> > breeds. And in a world with less oil, we need the kind of small,
> > mixed farms that can provide their own fertilizer and build their own
> > soil.
>
> Who's going to be the person to tell 2/3 of the earth's population that
> they're going to have to starve?
That would be the fossil-fuel, industrial, corporate farmers, waving
their price lists about for people to inspect.
If you have followed the thread, Bert, you would have seen numbers that
indicate that we are getting diminishing returns from industrial
farming, and industrial farming is based on increasingly expensive
fossil fuels (2200 lbs of coal for 5.5 lbs of nitrogen fertilizer?).
Joel Salatin on his farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, yearly
transforms his pastures into "40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of
pork, 10,000 broilers, 1,200 turkeys, 1,000 rabbits, and 35,000 dozen
eggs. This is an astounding cornucopia of food to draw from a hundred
acres of pasture, yet what is perhaps still more astonishing is the fact
that this pasture will be in no way diminished by the process‹in fact,
it will be the better for it, lusher, more fertile, even springier
underfoot (this thanks to the increased earthworm traffic)."
-----
He grows an inch of topsoil/year.
------
Like Salatin, in Bangladesh a new chicken coop produces not just eggs
and meat, but waste that feeds a fishpond, which in turn produces
thousands of kilograms of protein annually, and a healthy crop of water
hyacinths that are fed to a small herd of cows, whose dung in turn
fires a biogas cooking system.
In Malawi, tiny fishponds that recycle waste from the rest of a farm
yield on average about 1,500 kilograms offish. In Madagascar, rice
farmers working with European experts have figured out ways to increase
yields. They transplant seedlings weeks earlier than is customary, space
the plants farther apart, and keep the paddies unflooded during most of
the growing season. That means they have to weed more, but it also
increases yields fourfold to sixfold. An estimated 20,000 farmers have
adopted the full system.
In Craftsbury, Vt., Pete Johnson has helped pioneer year-round farming.
Johnson has built solar greenhouses and figured out how to move them on
tracks. He now can cover and uncover different fields and grow greens 10
months of the year without any fossil fuels, allowing him to run his
community-supported agriculture farm continuously.
" . . . in a world with less oil, we need the kind of small, mixed
farms that can provide their own fertilizer and build their own soil."
----
Monocultures, repeatedly planted in one area are highly susceptible
insect and plant pests. These vast monocultures are grown because of
tax-payer subsidies for grains (and tax payer subsidies to fossil fuel
extraction companies). US agriculture is producing 3,900 calories/
person/day, which goes a long way towards explaining our obesity
problems, our diabetes epidemic, and our poor nutrition. Our bodies have
been developing for some 2,000,000 years. We have only been eating
grains in significant quantities for 10,000 years, and it doesn't seem
to agree with us.
<http://www.environnement.ens.fr/perso/claessen/agriculture/mistake_jared
_diamond.pdf>
Buying from a "Community Supported Agriculture" farmer should be cheaper
in the long run, because they cut out the middle men. The food isn't
transported thousands of miles to your table, which saves fossil fuels.
Eating produce in season, can be boring, which should be correctable
with the right recipes, and the produce will be healthier and better
tasting, fresh. Since crops can be rotated, they will require less
"Integrated Pest Management" (IPM), and less pesticides.
Thirty-five percent of the Earth's surface is already given over to
agriculture, most of the rest of the land is unsuitable for farming.
The most important question you can ask is: Is my food killing topsoil,
or supporting it? More topsoil = more food.
----
The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith
<
(Amazon.com product link shortened)
4860804/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid81718588&sr=1-1>
p.250
"Peter Bane did some calculations. He estimates that there are a
hundred million agricultural acres in the US similar enough to the
Salatins' to count: "about 2/3 of the area east of the Dakotas, roughly
from Omaha and Topeka east to the Atlantic and south to the Gulf of
Mexico." Right now, that land is mostly planted to corn and soy. But
returned to permanent cover, it would sequester 2.2 billion tons of
carbon every year. Bane writes:
That's equal to present gross US atmospheric releases, not
counting the net reduction from die carbon sinks of existing
forests and soils ... Without expanding farm acreage or remov-
ing any existing forests, and even before undertaking changes
in consumer lifestyle, reduction in traffic, and increases in
industrial and transport fuel efficiencies, which arc absolutely
imperative, the US could become a net carbon sink by chang-
ing cultivating practices and marketing on a million farms. In
fact, we could create 5 million new jobs in farming if the land
were used as efficiently as the Salatins use theirs."
----
That's what we are talkin' about, Bert.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/2/maude
http://english.aljazeera.net/video/middleeast/2010/07/201072816515308172.html
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> Seriously...
> This is just one more reason why I consider you an idiot.