[permaculture] [Fwd: Re: [fukuoka_farming] Re: Academy of natural farming]
Toby Hemenway
toby at patternliteracy.com
Wed Aug 8 13:01:14 EDT 2007
Ben wrote:
> Blue-green algae preceeded animal life by millions of years, sure, but
> anything we would commonly recognize as a plant today requires animal
> contribution
Good points, Ben. Bob hasn't chosen a good argument here. For starters,
the first insects appeared at about the same time as the first plants
(early Silurian to early Devonian), so coevolution of plants and animals
began early. Also, the first plants were moss-like, while we garden with
flowering plants and grasses (grains), both of which evolved with
animals, hundreds of millions of years after the first plants. And
they've been heavily domesticated; they're about as far as you can get
from the spore-bearing early land plants and still be called plants.
Also, a garden or farm is very different from the wild in that yields
(harvests) are constantly being withdrawn from the system to feed
humans, requiring replacement by fertilizers from outside the harvested
area. That's a huge difference. If someone wants to do the additional
labor of growing and processing fertility crops, knock yourself out, but
animals will provide those yields much more easily, and with a pretty
high quality of life for the animal.
Toby
http://patternliteracy.com
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