Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>]

>From my farm's standpoint, I think of meat as 'winter' food. Corn and grains are for keeping the animals in condition energy wise (not their main food), and a live animal is actually cheaper to keep than a dead one if the stored feed comes from my farm.
As the cost of electricity for coolers rises, a combination of meat animals and root cellar foods is the key to efficient survival foods, I think. With some hoophouse crops for vitamin C, then we become sustainable in the long run. The addition of manure to composing helps, too.
There is plenty of discussion about the rising cost of gasoline and how a doubling of prices for fuels will be the impetus to less driving, but little discussion about how a doubling or tripling of electricity costs would affect our food planning. A refrigerator that costs 40 dollars a month suddenly becomes 120 dollars a month. That's when a goat and a chicken in the suburban yard start to look like a gold mine.

Dan
Belgium,WI

This is not to say that I don't agree with Liz--eating lesser quantities 
of meat may well be essential for a more sane and sustainable food 
future. But of equal importance is re-learning *traditional* ways of 
using meat animals--whether beef or other ruminants like sheep and 
goats, or pigs, or poultry--so that they support best use of prime land, 
help stabilize marginal land (slopes, rocky ground) thru grass/grazing 
rather than plowing, and gleaning around the edges (hedgerows, food 
processing cast-offs). Eating meat in such paradigms is eminently 
wholesome, and healing.

~Harvey