Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Pego Rice <firekeeper38@yahoo.com>]

This is one of the very specific reasons that small holds are more efficient 
by far than factory ag.  When you choose meat producers for the big pay-off 
and machinate endless ways to kill the overhead or transfer the cost to 
whoever can't complain, you get Angus.  When you choose meat production for 
how it will fit in your particular needs and conditions you might get a mad 
mix of poultry like chicken, geese, guinea fowl, ducks and turkey for eggs, 
meat and pest control, plus a couple of goats or a jersey for dairy products 
and a few fish in the water tank.  You find that you suddenly have enough 
meat to feed out a large family and a half a dozen farm hands all of which 
are much thriftier feeders than, well, Angus.

In a corporate farm a broad-breasted turkey takes only about 75 pounds of 
feed to raise a 30-pound male, a tom. By contrast, ranchers must supply many 
times that much feed to put 30 pounds on a cow. I don't know how much a 
farmer has to feed a turkey that is herded through the fields. George 
Washington and Thomas Jefferson released flocks of turkeys to remove worms 
from their tobacco plants. Definitely a dual use bird.  Probably the reason 
ol' Benjamin Franklin thought such industrious birds should be our national 
bird over the eagle who's habit of scavanging lent itself to BJ's remark 
about "Bad moral character"

I really need to find some space for some of these birds, when I get to 
cooking for T-day I will often cook a couple of birds to get 30 or 40 lbs for 
my huge crowd and it would just blow their minds if this were in one bird.  
Nobody sells a 35lb bird tho.

Yours, Pego


       
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