Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Pumpkin Lady <pumpkingal@clearwire.net>]

Tradingpost wrote:
> Good to get different points of view. My own 
> is that most of us do not need any form of 
> milk for the calcium, since the usual bone 
> problems do not respond to extra calcium 
> anyway but do respond to vitamin D.  

Most people don't eat properly. I think dairy is a good way 
to cover your bases. I haven't bought milk in over a year. 
Stopped buying cream when they added chemical emulsifiers to 
it and I noticed it on the labels.

> And apparently unpasteurized milk is largely indigestible. 

Link to research, please? And bear in mind I'll probably be 
able to haul out just as many that say otherwise. Belief in 
research all depends on what you want to believe.

And please stop saying "milk" as if it were all from cows. 
Many many people who stepped off the "commercially 
pasteurized milk" path decided that goats were a better 
option...or sheep. Many other kinds of animals give milk and 
many people use it. Almost all my cheese manuals list water 
buffalo milk even though I doubt you'd find much of it in 
the US, but it has been used historically for a long long 
time to make cheese.

> True there's the African culture living on milk and 
> oxblood, but I'm not going to try it myself. Nor meat only 
> or whale blubber. 

Be glad you don't have to. Some people do, and ignoring that 
they can live reasonably well that way is short-sighted. 
Learn what you can from the diet and how it works. People 
die because they don't know how to utilize what's around 
them to survive.

There are 15 THOUSAND species of plants that have been used 
in some fashion or other for food by humans. 150 or so have 
been cultivated agriculturally historically, but today only 
20 or so feed most of the people in the world, and if you 
listed them all out, a bunch of people would probably have 
never tried the ones that aren't popular in the US.

Mangles used to be a major source of animal feed. Mention 
them today and most likely you'll be met with "never heard 
of it", even in places where they grew them for CENTURIES.

> But there is no medical evidence that cows milk is 
> nature's perfect food for adults. 

Of course not, it's goat's milk if you believe all the hype. 
*laugh* Not that I do.

But seriously, all milk is not even close to the same. There 
is research out of Australia that if diabetic people who 
drink milk drank milk from (whatever less-productive dairy 
cow, I forget the name) many of them would not have 
diabetes. The research has been essentially ignored because 
dairies don't want to swap to the less productive but better 
for you cow. The bottom line for a dairy is not health of 
customer, it's production numbers. The bottom line for the 
Dairy Industry is to sell more milk, not better for you milk.

Different goat breeds have different chemical compositions 
of milk. African derived breeds are closer to cow milk than 
others in composition, so if you hare having a reaction to 
cow milk, pick a non-African breed goat to get milk from to 
increase your chances of tolerance.

People can make their own choices when they have enough room 
to have their own animals. Most do not choose to have cows 
because cows give goadsawful amounts of milk. Even miniature 
 ones give gallons. But people with one dairy cow or a 
couple of goats often feed the animals on land they are not 
growing on that year, and with scraps from the garden. The 
problem comes in when you try to put a whole bundle of them 
on too small a space.

> I still ask how much food could we produce on the land it takes to support 
> one dairy cow?

Depends on the land. If the land has a tree crop growing on 
it and grass under the trees, the animals can be grazed 
under the trees for almost no extra food cost. It's NOT all 
equal.

Morgan