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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] The Truth About Vegetarianism
  • Date: Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:32:40 -0500

There are several studies (please don't ask me to produce them, but I recall reading about them) that say organic growing outproduces industrial farming at all scales, within five years, and, since organic tends the soil so it's better each year, it's really a no-brainer, isn't it? The only thing that's propping up industrial farming is their political power through the Farm Bureau, etc, and it appears that Monsanto has busted any profit the big boys may have made at one time with exports for which they no longer make enough of a crop using GM seeds. When they stop getting paid by the federal government to crash the human food production system, they will be gone, and organics will be all there is. Richard Heinberg says a whole lot of people will become farmers, because it will take a lot of people to produce enough crops to feed everyone by the organic method, when oil gets up to $200/barrel and stays there, as it will, maybe sooner than we think. Michael Ruppert says by the end of this summer, and others are saying the same thing.

Since we took so long to start listening to Richard, I suspect we will have a human die-off of some magnitude as we ramp up transition efforts so we can choose humane methods to bring our population out of overshoot, but, if we're a bit lucky, it will be a relatively low magnitude, and we'll have built the resilience to withstand the shock. It will be a shock, even though science has been warning about climate change for 100 years or so. Some still can't/won't hear it.

So it's going to have to bite us harder to get our attention off the Koch brothers' propaganda campaign and onto saving our butts from fossil fuel addiction, as Dubya named it. The good news is that cultural resilience requires full human development so that we are each fit to respond appropriately to ecological changes resulting from foolishly ruining our stable climate system. Organically tending the land is a critical element of the solution system, certainly, but the complete solution system is a functioning ecological culture in the US and I hope we keep our eyes on that prize from here on out.

The oil business's Three Mile Island is occurring out in the Gulf of Mexico right now. When those pictures of oil covered critters start showing up on TV screens, oil's regulated out of profitability. We must transition off fossil fuels now, ASAP. Even Obama said so the other day.

As Edward R. Murrow famously said, good night and good luck.

Smiles.
Tommy


On 6/3/10 10:42 PM, Tradingpost wrote:
Feeding the growing population, in my view, is not so much about organic
versus chemical, but about the systems using each approach. I haven't seen
this point made anywhere. Organic is mainly small farm, family run and
locally consumed with little waste. Industrial or chemical farming is mainly
corporate megafarms today. And much is wasted before it ever gets to the
store due to natural variations in size or appearance. And much of the store
produce has to end up in the dumpster unsold. Question: which is more
efficient use of land and resources? And which would feed more people?

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 6/3/2010 at 9:49 PM Tommy Tolson wrote:

I'm not certain that "organic" and "agriculture" go together.
Agriculture is part of the main reason we've lost so much topsoil.
Agriculture is domination of the land by humans lacking the foresight to
care for the land. I suggest that what we do when we grow organically
is called "horticulture." It's the last human food production system
that was sustainable, as far as I can tell. How much of the present
human population it will feed is, as far as I can tell, unknown.

The UN isn't talking about choice, though, it seems to me. There is no
way the US model of meat-eating can continue, and the dairy industry
isn't a lot cleaner, so vegan lifestyles are a survival device, rather
than a choice, until we get our species out of population overshoot
(Earth without cheap oil supports perhaps two billion humans, Richard
Heinberg says) and recalibrate from there.

Smiles.
Tommy

On 6/3/10 4:29 PM, Ken Hargesheimer wrote:
The vegetarian myth is disproved. It is often stated that meat
produces one-fourth to one-tenth the food that using that same
land for a vegetarian diet would produce. That is not the whole
picture. Animals who transform one-fourth of their food into meat
transform three-quarters of their food into manures (high value
fertilizer if properly managed and used) which is transformed into
humus which is transformed into crops for both livestock and
people. Organic agriculture recycles everything and transforms
inert minerals, air, water and sunshine into increased biota
through feeding the microherd a full diet including animal wastes.
There is more life created into existence out of the dead
planetary chemistry than vegetarians are able to account for with
their tired false myth. [Lion Kuntz]

Much of the land in many countries is suitable only for pasture
which can be used only to produce meat



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