Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Thanks, John. Let's note first that what you (and others) do in Ireland with 
your animals is nothing like the CAFOs in the U.S. You don't crowd enormous 
herds in corporate feedlots and feed corporate corn to fatten for slaughter 
for our consumption three meals a day seven days a week, and you grow them 
for your own needs and do your own processing - no corporate middlemen 
screwing it all up and selling us E.coli. And if we did the same as you then 
we could just use meat European style, mainly bits here and there to flavor 
dishes, needing only the meat and dairy produced locally and saving millions 
of acres now in corn to grow food for people.

>Unfortunately it is clear to us that if people wanted to start doing the
>same thing that it would be very difficult to do in troubled times. We
>reccon it takes about two years run in time to do everything needed and at
>the moment it may already be too late to start and solve all problems
>before
>TSHTF.

I'm afraid so. If people find it's too hard to start growing now, it'll be 
impossible when things get worse. It takes some investment of time and money 
and both will be in short supply if this "recession" deepens, and the 
"recovery" cheerleaders keep lying to prop up the stock market and keep us in 
debt with jobless claims still rising and wages dropping and safety net 
programs being shredded by states in red ink.

Another point: rennet is a good lesson. Learning to grow and preserve and 
process takes years. I know. People didn't pay attention when their 
grandparents told tales of the Depression and how they got by. The so-called 
"greatest generation" blew it big time and lost the skills and knowledge to 
live simply and frugally. The younger generation must start from scratch now. 
They will get blisters and backache. Get used to it.

But there I differ on TSHTF. It's my hope that the gradualists (like Dimitri 
Orlov) are right, that we won't just wake up some fine morning to find our 
world is out of fuel and the store shelves are empty. That there will be time 
for many to relearn and redisccover what's been lost. Otherwise I'm wasting 
my time maintaining this list. Yet it's totally encouraging to see so many 
different people taking part, posting things of concern, staying on topic and 
discussing intelligently (and yes, even disagreeing with yours truly). That's 
what it takes to learn. We can't figure it all out by ourselves, can we.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------------------------------

Many types of jobs will cease to exist: public relations executive, marketing 
directors, et cetera. I think work will be very hands-on, and a lot of it 
will revolve around food production.
    -- James Howard Kunstler, 2003

How do you move from a system which has built in destruction of the planet 
and built in devastation for local communities and local economies and 
transition back to systems which formerly worked and new environmentally 
sustainable systems? That’s the project of our time.
 - Jerry Mander

When I speak of these two phases of systemic collapse, what I mean is that we 
concern ourselves over whether the waitress will bring the food promptly 
enough, but we omit to ask if there is any food to be brought.
-- Jan Lundberg



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

On 6/21/2010 at 11:12 PM John D'hondt wrote:

>Tommy,
>I really don't think the difference in carbon foot print between
>vegetables,
>grains, soy bean or dairy and meat is of the slightest importance. When
>TSHTF large scale agriculture is going to stop, shops will go empty and
>transport will slow down to a snail's crawl.
>This means that most people will start to starve at that stage and that
>anything that is edible will be eaten. Maybe there are a few of us capable
>of producing food for more people than ourselves but none of us can feed
>even the nearest small town for very long.
>
>We have a few things happening at the moment that could very well, each on
>their own, mean the end of our species and every single day of the week I
>get several mails to that effect. Taken all together I think mankind has
>no
>chance at all. Maybe a good thing too because we are not a good species to
>have around in fragile space ship Earth.
>
>The hopeful detail though is that when our numbers go very low we might
>just
>pull of to come out as a better, improved species.
>
>And why should "we" not have access to meat and dairy. Without going into
>details, I fully expect my family will have plentiful access to just that.
>We milk two cows and five goats by hand, produce our own rennet. Make 3
>two
>kilo hard rounds of cheese per week, butter, kefir and soft cheese as much
>as we want. What is most important is the knowledge of how to do things
>and
>we do have that.
>Unfortunately it is clear to us that if people wanted to start doing the
>same thing that it would be very difficult to do in troubled times. We
>reccon it takes about two years run in time to do everything needed and at
>the moment it may already be too late to start and solve all problems
>before
>TSHTF. It took us 5-6 years to solve the rennet problem for instance. The
>amount of nonsense written about this subject is enormous and it simply
>does
>not work.
>john
>
>> Does this study remain valid when/if Peak Oil, climate change, and
>> economic collapse are factored into its assumptions?  Meat and dairy
>> have a lot more of a carbon footprint than vegetables, especially from
>> established beds, unless we're talking about homestead chickens/rabbits,
>> etc.
>>
>> What the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is teaching us, too late, is
>> that there is not a way to safely produce deepwater oil with current
>> technology.  BP spends $1 billion/month cleaning up and trying to plug
>> the well they let get away from them.  Ocean-going ships are no longer
>> able to access Mississippi River grain export facilities.  After this
>> thing ripples through Gulf state economies, the tens of millions of
>> refugees will make the Katrina diaspora look insignificant.  Richard
>> Heinberg today on Energy Bulletin.net says BP's mess may take down the
>> US (and harm the British) economy
>> http://www.energybulletin.net/node/53168.  Over time, Richard has been
>> near 100% correct in his predictions.
>>
>> The only reason BP's drilling in mile (or more) deep water is because
>> the easily gotten commercially viable shallow water and land deposits
>> are gone, meaning cheap oil is gone, which is what Peak Oil always
>> meant.  When oil goes over $80/barrel, the US economy staggers, and
>> Michael Ruppert says we'll have $200/barrel by the end of this summer
>> because BP is deepwater drilling's Three Mile Island.  Ruppert says he's
>> right 80% of the time.
>>
>> What this seems to indicate, to me, is that we will be eating whatever
>> the immediate twenty miles or so produces, and a significant portion of
>> that will be what we can produce ourselves.  Keeping our diets healthy
>> may become a challenge.
>>
>> It seems certain, however, that we will not have the access to meat and
>> dairy that this study assumes.
>>
>> Smiles.
>> Tommy
>>
>> On 6/20/10 1:47 PM, pbunch@cox.net wrote:
>>> This Cornell study indicates that largely vegetarian diets with small
>>> amounts of meat and dairy products may provide more effective land use
>>> than vegan diets.
>>>
>>> http://tinyurl.com/332pxro
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