Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>]

Situation is a wee bit differnt here Paul.
We never eat popcorn or any corn for that matter (gmo, no thank you)  except 
for a little bit of our own home grown, coloured,  heritage corn. And that 
is not very suitable for making popcorn. We would also avoid any microwaved 
food.

But were we live you can not try for self sufficiency and not eat meat. You 
have vegetarians here but 90 % of what they eat is imported from the other 
side of the planet.
Also much of Irish land is only really suited for grass or sitka spruce 
growing. Sitka spruce plantations are green desert where no local animal can 
survive. And grass is only suitable for herbivores.
It is just not smart to get rid of the ruminants, plow up the land and sow 
corn or soy. I have tried to grow soy (one row in the garden) and it only 
produces a minimal crop once in ten years or more. Same with corn, the 
regular corn you know does not ripen here. Most corn is cut still green as 
cattle food. Other grains? Not possible on our steep mountain slopes. 
Plowing with modern machines causes massive errosion and the harvest is 
unpredictable. I know one man who set barley on almost 200 acres and he 
ended up with less than a hundred kilos of grain. That same acerage would 
have fed a hundred cattle for most of the year and as I said they would not 
have damaged the land as that barley cultivation did.
There are farmers here with flat land who grow wheat, barley or oats. The 
one we know best fertilizes his land with cattle manure and cheese whey from 
the cheese factory near him. Without those inputs he would exhaust his land 
in a very few years.
John

./
> Trans Fats Ban Could Have Devastating Effect On Popcorn Industry
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/09/popcorn-trans-fats-ban_n_4245453.html
>
> I suspect what they'll ban is simply artificial hydrogenation. Gov
> interest in it of course is the fact our taxes pay for so much treatment
> of the health problems, plus we all pay higher ins premiums for it.
>
> We've avoided margerine & such as much as we can for quite a while but
> we don't rule out all animal fats. We do eat out but still try to eat as
> low on the food chain as possible. Plus our fresh market products
> encourage that. We use meat more like European style for flavoring,
> since cutting down high meat consumption would free up farmland &
> resources that now go to feed livestock & extend our global resources
> further into the future.  Maybe even buy time for people here to learn
> to cook again :-\
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