Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Hi Paul, comments underneath here

> Good discussion! What you're pointing out there, John, is a most
> sensible approach to agriculture, which is NOT "one size fits all". Of
> course you wouldn't know that from most gardening books and "experts".
> Too many variations in soil, climate, location, markets, traditions etc.
> And certainly there are places where livestock work best, and I use aged
> manure when I can get it. But I join Frances Lappe & many others who
> oppose the enormous waste of declining resources for excessive and
> unnecessary constant consumption of meat. It may be a lot worse here.
> What we have now is CAFOs, confined animal feeding operations, that are
> wrong in all the worst ways, and put extreme demands on water and fossil
> fuel resources that could instead feed the hungry billion or so. Most of
> our corn and grains goes to feed cattle, not people. Which is nothing
> like free range beef etc grazing where crops are impractical.

Of course I agree with Farncis Lappe and yourself that the way most beef is 
produced is horrible and wastefull. I also think that the CAFOs are located 
far from the feed producing areas and that the manure piling up there is not 
being returned to the plant growing areas. This makes it much worse.
However, I am not an optimist that we will ever feed 7 or 9 billion people 
sustainably no matter what we do. I think I mentioned that before but as a 
young biologist some few years ago. (It was just the start that computers 
came into use for less than back breaking prices.) A few of us young Turks 
tried to calculate how many people this planet could sustainably feed. The 
figure we arrived at was a lot smaller than the present day population. It 
was oil that allowed our numbers to rise above that. Nowadays we can use 20 
(and often much more) energy units to produce 1 unit of food energy. This is 
only possible by destroying the food producing capacity of the planet long 
term and wiping out other species.

> You mention "not smart to get rid of the ruminants, plow up the land and
> sow corn or soy." I agree again. Plowing up millions of acres - whole
> states - in our Midwest caused the great Dust Bowl in the 1930's. It was
> home to endless bison herds before the govt extermination (bison AND
> plains indians) in the late 1800's. What was behind all that tragedy?
> Wealthy land speculators of course.

And things have not changed. I think there are two enormous problems capable 
of doing us all in a lot faster than most expect.
A few months ago there was an article in Arctic News that gave convincing 
arguments that this phenomenon alone could wipe out most life in the 
Northern hemisphere in less than 20 years. They gave the Southern hemisphere 
another 15 years extra. Are we doing anything about it? Not at all. With the 
arctic getting ice free more drilling is already taking place. And of course 
there are people like the governor of Texas who think that : "Wind is a 
finite resource and if we go in for harvesting it the temperature will 
rise." Funny if it were not so sad.

The second major problem at the moment is Fukushima that you probably don't 
hear that much about on the regular news any more. The whole Northern 
Pacific is already so contaminated with their radiocative waste that it will 
mean the end of all fish consumption from there before long. The worst thing 
is thousands of tons of mox fuel hanging from the fourth floor of a 
collapsing building there. There is talk now of trying to get all those fuel 
rods down before it becomes completely impossible to cool them with the 
building sagging further every day. I don't think there is any expert on 
such matters who for a second believes that is going to end well. The 
corruption there is huge. The actual workers are driven like slaves almost 
with minimal pay. And the workforce has halved since the accident happened 
two years ago.
One mistake and we will have enough plutonium everywhere to kill us all in 6 
months. An individual needs only a micro gram inside him to finish him in 
that time span.

Do we really need to waste time on what politicians are talking about? Or on 
further expanding the drone industry to enable us to bomb more poor people 
faster? The wealthy speculators are still thinking about fast profits only.





> On self sufficiency I might add that we don't aim for that ourselves. We
> feel that through history humans have been tribal and cooperative, with
> some specialization of labor which is far more efficient than individual
> self sufficiency. Community self sufficiency - partially - is more
> practical. We wish we could do more local barter but this is Tea Party
> Central, sorry to say. Total self sufficiency is a myth. We can feed
> several markets but we can't build the van to get there .


Self sufficiency is often misunderstood. I use it as defined by John 
Seymour. Of course nobody can be self sufficient. We all need others. But 
that too is not the same everywhere. Where I come from (Belgium) I had many 
friends and colleagues who were handy at many things. I know professors in 
psychology whose hobby is building and MDs who like to weld. Life for us 
here in Ireland would be impossible if we were not fairly handy. We live 
quite isolated. Your car does not want to start in the morning? You better 
try to find out why and fix it for if you try to ring an expert to come and 
do it for you chances are you will not be driving anywhere for days. Hole in 
the roof? No problem if you have six months time and can live with all those 
buckets and pails to catch the drip (this is Ireland!)
About a year ago my wife dislocated a finger in a fall. It was pointing 60 
degrees the wrong way and it was very painful. I could have put her in the 
car and driven to the hospital (half an hour) and sit there waithing for an 
hour or more (up to ten hours has been known) to find a doctor to fix it. 
Her whole hand was starting to swell already when I first saw it. So I gave 
here an hanky to bite on and snapped the finger back in place. 2 seconds 
work and pain gone. And with a bit of home made salve the swelling was gone 
in half an hour. Best part was that we had a reason for a good kiss.
The farming aspect of self suficiency is similar. You better produce 
everything you can yourself for the moment you have to buy something it can 
cost you  a week's or a month's income for something you can do yourself for 
just the time and effort it takes you.
Also if you are into alternative healing as I am there are things you can 
not find anywhere for sale. I bought a good supply of lye just today (I can 
make that myself too if I were really pushed) with the idea to get back into 
ormus (sea milk) making. I have the idea that this might be one of the few 
things that can reduce damage from radioactive contamination. And it might 
also help plants to grow better when sunlight is poor. I don't intend to go 
selling ormus for this would be practising medicine without a license and 
very illegal. But I am wiling to give anybody interested the recipe for 
free. And if anybody comes asking me for some I'll give that away too.
> This is hard writing for me that touches on so many critical issues. And
> I need to finish clearing the old tomato beds to start repairing that
> greenhouse for winter. It won't get done by wishing.

I fully understand we are in winter already and that does not make life 
easier.
All the best,
John

> paul tradingpost@lobo.net
> -------------------------------------
>
> On 11/10/2013 1:26 PM, John D'hondt wrote:
> > 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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