Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

First let me agree the permaculture principles are sound; it's what the
money grubbing "certified" teachers have done to it. $900 US to listen
to somebody talk for a week, then you get a certificate! & then you can
put on your own seminars & charge $900, as they advertize, all without
actually doing any growing or homesteading of any kind. They even
copywrited the word "Permaculture" to be able to sue anybody using it
without their royalties.  BTW Mollison feels the same way. And he wrote
the book on it.

<Yes, unfortunately the world is full of money grabbing varmints. In my book 
the only justification for being alive is trying to make this a better 
world. And making money from someone elses ideas does not fit in there. I'm 
not even sure that making money from your own ideas is so great. Invent a 
new super efficient engine or a new way of free energy and try to patent it 
and chances are you will find yourself killed by the vested interests who 
don't want to loose out on their old ways of raping the planet.
So far I have only made minor inventions, mostly to do with plant and animal 
diseases and I have always given them away for free to anybody showing an 
interest. If I should come up with a potentially rich making new something 
you will be able to read all about it on line shortly afterwards for free.

Second, I believe the emissions they refer to include ALL the fossil
fuel use that goes into the grain growing, equipment, feeding, watering,
& transporting & finishing beef for market with CAFOs that make up the
vast majority of beef production in this country. Not cow farts.

< OK and I agree that that is sick. Cows have adapted to a food that is 
useless to us and that we can't digest and that is the only food we have 
ever given them. Feeding them grain makes them a different animal altogether 
and not very good for human consumption. They then develop E. coli H157 in 
their digestive tracts that can be easily deadly to people and they lack 
omega 3 fats to name but a few differences.
We happen to live in a country that grows gras better than anything else and 
it makes sense to keep cattle on such land. We don't need grain, equipment, 
not a lot of transport (and a good bit of this by horse cart) and the cattle 
finish themselves by the end of summer when they look round and happy and 
with have a gleaming coat. We do need to feed silage and hay during winter 
but the energy this costs is much less than people driving to town every day 
to go shopping. Feeding cattle in winter is all hand work for us. Also with 
our way of rearing cattle a sick animal is something we don't see often at 
all. I can't remember when we last had to call in a vet.

John

On 9/16/2014 3:14 PM, John D'hondt wrote:
> I have been thinking about this for a long time Paul and I have the 
> distict feeling that blaming "emissions" of 36 % of the grand total on 
> cows is complete balderdash. A complete lie that does not become more true 
> even if it is steadily repeated.
>
> - in the first place all herbivores have bacteria inside them that can 
> break down and make use of cellulose which is a major constituent of plant 
> cells. Not just cows but elephants, deer, goats and rhinos, sheep and 
> rabbits and horses have what it takes to break down very resistant plant 
> molecules. If it were not for these herbivores and their commensal micro 
> fauna and flora dead plant material would just pile up and stay there 
> forever and life would grind to a halt. All these herbivores live on a 
> diet in the natural state that would see us starve very fast if we tried 
> to live on it.
> Cows are extremely efficient at breaking down cellulose, more so than 
> deer, horses or elephants for instance but I doubt very much that they 
> constitute even 4 % of all herbivores or herbivore biomass (and this 
> includes insects) on the planet.
>
> - I have lived in close proximity with cattle for now almost 30 years and 
> I have never experienced a cow pass wind even once. They do burp while 
> ruminating on average 6 times per hour and they ruminate for on average 8 
> hours per day. Every burp has a volume of about 250 ml and for a part 
> consists of the air they swallow while ruminating and that comes back up.
> A grand total 4-5 gallons per day?
> Take a cow of 400 kg which would be 6-7 average adult humans. It is 
> thought that an average human passes wind some 7 times per day and the 
> total gas emissions can be over 3 liters per day which means that the 6-7 
> humans would be just beaten in emission production by one cow.
> How many humans are there on the planety compared to cows? I think humans 
> outnumber cattle 5 to 1 so bovine and human emissions would be about the 
> same.
>
> -the world consumes some 90 million barrels of oil per day leading to some 
> 20 million metric tons of climate altering emissions per day? I won't even 
> look at burning coal and wood figures to be added to this.
> But blaming 36 % of all  emissions on cows is ridiculous and very bad 
> science.
>
> Further, I am also guilty of bastardizing original permaculture here where 
> I live. We have to row to the best of our abilities with the oars we have 
> been given. But I think the general ideas behind permaculture are very 
> sound.
>
> John
>
>
> I agree but those figures do average in pastured beef & all kinds of
> agriculture. Also I have no respect for the way "permaculture" has been
> bastardized in the U.S.
>
> On 9/15/2014 6:28 PM, John D'hondt wrote:
> > "beef makes up 4 percent by weight of available food, but 36 percent of
> > emissions"
> >
> > CAFO beef probably but I severely doubt that gras grazing beef is worse 
> > weight for weight than humans.
> >
> > "Direct emissions from agriculture make up between 10 percent and 12
> > percent of overall greenhouse gas emissions. If you throw in factors
> > such as fertilizer and chemical production, fuel use and agricultural
> > land-use change, the proportion rises—along with the uncertainty—to
> > between 17 percent and 32 percent.
> >
> > that is regular industrial agriculture and not organic-permaculture!
> >
> >
> > "Researchers may enhance yields and farmers may use resources more
> > efficiently, but populations will increase—and so will demand for meat
> > and dairy products."
> >
> > The human population exploded thanks to oil. Oil production and human 
> > population graphs follow one another very closely.
> > Past peak oil...we can only keep people fed by trashing the planet for 
> > short term gain. I can see a breaking point in the not too far distant 
> > future and then populations will crash and so will demand. Just 
> > extrapolating graph lines is oxymoronic.

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