permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

Marimike6@cs.com wrote:

> The arid portions of Texas are a lot like Ethiopia, Sudan and Chad. These 
> regions support millions of peasants on a subsistence basis. So I would think one 
> would start with the growing of appropriate grains like sorghum or millet. 
> The stuff is highly nutritious for both people and animals, and is grown in a 
> number of nutritious varieties for differing conditions. Tastes good, too, when 
> made into injera.

I was talking with someone at Baker Creek Seeds yesterday about permaculture. I noticed that their catalog listed 
several varieties of cane sorghum, which grows find over much of the South. We discussed grain sorghum and I
realized that I have never heard of any food products made of this offered in 
the US.

So, I guess that it can be ground and made into various breads or boiled like 
rice or grits.
I also noticed how good my goat feed pellets smelled. This would be barley 
and oats.

It would seem that grand mixes of grains, some non-traditional might make really tasty and nutritious breads for daily 
consumption, homegrown and homemade, of course. A bread mix for the no-wheat people:

millet
barley
sorghum
spelt
kenaf
a little oats
corn
flax seeds


> The same might be said of the dryer parts of India. There are no better 
> stewards of the land on this planet than the Bisnoi, who live in the Thar Desert. 
> They have made a successful go of it for the past couple of thousand years, 
> while more modern irrigation schemes have recently salted the place up and 
> damaged the water table in pursuit of rice for the millions. So one is invited to 
> reflect that a tribe of primitives who've never taken a single course in 
> agronomy have come up with superior solutions to those of a board of the highly 
> educated and published PhD's India invited to design their program to "bring the 
> desert to life".

Green Revolution again, unsustainable and greenbacks for only a few.

> Not much on the web about them, I suspect. But you could search for a very 
> fine book the Sierra Club published called The Law of the Mother, edited by 
> Elizabeth Kempf (1993). 

Sounds like good reading.

> The Bisnoi swear by the virtues of the khejri tree
> (Prosopis cineraria) for its wood, shade, edible pods and generally beneficial effect 
> on the arid environment, its people and its wildlife. This is just a 
> "forinstance", and much work needs to be done on finding out what some people have 
> known for thousands of years.