permaculture

[Douglas Barnes <duckrace2000@yahoo.ca>]

Yes, I think it important that we are ecosystemic in our approaches. Properly 
integrated, animal systems can be a boon to total productivity. 

And there are places where raising mainly animals requires much less energy 
than growing vegetables. As Bill is fond of saying, in the arctic, you have 
to be a carnivore.
 
Douglas JE Barnes 
EcoEdge Design 
http://www.ecoedge.ca
http://permaculturetokyo.blogspot.com
dbarnes@ecoedge.ca

----- Original Message ----


Message: 3
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 08:23:00 -0700
From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
Subject: Re: [permaculture] So what do you really think about long
    term    climate change due to pollution
To: ibilio list <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID: <C2327964.7757%toby@patternliteracy.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

On 3/27/07 1:49 PM, "Charles de Matas"  wrote:

> It takes less land to grow a person's food requirements for a vegetarian
> diet than for a diet that includes meat.

Ah, but let's think permaculturally here. If livestock are competing with
you for food and land, that's a case of bad design. Animals can be stacked
into a system as an additional yield, not as a substitute for some other
yield (or worse yet, as a detriment to yield, as in industrial meat and
diary farms). I know people who are raising chickens almost exclusively on
food scraps, weeds, and insects, others who raise goats on unwanted browse
and cuttings from their abundant food forest, others who graze animals on
land that is no good for raising crops. All those animals add to yield. If
you set up your systems right, it can take less land, not more, to grow a
diet that includes meat than one that doesn't, since animals can eat so many
things that we can't, and turn them into food for us.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com




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End of permaculture Digest, Vol 50, Issue 37
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