permaculture

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

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        Re: [fukuoka_farming] Re: Academy of natural farming
Date:   Sat, 28 Jul 2007 14:41:27 -0700 (PDT)
From:   Robert Monie <bobm20001@yahoo.com>
Reply-To:       fukuoka_farming@yahoogroups.com
To:     fukuoka_farming@yahoogroups.com

Hi Matthew,

When Fukuoka toured the US, he frequently observed that the land was too
given over to cows and grapes. The American diet of beef, beef, beef, is
itself unnatural, completely out of balance, and the land is unnatually
covered with cattle that add excessive urea and nitrates to the soil and
waterways. When people finally catch on to the reality that they can
live longer with less cancer and heart disease if they phase out the
beef and eat more legumes, greens, grains, and berries, what will happen
to the cattle? I hope they just put them out to pasture and spay them so
they can't reproduce. I certainly don't what their body parts or manure
in my vegan garden!

Where I live, in New Orleans, there are hardly any horses, cows,
chickens or ducks (except for a few horses and ducks in the City Park)
to be found for at least 6 miles in each direction. That is fine with
me, since, like Paolo Soleri and Buckminster Fuller I believe that urban
centers are a natural way for people to gather and live. If urban
centers eventually become self-sufficient, as I believe photovoltaics
and sensible architecture (like Soleri's and Fuller's for example) will
eventually make possible, then they will do just fine without the usual
"farm animals" and without the traditional dependence upon the outlying
rural areas. Monolithic domes which are built by first inflating a large
balloon and then spraying concrete "shotcrete" over a rebar frame use no
wood and few other resources taken from the traditional "country" or
forest countryside. Nabil Khalali's "super adobe" domes go even further;
they are built from material s found "in situ" on the site with
nearly no input in energy or materials from the outside. When I retire
in a couple of years, I have already made up my mind to live in either a
monolithic dome or Kahali super-adobe structure, completely powered by
solar, and continue to expand my vegan garden. This is now fairly easy
to do: goodbye farm animals, goodbye animal food, goodbye grid, goodbye
oil economy. Good riddance to bad traditions.
I hope everyone everywhere in the world can do this--explore the power
of photosynthesis, self-fertilizing plant power, and local self-sufficency.

Most demographers predict that human settlement worldwide is going to be
urban rather than rural. The natural tendency within urban areas is to
get rid of the traditional farm animals, if only to decrease the
likelihood of infectious disease. Farm animals are a burden rather than
a help in urban environments, and if the technologies and the farming
methods are right, they can siimply be phased out. As a basic
evolutionary fact, no class of plant used in human farming needs farm
animals, manure or guano. Plants preceded animal life on this planet by
millions of years and did quite well without it. Vegan farmers of any
experience quickly learn that the dynamic accumulators grow without
manure input from animal stock, all the major cover crops will come up
fine if fertilized with alfalfa meal or soy meal; and herbs, leafy
greens, root plants, and berries also can do quite well with no animal
manure. I have several autum olives trees that fix nitrogen like crazy
and they
have never been fertilized by any kind of animal manure.

Vegans are divided on the question of whether to use human manure and
urine. Will Brink, whom I greatly respect, does--I believe--use
humanure. Many others, including Kawaguchi--I believe--do not. So long
as there is even the smallest chance of food contamination from human
waste I would strictly refuse the practice. Since there have been many
productive vegan farms that declined to put composted human waste in the
field, it is obvious that food can grow well without it. Certainly, we
have many byproducts that need to be disposed of that we (I hope) do not
put in the garden (plastics, corrosives, detergents, uranium).

Steve Solomon in his latest book hearkens back to Lawrence Hills as an
example of a "plant only" system of closed cycle gadren fertililization.
Even though Hills was not a vegan and mostly did not farm that way, he
delighted in showing by chemical analysis that comfrey contained higher
quantities of essential plant nutrients than did animal manure.
Solomon ventures that a field of comfrey could nutritionally support
(applied as compost and as dried mulch) a field of produce equal in
size. No doubt this is true, but vegan farmers like Ian Tolhurst have
shown that a more diverse group of plants also can also fertilize and
support staple food plants. Kawaguchi in Japan has done the same, and
soil scientist Michael Melendrez in New Mexico has devised a competely
vegan product called "Protein Crumblies": that delivers glycoproteins
(protein/carbohydrate) to the colonies of microbes that benefically
"infect" plant roots to shuttle nutrients back and forth. Vegan farming
is good for entirely pragmitic reasons--it works! No animals need apply.
Welcome to the age of "stock-free": farming.

I am glad to see a subclass of natural farmers headed in the more
elegant and safer direction of veganic farming. Gardens are certainly
part of the food web, and the microbes, worms, and other creepy crawlies
endemic to this werb are welcome, but we don't need the horses, cows,
and other big-manure animals or even the medium size ones like ducks and
chickens to make our gardens work. Plants and plant products are
incredibly resourceful, and we need to start seeing exactly how deep
these vegan evolutionary pathways go. The Japanese natural farmer
Kawaguchi is a great starting place, but that is another subject,
deserving booklength treatment at least.

Best wishes,

Bob Monie
watching Vetiver grass now grown to more than 4 feet height with no
assistance cow, horse, chicken, or duck manure
in New Orleans, LA
Zone 8

Matthew Minoprio <mattminoprio@yahoo.co.uk
<mailto:mattminoprio%40yahoo.co.uk>> wrote:
Hi all,
I am new to the world of natural farming but have been thinking along
these lines for a while now. Animal and human manure!!!!!!!! I have no
problem with vegan natural farming but human manure and urine is a
natural product and rich resource that I believe should be recycled back
in to the soil roughly from where it came. The same with animal manure
if you have animals on your land. I think that composting human manure
and spreading around trees (orchard or wood lot etc) , and peeing
anywhere or collecting urine watering it down and then feeding trees is
a good a natural thing to do, to reintergate these resources rather than
flush them away and create more problems. Masanobu Fukuoka used to have
ducks free ranging in his fields untill they built a motor way through
the middle of them there by reducing accessability for the ducks. Having
animals in the system is natural, and you can have animals in the system
without plans to eat them. We must remember that animals and* humans are
natural parts of the ecosystem they live in.
Cheers
Matt