...profits, eating, survival... ...Easter Island...
sure, but that doesn't mean it won't recover if replanted and the animals are kept from destroying the seedlings. like many things it's a matter of will.
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i've read most of what he's published.
he is not building topsoil, he amends it heavily with organic materials that he brings in by the truckload. they get run through the cow barn, the pigs, chickens, before they get scattered on the fields.
i don't think he's much wrong in what he does, but some aspects are not sustainable in the sense that he is using inputs from other areas.
i still give him high marks for what he does compared to many farmers. he at least does understand the importance of topsoil.
he loses marks in that he could be using organic corn for his meat chickens (he complained that his source had too much chaff/cob in it, well duh, get a different supplier or grow your own).
his cows are fed from hay grown on his land, he could change to more bison as the grazing animals and not have to harvest hay or have barns.
forced labor on farms and, yes, prostitution.
what part do you need expanded? non-profit, for-profit or government?
i was able to grab the smallest format for them (6Mb vs 62Mb) and watched them a bit ago.
some interesting parts in there worth watching. being a gardener i like the whole system approach of permaculture.
sequester some percentage of carbon for a longer period than the current method he's using. probably also increase some of the nutrient cycling because of the higher bacterial count in the soil. depending upon how he gets the carbon source would make me rate it better or worse...
only one of the many positive aspects of eating well.
yeah, plus he gets points for feral pig harvesting. :)
i'm not talking about commodifying, i'm talking about self-teaching using freely available materials. commodities cost something and are easily exchanged. knowledge doesn't cost anything, but does take some time to learn.
the community for many people these days is not local but virtual and distributed. much like this medium of usenet. unfortunately or fortunately virtual community still isn't enough for most people.
i don't think we disagree about a lot of this, but education reform is a side tangent i'll leave alone...
yeah, but for some reason there seems to be no shortage of children born in war torn countries full of starving and displaced people.
yes, i know the normal explanations for why population goes the way it does, but it isn't the whole story. which is why i talk about birth control choices, women's rights, fundamentalism and governmental stability.
i'm not, i'm stating facts that are well known. when it comes down to the final equation where each calorie is critical does it matter who eats the one that tips the balance for another person in another place to starve? you may never actually be able to point to any one situation in that fine a detail, but i think you understand that the carrying capacity is a hard limit that once passed is going to take it's due one way or another.
yep. as exploitive omnivores we are just too capable and we are also making the mistake of making plants too capable. if i were a farmer who was into breeding corn i would be breeding for a sustainable corn yeild within the natural soil rate of recovery and not trying to breed a more productive sucker of nutrients from the soil as seems to be the direction of so many others.
the feedback mechanisms outside of human behavior we have to control the population are the accumulation of poisons (making reproduction less likely), environmental degradation making offspring less likely to survive and general catastrophes (volcanism, weather, comet strike, sun getting weaker or going nova), probably others i can't think of at the moment too, but those seem to be the biggies.
this is all a far tangent, but yes, i think that for many they would prefer any situation than having to get an abortion. for the rest of it i mostly agree.
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the problem with reality is that it exists no matter what we might desire from wishful thinking. deniers to climate warming and CO2 sequestration being important are eventually going to come around or die off. there will be, in time, enough people who will act differently that it will no longer matter what the minority deniers do. like scientific theories, in time the people who are unable to adapt will be replaced and the world will continue.
just that the short term can get rather messy.
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unfortunately, these are links in books to on-line resources that are gone stale or vanished by the time i get the book. as time goes on i see it getting even worse.
how can i honestly evaluate an argument or a theory and results of experiments if the data is gone? the web just isn't a scholarly medium as much as it should or could be.
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*snickers*...rant trimmed a bit :) ...
to improve things a fair bit would be to start finding the supports in place which make such thinking "normal" and starting to challenge that system and get reforms in place.
unfortunately i think some of it (maybe even a fairly large portion) is based in religious ideas and practices. so it is a major challenge. we no longer have to "go forth, be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth" that's already been done, we need to put out a revision of that bit and people get pissed when you talk about revising "The Word".
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around here the non-harvested part is not enough to cover the soil, it's stubble for the most part. this is where i do like some other source of production than annual crops. perennial forms of the same crops would be an interesting change. in some ways i do that already via the alfalfa and birdsfoot trefoil green manure and forage crop, but it's not quite the same as a blueberry bush or a beet tree. i'm very interested in what might eventually happen with genetic tinkering, but we're a long ways from that tinkering being really systemically smart. i'd love to do a Rip Van Winkle for about
500 years...
roads should be made from lighter materials too especially in southern climates...
compost is processed organic materials, in some areas it would sequester a lot of CO2 quickly if any of them were buried without any composting step at all. like around here where the water table is fairly high. burying materials here would be very similar to how peat is formed, just stack it up down under the ground where not much air or critters get to it and it will stay put for a long time. i have dug down and found trees buried here only a few feet down. they've been there for quite a long time as this is old agricultural land (cleared in the late 1800s) -- those trees have been buried close to two hundred years.
charcoal is one way of taking carbon out of the cycle, i do agree with that, but the added steps of processing is not needed in some locations -- let's take advantage of those locations and get a larger percentage of the material sequestered than would happen if turned into charcoal. the volatile compounds trapped in the wood are better left in there if we don't need them for any other process.
agreed. for some locations it's an ok stop-gap measure, but it's not sustainable IMO.
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yea, i know, i just gotta roll with it sometimes. :) like a preacher on a street corner...
no, it starts as celluose when harvested and as it is harvested it gets heated up by what is already burning (or a starter fuel like wood taken from a wood lot). so that forms the base for the process, the celluose is heated and gives off wood gas (which is burned immediately as a fuel to the engine) and the result dropped out the back is the ashes from some burning, the charcoal from the wood gas process and a percentage of unburned organic materials which keep the soil critters in some alternate food sources. converting it all to charcoal removes the cover and structure that the soil needs and the fungi need the cellulose sources too.
i'm not sure how large such a thing could be or how it would all work, but for a sustainable system of harvesting that doesn't need oil it could be an alternative. or even in combination with wood as a fuel. as someone who likes steam engines and trains i just kinda love the idea of a tractor that actually takes some fuel right from the plant it is harvesting so that it doesn't need to be refueled at all or as often.
no, that's a waste as the heat directly from burning the cellulose would be what you want. not a loss from another layer of processing. also the gas given off and condensed if using the cellulose to produce both heat and charcoal can be stored and used just like gasoline. no need to turn anything into H2.
yeah, the hydrates and the methane from thawing arctic tundra and permafrost are also feedback additions that we have to worry about and counter. add more decomposition of carbon compounds in northern soils as they warm...
there is a possibility that the northern areas will grow more trees as a result so the feedback cycle might be very interesting. i still think we need to reduce CO2 below what we are adding so the oceans can recover and increase the pH. corals and shells are important parts of building shoreline erosion breaks.
it could be a mix of planted species, but the result is still the same. we get a portion of buried charcoal from each pass of the harvester/planter and that adds up over time to a significant amount of sequestered CO2. if you have to spread something on the soil wouldn't it be best if it were done by using fuel derived right there instead of from fuel transported in?
if we can go perennial plants for cereal grain production (corn, wheat, rice) and also perennial legumes (i ain't giving up my beans bucko :) ) for adding some nitrogen that still does not get charcoal into the ground. there would still have to be some method of harvesting and spreading the charcoal and it makes the most sense to me if it were to happen as a part of the same process be it from burning the fields once in a while (bad idea as all that energy is then wasted where it could otherwise be used as a food source or a fuel -- not counting the air pollution aspect).
no, i'm going to use cellulose to create more heat, wood gases (wood alcohols, etc.), charcoal and probably some ashes too along with some of the harvested organic material also going back onto the surface. a mixed output system driven by a mixed input system.
it has to be buried deeply enough to smother it. otherwise you'll lose even more of it to further burning. quenching with water -- water too heavy. pipe the exhaust into the trench with the charcoal so that it helps smother the charcoal, but also the soil will trap some of that exhaust.
corn, rice, soybeans are usually harvested when the seeds are firm enough (dry enough) to not be damaged by harvesting and further processing. i'm pretty sure all the plants are dry enough to burn, the dust flies during harvesting around here. if the harvest is too wet there is a problem with potential rot so that is an aspect of harvesting that is watched pretty carefully. i do know that loads are tested before they are put into the grain elevator for moisture content.
sometimes there is a wet period during the harvest where the corn has to be dried further but this is to prevent troubles with rotting in the crop, not with how well the stalks and cobs might burn. might actually work out that the waste heat from the making of the charcoal that it could be used to partially dry the corn if needed too.
once in a while it is too wet too often and a crop is lost due to spoilage in the field. that can just be left until it gets freeze dried and can then be run through a charcoal machine in the spring during planting. for warmer and wetter climates it could all be turned under or left fallow to collapse naturally. a loss of a crop and a loss of a chance to sequester some carbon but not likely to be a regular happening because if it was then they'd be growing something else anyways...
consider for a longer term project where fast growing trees could be planted, then after a few years (seven or less for some poplars i've seen grow here) they could be chopped and left to dry and then chipped and burned on the fly and the charcoal buried at the same time. no crop needed to harvest but there might be a wood gas surplus that could be stored and then used later as fuel. not sure about that though as wood chipping might need a lot more power than dragging a single blade through the soil and spinning some blades and a fan.
...infrastructure costs from rising sea-levels...
yeah. Sandy was a wakeup call, but i think the government is still hitting the snooze button and likely will continue until we replace the alarm clock with a rabid porcupine dressed in oil as a disguise.
*le sigh*the larger and more long term point is that i really think that no matter what happens short term it will get dealt with one way or another. either Momma Earth will take us out or we'll learn to live within what we've got. the only other alternative is to head off to other places in the universe and in order to do that we'd have to figure out how to live in a closed environment for an extremely long period of time that is even smaller than a planet. Biosphere II pointed out that we still have a lot to learn there.
last year for us the Roma tomatoes were ok for adding to the salsa to give it some more thickness, but they didn't do much for juice.
we put the green ones in the garage in a place where the sun didn't fall and they ripened enough for a while afterwards that we ate and put some up and made more salsa. not the best tasting, but better than throwing them out. some did rot. the worms got those.
just don't ask me to pull it...
Steve Peek recently posted to r.g.e or r.g he's got a fairly large blueberry plot so might have good advice about this.
har!...
read a while ago.
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these are harvestable sources of fuels and materials.
not sure about this, once it falls apart then it can become host to bacteria, algae, fungi or concentrated by a critter which eventually dies and parts fall to the ocean floor. if we stop dumping such compounds into the oceans then eventually they will settle out and then get covered up. in millions of years they get pushed down under the continents and heated up to the point they break down or get turned back into oil.
if it is large enough to be filtered out then it is: incorporated in the animal, excreted or the animal is eaten before it has done any of the previous two things.
if it is incorporated in the animal then at some point it settles out and gets buried. excreted materials are usually coated with mucous often also with other stuff like bacteria and fungi. i.e. also things that tend to clump and settle.
i'm not worried about particles i'm worried about molecules that act as hormones, but as long as we stop putting so many into the waterways then eventually they get deactivated or absorbed and then are settled out. if enough get absorbed by people and that causes reproductive problems or more disease then eventually that will take care of the problem as the population will decrease either enough that the effect goes away or so badly that we go away. sure i don't want people to go away completely, i just want moderation and respect for other species.
i think the planet has a vast amount of ability to heal and cleanse things if we don't overload it. right now the world is telling us in clear ways that we are overloading it.
ditto!
songbird