Charlie wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
being a typical lazy American, i'm training an ox team. those hand plows are too much work ;) for anyone contemplating a small homestead, look at Irish Dexter cattle. meat, milk *and* draft, in a small package (around 300 pounds). nice temperment, & easy keepers too.
lee
"JoeSpareBedroom" wrote in news:YirKi.17636$ snipped-for-privacy@news01.roc.ny:
well, i have one biological child, but we hope to eventually adopt several more. i'm interested in taking on family groups of kids, which, it seems, many adoptive parents are not. i think breaking up kids from their siblings is pretty unkind. so if i ever say i have 6 or 9.2 kids, do i have to also explain that i acquired them by other than biology? lee
Well, it does matter. I'm not a fanatical believer in the zero population growth idea, but there is a difference between building 5 kids of your own, vs building 2 and adopting 3. By adopting, you haven't added any to the population. And, with regard to food & water supply issues, population growth is certainly a factor.
Fine, but what about latté?
"David Hare-Scott" wrote in news:fddidj$g8n$ snipped-for-privacy@aioe.org:
not all land is suitable for vegetable production. cattle/sheep/goats can thrive on land too hilly or rocky to be useful for food production. i take it you are not familiar with the Northeast of the US? we have plenty of water, but not a huge amount of decent flat land suitable for food crop production. there's a reason old Yankees were dairy farmers & shephrds.
if you stop looking at 'meat' as being only high maintainance modern beef breeds (or dairy being only Holsteins), you will see that it should be possible to continue your omnivore habit fairly well. lee
"JoeSpareBedroom" wrote in news:LJtKi.17643$ snipped-for-privacy@news01.roc.ny:
i'm looking into a greenhouse so i can grow coffee... gotta have that to make latté. i think i'll need to grow cocoa too. so if i put a 2nd greenhouse out in Savannah (NY), can you keep an eye on the coffee there? ;) seriously though, i'm not a huge fan of straight roasted chicory. what other locally growable coffee substitutes are there? we've got brewing beer & cider down, but i'll need more flatish land to grow grain. the hops grow like crazy here, plus we have several non-hop plants for preserving beers (creeping charlie, for example). there's a dammed pond on our property that is rumored in the town history to be the first local grain mill. the flow is restricted currently by a Fish & Game dam upstream, but that is currently failing... lee
Is the dam on anyone's list for removal? There's been a movement afoot for a while to eliminate dams whose purpose has evaporated over the years.
The message from "David Hare-Scott" contains these words:
In many parts of the world sheep , deer, goats, and native breeds of cattle can graze a living from terrain too steep, poor, cold, wet, hot, dry , acid, alkaline, rocky or remote for humans to grow food crops on.
Wherever poor land can only support vegetation fit for rough grazing/browsing by species which can digest fibre by cudding, it makes perfect sense for humans to let cudding animals convert that tough vegetation into proteins vitamins and fats which the human physiology can digest.
Janet. (eating local hill sheep, wild venison and hardy beef in Scotland)
"JoeSpareBedroom" wrote in news:X2vKi.17647$ snipped-for-privacy@news01.roc.ny:
mine? no, because the state doesn't know it exists (and i'm not going to press the issue so that they find out). the F&G dam was not in good shape before the flooding this past spring, & that certainly didn't improve anything. i will see F&G tomorrow and ask about that dam. it really doesn't serve much purpose, except to slightly (about 2') artificially raise the water level in a spring fed pond. i suspect the reason F&G has control over that dam & section of stream is more for access to the pond for stocking efforts. of course, if they don't do some work on it, i strongly suspect the road is going to go away in the next flood... the under road culvert can't take that much water going through. we had 8" over the road, along with the culvert's load. it washed a cement block i left on my dam over 300 feet downstream... there was too much water coming in for me to get the drain at the bottom of the dam open, but i suspect that's a good thing really. there was no damage to my dam at all (it's earth & rock, at least 200 years old). lee
This is all fine, more power to you if you can get a feed off such marginal land. However in many places feeding animals on pasture that is quite suitable for cropping _is_ done. Lot and shed fed beasts _are_ fed on grain etc that is grown on such land and often these are fertilised with chemicals requiring energy (oil) to make.
It's also going to be harder (but not impossible) to raise vegetable crops on that land without chemical fertiliser if energy becomes very expensive. So would we be able to afford the added layer of inefficiency of running it through an animal to get our calories in a preferred form? From the perspective of considering current common practice the original article has a point.
David
"David Hare-Scott" wrote in news:fdfno7$scl$ snipped-for-privacy@aioe.org:
yes, and *that* is all due to the easy availability of petrol & chemicals both for intensive cropping & moving the meat to market. take away cheap fuel & those operations will disappear rapidly, along with the cattle breeds unsuitable for living on marginal land.
do you know much about organic growing or the farming methods used in the early 1900s? it's not only not impossible, it's pretty simple (far from "easy" though). no, the fruits & veggies won't be huge & "perfect", but they'll be a lot better tasting & more healthful (the nutritional values of fruits, vegetables & grains has actually declined since the 40s when factory farming & massive chemical use became the "norm". lee
"David Hare-Scott" expounded:
David, I've got a book for you to read - the Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Poulan. Read that first and then write about raising animals for food.
No, not all that harder, just - different. More local, more diverse methods are going to have to be used. Going to wreak havoc on agribusiness, and as far as I'm concerned that's a good thing.
We're better off 'running it through an animal' than running it through a factory first.
Excellent writer! Check out "The Botany of Desire", if you haven't already.
The message from "David Hare-Scott" contains these words:
Meat produced that way, ends up how meat is supposed to taste. So long as producers have oil to transport it to the very top-price end of the meat market, they will. When they no longer have oil, no doubt they will swim beef across water and walk it across land from where it was raised to where it gets sold; a method used here within living memory. Just this morning on BBC radio, I was listening to someones plan to walk a herd of geese on foot through London as part of a project to show city kids where the food on their plate comes from. In my father's lifetime, live geese were still walked long distance to market.
That is already done quite extensively here (in the UK). In this part of Scotland, again within living memory. the only fertilisers used on commercial arable crops were seaweed, ash and animal manures (collected by keeping the animals confined at night). A local commercial veg producer still uses only those natural, local fertilisers, and can sell their Organic crops at a premium price.
I'm talking about farming essential proteins, not calories.And you can get far more than meat from livestock; they also produce fertiliser, hide, fat wool and bone. You'll be needing bone needles for knitting and sewing; animal fat for greasing the wooden wheels of your wagon, and hoff and horn to make glue to mend your wind-powered computer.
In cool climate areas of a world with a short growing season and no petrol transport, it would be hard to grow enough digestible protein crops. So it makes sense to grow animals (on non-arable land) for all the very valuable ways they can be used.
Janet.
"JoeSpareBedroom" expounded:
It's on my list! :o)
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is next, though.
After you've read it, have some fun: Explain the theme of the book to various people and see who drools and says "whuh?" Basically, it's about plants training people.
Since you have divorced what I wrote from the context of the article on which I was commenting and have also snipped any mention of small animals, then clearly I'm writing about cattle.
To put it back in context. The author of the article assumed that all cattle are fed on grain. You and I boht know that is not the case although it may be the case for most of the time in the US (although God knows why given the falvour of grain fed beef).
It IS possible in limited circumstances most of which don't apply across the breadth of drought ravaged Australia where animals will be able to forage and survive where a vegetaive food would shrivel to a crisp. The animals won't in general be prime killing stock for frying/grilling but they will certainly be edible in casserole/stew form. I suspect you must live in a water rich area to write what you did.
Haven't you been to a butchers recently? It's already getting to that level.
In
Yep. You got my point there.
David, I know you are in Australia, but it seems that you are ignorant of the amount of marginal land we have here. When a food basket area of Australia like the Murry is now not allowed to do any watering, that land is well and truly into the marginal territory. and it may be there permanenelty with global warming.
However in many places feeding animals on pasture that is quite
Yes it is, it's particulalry favoured in the US, but that is not the whole picture depite how the author wrote his article.
Lot and shed fed beasts _are_ fed on grain
Yes, but it can be otherwise and will be otherwise at sometime in the future and if that land isn't built over by McMansions.
I've got to say that this is absolute rubbish. It's not JUST about getting calories and it's not just about how animals are currently fed. And THAT is the whole problem about the original article. The author seemed to know so little about social history that he couldn't make a valid point to save himself.
Where do you get your nutrients to grow this food? You can't keep producing food without input of fertiliser for all but a very short period of time.
In a non oil world the easiest and best source of that is animals manure. and animals will also give you other far more useful byproducts that are needed to sustain life - this includes (briefly) leather and fibre and rennet and soap and a hundred other things.
Please don't jump to conclusions. I am well aware that Oz is the driest inhabited continent and has the oldest most impoverished soils and that historically we have not dealt with these facts very well. I still have trouble with you saying
All my neighbours run beef cattle on pasture. They mainly fertilise it with chicken litter. The chooks are fed on feed derived from grain. The grain is fed with chemical fertiliser. The paddocks not given chicken litter are given superphosphate etc. My concern is just as valid for these pasture fed cattle as for lot fed animals.
Such a concept only applies
It doesn't snow here but the grass stops for about three months a year in winter. Unless you want your animals to lose a lot of condition over that time you must supplemenatary feed with hay or silage. Growing hay is essential to the way the beef industry works here. The concept does apply here and in many other beef producing areas.
As for running down the stock over winter I can only imagine you are talking about animals other than cattle.
I never said it was the whole picture, I said he has a point.
We agree.
You are picking out one bit of what I said and ignoring the context. I didn't say it's _all_ about calories I said you lose calories by growing animals. The matter of humans having trouble getting enough protein of the right sort from an all vegetable diet has not been mentioned, once again don't assume that because I don't mention it I don't know about it. I am not shilling for the vegans, I'm an omnivore.
And THAT is
Obviously. And if your fertilser options are limited or much more expensive you need to consider the efficiency of your operation in generating calories. In Australia we eat far more meat than we need for dietary purposes because we like it. Can't you concede that there is future in which we may not be able to afford that luxury?
I have no problem with that at all.
David
Agreed.
I agree.
Grass fed beef, slow to maturity, is some of the best I have eaten, along with bison, which is available locally for us. Harvesting and storing winter feed is certaily doable, on a limited scale, though work it is. Most of the time here, snow cover is not total through the winter.
Also, depending upon your location, deer, elk, etc. are there for the harvesting, at least for now. I used to hunt, and eat whitetail deer. Still eat some every year, as the boys both hunt and I always help them butcher. I haven't killed for about ten years, but am able and prepared to do so.
Same for all sorts of wild meat here in the u$.....fish, frogs, squirrel, rabbit, wildfowl, upland game and some critters that I have eaten years ago, such as raccon and some that I haven't been hungry enough to try yet, such as possum. Depends upon your locale. Have I read that 'roo is eaten in your country? Should be plenty of them to go 'round!
Rabbits are simple to raise, and the old idea of having individual hutches, breeding boxes, etc., is not necessary. We've raised rabbits in a shed with straw bale shelters, free to roam about the shed, and they did great and gave us a great harvest.
I've been raising only heirloom garden produce for ten years and saving seeds. This is *essential* if we want to survive a downturn. Absolutely essential. I continually recommend heirlooms to people.
I try and maintain a selection that produces in dry climates and in normally moist years. COvering bases. People alos need to research what the native peoples rased before modern methods took over......such as in the u$, where Native Americans raised much maize, beans. and squashes, all good storage items.
I agree, but the overview and the exhortation to thik about doing for oneself when the tide turns is the true value of the article.
Maybe, just maybe, some of us will make it. Hope it doesn't go all Mad Max on us.
Care Charlie
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.