My search for the most ideal of what is possible

Fred Frank V Bur wrote:But I want to know if other vegans are content with being in community with others who are not vegan. Wouldn't all vegan communities be desirable? But maybe my hopes for what sustainable community that way would be does not attract others into discussion for it. I still want to keep trying.

If I were a vegan I would definitely want to be in a strictly vegan community.  I don't honestly see how a true vegan could live in a community with non-vegans and produce food in community.  I think non-vegans would want to use animal products in the production of food.

I practice a modified form of Biointensive and sometimes include animal products, but as originally conceived it is a vegan food growing system, using only plant-based materials to produce a vegan diet.

http://www.growbiointensive.org/grow_main.html

Except that microbes still do the grunt work of breaking down plant-based biomass. How is that different from using worms, or any other livestock?

-CK

Timothy Markus wrote:The vegans I know consume a lot of almond or soy milk or both.  I think that there are frightening issues with current agricultural methods for farming both of these, just like there are with all other 'state of the art' farming for meat, grains, etc.  I think you could have a sustainable vegan diet with a nut-based food forest.  If you ran an animal rescue you could graze them for their remaining lives, but that's still using the animal.  Maybe a food forest abundant enough to let a lot go to wildlife.

Seems like you can grow a lot of almonds in a food forest so that works in a permie system.  Not sure why grazing animals would be required.  I don't run animals (other than myself, who spends as much time as possible there) in my food forest and it generates piles of food.  It's open to wildlife, but they seem to mainly reduce the yield to us (so I just grow more).  If anything, I may end up fencing it off to limit some of the damage the wildlife do, this year they were extreme due to population booms.  I live in a wild forest and my fury neighbors are as interested in my food forest as I am.