Nicholas Langis

Will that documentary openly disclose that the Polyface "miracle" requires more grain calories in input than it produces in actual meat?

Adam Merberg wrote:
Say What Michael Pollan? The Free Lunch
...
I’ll first look at the grain used to feed Salatin’s broilers. The most recent printing of The Omnivore’s Dilemma states (page 222) that Salatin raises 12,000 broilers each year. (The productivity numbers in earlier printings were different. In fact, my copy even has different numbers in two different places.) According to Salatin’s Pastured Poultry Profit$, the broilers have a carcass weight of 4 pounds, and the chickens require 3 pounds of feed for each pound of carcass weight (page 185). That comes out to 144,000 pounds of feed each year. Salatin writes that he uses a feed consisting of 52% corn, 29% roasted soybeans, 11% crimped oats, and the rest consisting of fish meal, kelp and nutritional supplements. Since I’d like my estimate of the energy content of the feed to be conservative, I’ll ignore the calorie content of everything but the grains. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find good data for calorie content of feed grains, so I’ll be using data for food-grade grains. Using USDA data for corn, soy, and oats, one finds that a mixture of 0.52 pounds of corn, 0.29 pounds of soybeans, and 0.11 pounds of oats contains a little over 1700 calories. That comes out to 244,800,000 calories in the feed grain.

Now what about the productivity of Salatin’s farm? Here things get pretty tricky. There are several different kinds of animals, and each has several different kinds of meat with different calorie densities. For rabbits, I wasn’t able to find any useful data on carcass weights. Regardless, here is the calculation in tabular form. (References are at the end of the post. Where no reference is given, the source is the version of The Omnivore’s Dilemma available on Google Books.)
Food Quantity / Energy density / Total Energy (Cal)
Beef 25,000 lb / 1163 Cal/lb 1 / 29,075,000
Pork 50,000 lb / 1062 Cal/lb 1 / 53,100,100
Broiler hens / 48,000 lb 2 / 615 Cal/lb 1 29,540,136
Stewing hens / 2,400 lb 3 615 Cal/lb 4 / 1,476,000
Turkeys / 12,000 lb5 / 541 Cal/lb 1 / 6,492,000
Rabbits / 5,000 lb 6 617 Cal/lb 7 / 3,085,000
Eggs / 360,000 eggs / 135 Cal/egg 8 / 48,600,000
Total / 171,368,236

With these very rough estimates, it appears that Polyface actually requires more calories in feed than it produces in food. ...

I am guessing an emphatic NO. Incase you didn't get it, when making open sources calculations based on his own admissions for his production of chickens and his grain feed, just to feed his chickens Salatin uses 244,800,000 input calories, which yields only 171,368,236 calories in animal based foods. The numbers are actually worse than that as his pigs are also feed 25% grain.

Despite what Earthship Biotecture says in their marketing like claims, Earthships built out of their home-base of Taos in the desert Southwest of the USA have encountered numerous problems(which is not to say those in their home locale are problem free either). Especially those built in Northern Europe with colder climates like the ones in Brighton(UK), Belgium, Scandinavia, etc. have been plagued with problems. Basically they didn't insulate underneath the building structures, because you don't need that measure in New Mexico! In Europe that resulted in Earthships that have moisture problems, mold and need fossil fuel based heating as the passive heating does not work in winter.

I would advise that you contact people like Mischa Hewitt(involved in the Brighton project and who now uses different materials and approaches after its failure), Marcus Lewitzki, etc. who know more about the problems of Earthships built in higher latitudes and don't have a monetary interest in telling you what suits their bank account. I would seriously advise against this idea of having people from the alien climate of the American Southwestern deserts come to build in Montreal. Every climate is very different and the building techniques and materials needed are never gonna be one size fits all, despite what Earthship Biotecture promotes. Then when their crew with minimal experience in the colder latitudes like Montreal leaves, you will be stuck with an odd shaped building that does not meet its sustainable claims.

@Jessica Gorton:
I have money saved to pay for a course. Unfortunately, many courses just take up time and effort and don't necessarily mean -- let alone guarantee, that when you are done, you actually learned enough to start and maintain your own permaculture endeavor. For example, I was gonna attend the Earthship Academy in Fall 2012, but after contacting several alumni via email and Youtube personal messages, it seemed most of them never did anything with it. It was just more of a experience or work vacation. I don't want that. I would rather take a vacation and visit my relatives in that case.

@Paulo Bessa:
My concern about volunteering is the same I relayed to Jessica above. I want to learn enough to start and maintain my own permaculture farm. I am sure starting a permaculture effort from nothing is alot different than volunteering to an established one and wonder if you could ever bridge that gap just by volunteering at a very established place unless they made great efforts to teach that.

@kirk dillon:
Is there any particular reason you recommend Zaytuna Farm? Have you been there personally?

I looked it up online. It seems interesting, the trainees seem to sort of camp out in covered stations and live a minimalist lifestyle which is attractive to me. However, if I am gonna travel that far, I guess I would rather travel to Greece where I can also eventually visit my relatives who I have not seen in a long time. I can see how being vegan would present difficulties, since people don't generally care for veganism(since people like to consume as much resources as they can to show off their alleged wealth and social status). I don't have issues with using chickens to eat insects and pests on a farm, but I do with killing them, selling them and being served them for food.

Hi,
I am sick of my current job and life, and see no point in continuing. I have long wanted to live a more sustenance oriented lifestyle using little or no money if possible, nothing is holding me back. I hate my job and can quit. I never started my own family. I have no mortgage or debts and never met anyone in thirty-one years of living worth meeting. Currently I live in northern New Jersey where it is gonna be too cold to farm soon enough and I don't really want to stay here anyway.

Is there anywhere I can learn permaculture by doing it? An intensive course or anything? I am open to any suggestions. However, as a vegan I will not involve myself in animal agriculture or husbandry.

Thanks