bruce kline

David Livingston wrote:Well the Land Lord wants to give me some  more land !
He is very happy with what I am doing the problem is I am not sure I want it . As part of an on going dispute with the farmer next door he want the Farmer to shift his cows off one of the field and give the land to me . The land is almost solid clay with a thin layer of topsoil and cow shit having been over grazed since  Adam was a boy   Any suggestions ? Particularly ones that dont cost money

It sounds like the the land has a lot of nutrients in it, but much of the manure may need to age/rot.  You could add wood chips to plant ground cover mulch to start I think.

I think there is a difference between grazing and over-grazing. China has an
amazing history of these huge projects that some big-shot in the communist
party gets convinced is a good idea, and then they do it and throw whole
areas of the country or the economy out of whack for decades or longer.

As to your experience with sheep, perhaps sheep were not best suited for your
needs. I think sheep or goats are better used for short times on certain areas
or better used in scrub areas. I am not expert, but I think you are generalzing
from a position of little data that conflicts with what other experts actually have
said.

I am learning about veganism/vegetarianism and permaculture too, a whole
world is opening up for me late in life but I also see that as there are biased
voices for the processed food industry it's the same with everyone and one has
to be skepitlcal and avoid quick emotional arguments and try to qualify things
with facts, because there is a lot of imprefect data on both sides of these debates.

I'd like to gently push this discussion back on track.

This is not really about the merits of eating vegan or vegan philosophy.

My conception ( could be wrong ) that if we humans were to restore nature,
the forests and the wildlife, the ecology that it would help to stabilize and
revitalize the homeostasis of the life zones of the planet and the elasticity
of the atmosphere.

Reforestation is one part of that, another part would be to stop abusing
the sea and the atmosphere.

I mentioned this somewhere and a vegan said you can do what he or she
called veganic permaculture. I was interested in the concepts and finding
out more and the differences from regular permaculture.

I see regular permaculture as being more outside the restoration of the
environment, and more like leveraging ecological systems to aid in producing
food. What I am talking about would not strictly be about producing food,
but it seems to me that if we had to design the world over it would make
sense to create wilds that in a safe sustainable way could produce food.
My feeling is that done right this would be equal to or superior to any
method we use now to produce food, especially if we put people to work,
gave them jobs managing the environment.

I agree with the point that we do not know everything about the environment
at this point, but so much of it is gone that I feel we would have to take the
chance if the chance ever arose and do the best we can. Mostly that means
non-interference.

The suggestion of veganic permaculture, seems to me on a large scale to be
one that would make vegans happy, but on a large scale that I am referring
to would actually take habitat away from animal life, so that thought which
did not occur to me before may be the first order answer to the problem.

Also I agree with the comments about animals doing work, that is, animals
promote vegetable growth, at least that is what I have heard. When you
prune a plant, or take a bite out of it, you stimulate growth is what I have
heard experts say. So animal live, hernivores, and I am not really talking
about "livestock" which has a certain connotation to factory farming. This
would be anything but, perhaps more like human predation of thinning.

My fantasy vision would be constraining human development to islands of
high density cities where industrial and cultural events can take place with
the rest of the land an interconnected garden managed by scientists,
students and vacationers, or those who would want to live a natural life.

Dangerous predators could be tagged and monitored so that they would
present no threat to people who would be warned by communication network
to get out of the way or the predator could be diverted by electronic means?

The point being to sustain the ecological diversity while still providing
a surplus for humans, perhaps supplemented with hydroponic or
permaculture farms.

I think the suggestion of veganic permaculture might have been because the
suggester did not realize what I was trying to get at. So, not only would animals
do the work in nature, including right down to insects and worms, but it now
from things mentioned here would seem to be necessary.

I don't have the whole concept thought out, and some of this I got from reading
Whole Earth Catalogs from decades ago on how to save the planet combined
with what new ideas and technology are out today.

So now I wonder just how or where veganic would fit in or be necessary. Some
of the reading I have done has shown that far from just doing work for humans,
many animals actually enjoy interacting with humans, ie dogs and cats for sure,
but also dolphins, horses, and I am sure there are others. I heard a radio show
a few weeks ago about a man who had a relationship with a dolphin where the
dolphin would leave to go out to sea, but would periodically return to spend time
with this man. I think food was not the issue here because he did not feed the
dolphin.

Humans love animals and animals can love humans as well as has been shown
with some of the nature shows in Africa. I think this kind of purist aesthetic of
assuming that the only way to appreciate animals is to leave them totally alone
can not be natural. Though there are lots of cruel and dysfunctional relationships
such as horse or elephant breaking ... but that is not the extent of all human
animals relationships.

Thanks for all the ideas and comments, I hope people to continue to imagine this
along with me because I honestly fear for the future of all life on the planet, and
even if life continues, the status quo of today is not a very good model for that
into the future.

Tyler Ludens ... who or what are you disagreeing with?
This non-threaded discussion board does not make that clear, or it could be that I am a 1-day newbie.
I agree with you that desertification is mainly caused by humans, or on the flip side could be repaired by humans.
Also that is the exact point I was looking for ...

> If humans don't allow appropriate animal activity, such as herbivores managed by predators, then they have
> to take the functions of the animals upon themselves, which is by necessity, not as efficient, requiring more
> human labor. In my opinion.


Bethany Dutch, thanks for your reply,
I cannot comment on the vegan lifestyle because I think for some people with certain medical problems it is
appropriate, and I like what Michael Pollan says about diet ... "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much". I think
that is the quote anyway. I comment on the Nutrition Facts website, which I get a lot of information from, but
the people there and the comments there are outright hostile to any mention of eating animal foods. Their
general belief is that meat and animal products are poison and will kill you in any dose. Their strategy seems
to be to find studies and then extrapolate them to whatever degree necessary to support a completely animal
free diet - and more to my question's point - and animal free agriculture.

In general I agree with anything that wants to reduce our factory farming infrastructure, but I have studied a
little bit about permaculture and this militant vegan out look as defined on nutritionfacts.org is troublesome
for its complete irrationality.

But a vegan diet, and a vegan permaculture seems at odds to me as they seem to in your comment.

Maybe as a followup question I could ask you, if you have goats and chickens, and let's say you were a vegan
permaculture practitioner, what would you do with the animals when they died if you did not want to eat them.
My point was that if the US was to try to reverse its destruction of the land, and reverse desertification, using
permaculture practices, would not one have to either eat the animals or have a healthy supply of carnivores
such as mountain lions, bears, etc to keep the herbivore population down?

Not that the US ever would do that, but if we did would we rather eat herbivores or have so many carnivores
around that they presented a danger?

--

Aside ... I am reading a book called Drunk Tank Pink, and I have to wonder now if the color of this page
is pink in the hope of keeping the argumentation and hostilities to a minimum? The book is pretty
interesting and first thing goes into this issue that color has an affect on people's mental attitude.

> All that said the examples of making a desert not a desert anymore have utilized animals. But i havent seen many.

Yes, that is what I was getting at. Vast areas of the world are becoming desert. People say it is not man's fault, but
odd that it happens or happened the most where there was the most human development and civilization and is
moderated somewhere where people have had to live and become civilized and cooperative to survive.

The context in which I am asking this is not necessarily for food production, but rather habitat rebuilding, but seems
like it might be done as the Native Americans did things, where they consciously or unconsciously created what we
think of as permaculture food forests by reinforcing the plants and animals they liked and used.

What would the effect be if areas of desert were brought back, would we be able to slow and reverse global warming,
and judging from the speed and the lag of the CO2 already in the Earth system fast must be done whatever we do.
It seems a win if it can be natural.

I was in a discussion where I was supporting permaculture in the sense that Alan Savory
talked about in his TED talk on reducing desertification, not necessarily in terms of farming
or producing food. I am not expert in this but I support trying to renew the natural world
from where it is today, both on the grounds of reversing the decline of nature and helping
to stop catastrophic climate change.

This was on the Nutrition Facts Org website where people are to say the least vegan
crazy, so someone said there as such a thing as veganic permaculture.

Now, I would imagine there would be, and have no problem with that, but I'm thinking
how do you compared to the two for reversing desertification.

It would seem to me that for that veganic permaculture would be less efficient because
animals act as stimulants for vegegation growth, and broadcasters of nutrients to places
that plant would not or more slowly get to. Also veganic permaculture would be more
labor intensive as animals are doing work that would need to be done by people or machines.

I was just wondering if anyone had done anything thinking of experimentation with
this idea before? Thanks.