Sustainability

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

A while back I posted this link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/17/BAGI1CGM1H.DTL

The board I found it on went on to have a fairly heated discussion about sustainable farming practices and whether Lierre Keith's claims that strictly vegetarian farming is harder on the environment than diverse farming. Coming from a standpoint of sustainability, it does seem that some non-predator animals need to be involved in the local farming loop in order to produce manures to enrich the soil.

Thoughts?

I haven't yet read the Omnivore's Dilemma but I think it also touches a bit on biodiverse sustainable farming practices.

[rygD]

I have heard that it is best to not farm a particular plot year after year, and I suppose what you said makes sense, as the soil would eventually be devoid of nutrients.  On the other hand, how is this any different than letting that land go and have whatever plant life sprouts up in it (even grasses) using all that up.  I like eating meat and other animal products, and the manure will return nutrients to the ground, but wouldn't the dead plants do the same?

Fighting my urge to suggest things such as killing off a large percentage of the human population to reduce how much food is required, or using the blood of men to make the soil more fertile, I think that using the old compost heap is a step in the right direction for supplementing the soil.  This seems to me that it would help out, but it may be true that it wouldn't be enough.  I also think it would be a good idea to help reduce landfills.  Free range farming has a lot of positives, but the way that many cultures are at present (vast urban areas with huge populations) may not make this feasible in many places, so the factory farm seems the best option (to my uneducated mind).

For a small community I think it can go either way, but again, I am not familiar with farming.  I think that a vegan community should be fine if they use whatever they can to give back to the soil.  Is it possible to "clean" sewage for use to fertilise crops?  I do think that an omnivorous community would have the advantage, as they could use manure along with other parts that are not consumed or otherwise used.  Another option is to live off of what grows wild in the area, depending on the size of the group and their location.

Perusing the article you linked I think I personally agree with some of what the woman proposes, but I also approve of peppery pies as weapons!  What a brilliant idea.

I have a difficult time understanding vegans.  Your body is designed to function with either meat or plant matter as food, and were we herbivores or not using all the parts of animals that were killed for food we would not have become as highly developed culturally, I suspect.  Vegans seem to me to be the type of people who are squeamish about the death of other animals since they have grown up in a sterile and compartmentalised community where they have limited exposure to the rest of the "scary, dirty" world.  I find it interesting that they don't want to hurt other animals, but they have no problem attacking humans with things designed to cause pain, and for an extended period of time.  Silly anarchists.

[BADGE OF HONOR]

It's pretty much impossible to live in the modern world without harming the environment one way or another (plastic, anyone?).  That said, diverse farming is always going to be better, in terms of both nutrition and sustainability.  Monoculture farming is a disaster waiting to happen--see the Irish potato famine, or look into the extraordinary steps corn farmers have to take to keep their Monsanto crops alive.  The Aztecs practiced basically vegetarian-only farming (not having any large animals to domesticate), but it was extraordinarily labor-intensive.  In terms of simple ecology, it's much much easier for humans to get their protein from animals than plants.

[rygD]

In terms of simple ecology, it's much much easier for humans to get their protein from animals than plants.

It is yummier, too.

[Eater of Clowns]

Most farms I visited either kept a small number of animals in order assist their practices or had plans to do so in the near future, should they be able to make the investment.

Monoculture is a big problem for soil integrity, as badges pointed out, because the same nutrients are taken from the soil year after year without any new ones being deposited.  Tilling is a surprisingly underdiscussed negative of farming.  It's so common, but it's bad for quite a few reasons.  Loosening up the soil like that makes it susceptible to erosion - tons and tons of top soil is lost yearly just from rain, washed away.  The way it was given to me is that good farming practices should make rocks shrink, not grow, meaning any rock in the ground should over the years disappear beneath the newly produced soil instead of come loose.  A few farms I visited practiced no-till agriculture to counteract this, but it was never the small farms that were the problem to begin with.

Farming is also a major contributor of greenhouse gas emission.  It makes sense with all the gigantic machinery used these days (John Deere makes a $600,000 combine!?!) and the shipping needed to distribute, but that's not the entirety of it.  Again, going back to tilling, each time the soil is disturbed it releases the trapped carbon dioxide.  So there's that.

Two solutions being attempted to monoculture crops are rotation and permaculture.  Crop rotation dates back to the fucking dark ages and it's amazing we've lost that idea over the years.  Permaculture goes back further, but was obscure in the never-really-used-in-western-culture way.  Certain crops can be grown in the exact same space and work together as natural pest repellants and soil nutrient providers.  One example I can think of is the soy bean and corn deal.  The corn has a naturally high, solid stalk and broad shady leaves, which lets the soy bean climb up the stalk and be protected from too much sunlight.  Another plant can be grown beneath those to cover the ground and provide support for both (I forget specifically which plant).  Now each of them also have their own beneficial or harmful insects - and likewise repels their own.

There are several problems here.  One, farming science is incredibly limited to exactly one variable per crop per year, so progress is very very slow.  The good farmers explain their craft as a 1,000 year project, and the 7th generation brand derives its name from adopting practices that would be beneficial seven generations from now.  The other problem is food fads, marketing, and general eating habits.  We consume too much meat, too much corn, too much soy.  We need to diversify what's on our plate - there's a plant that's an amazing contributor to permaculture called the hardy kiwi, I guess it's like a smaller kiwi that has edible skin.  But it's one of those things the average eater would balk at because they don't recognize it.

I haven't read Omnivore's Dilemma myself yet.  I still intend to, because it looks at farming itself, but Michael Pollan's newer In Defense of Food deals with an individual's eating habits and it's a solid read.  I guess he's got another one called Food Rules.  It's accessible, unpretentious writing from what I've read.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Wow, EoC, thanks! You seem really knowledgeable about this topic, which is fantastic.

There really is a problem with having a lot of people living in areas that are not arable. My local area could easily practice sustainable farming for itself, because it's incredibly fertile, but instead we have a fantastic amount of food shipped in, and we ship an equally fantastic amount of food out. There seems to be something terribly broken about that system, and also something very broken about local food being more expensive than imported food... though that balance is gradually shifting.

[Eater of Clowns]

Comic books and food systems are how I spent the majority of my electives in college.  Lot of reading, lot of hands-on.  My favorite class was Sustainable Agriculture, we had a 4 hour lab once a week where we went to local farms (western MA has tons of them).  The farmer would give us a tour and sometimes we'd give them some basic labor, picking squash things like that.  The dairy farm we went to was surprisingly awesome, usually they're smelly and cramped but it was a beautiful hilly piece of land with happy looking cows wandering about.  I guess they sell the majority of their milk to Stonyfield Farms, which, in addition to them making some outright delicious dairy, is the reason I wholeheartedly support that company.

Oops, reminiscing.

Food business is fucked, super proper-fucked.  FUCKED fucked.  We export grains subsidized grains so cheaply to third world countries their own farmers can't make a living.  The beef industry straight up buys congressmen.  You think insurance and pharmaceuticals have clout?  Beef.  I'm personally dead convinced a MAJOR reason marijuana is still illegal is that cotton throws their weight against it.  Legalizing marijuana means legally growing hemp in America, making a cheap, easy crop that's a viable threat to cotton.  That might be a little tinfoilhat of me, but it's why I support legalization in spite of never having smoked.

I'll admit a lot of those classes were alarmist and filled with exactly the sort of hippies you've been talking about in other threads, but there's truth I worked pretty hard to glean out of it, in spite of the misunderstandings I still have.