Read the Comments?

I don't know how many times I read comments on a news item and wish I hadn't - and then I tell people about the horrible things people have said, and am told "Never read the comments!"

This time, though, I am glad I read the comments because I found this gem. I've been thinking a lot about waste lately, and about how to create as closed a system as possible with my gardening (and eventually, my daily living) so that I am not, for example, taking phosporous from Morroco and then peeing my own phosphorous into the local lake where our sewage ends up. This could be a closed loop within community - I have no problem using a friend's horse manure and returning vegetables to her. Basically, I don't want to enrich my own situation by impoverishing another. Nature provides a beautiful model to follow, and this commenter explains how it works in a food system:

One of the hardest things for me to wrap my mind around is the almost singleminded focus that so many people have on looking for a way to 'manufacture and sell' a remediation for a problem. In other words, techno-fixes are the way forward (particularly if one can market them or the tools to apply them).

Nature designed grazing animals to harvest, process and redeposit all the nutrients and organisms necessary to maintain soil fertility indefinitely with humans filling the supervisory role since we no longer allow the graziers to range at will on the landscape and we have removed the predators that kept the graziers moving and thinned the population periodically.

A lovely side benefit is a truly clean, healthy food (so long as we humans resist the urge to medicate the critters like we medicate ourselves or lock them up in small areas where they have to live in their own excrement) that provides most of the nutrients we need to stay healthy. I know, there are many things that also come from various 'vegetables' but the graziers eat the original vegetables and the nutrients are deposited in their tissues for their use as well as ours.

Another side benefit of planned grazing is the rebuilding of the soils' ability to catch and hold water using the root webs that happen when grass is thick and healthy. I think most of us on this forum are aware of the water issues we face and of the need to find ways to restore the water cycle to its correct state. You can fix the erosion and compaction problems faster with grass than with any other plants.

The constraint, as I see it, is that no one except the grower makes much money from these techniques. One can't be the next Bill Gates or Kubota tractor designer or Monsanto or ADM with these procedures. No one with an interest in promoting grass management is funding research projects at our land grant colleges so the researchers continue to pursue projects with a commercial bias...then give the results to whoever paid for the projects.

To the contrary, many times the land grant experts actively work to discredit grass management practices for the very reason that they reduce or eliminate the need for purchased amendments and equipment.

You find Rodale, Vandana Shiva, Allan Savory, Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry Gene Logsden, John Todd and many other proponents of Natural Systems doing the necessary validation but the information does not make the front pages (or even the back pages) very often.

I wonder why we humans, particularly Americans, simply must complicate things instead of looking at what has worked for centuries and seeing if we can replicate the System.

Well, I think the commenter has given the answer to her own question - the engine of capitalist growth that we are all feeding drives our food system. The many fundraisers to cure cancer, and the lack of fundraisers to prevent it come to mind - it is far more profitable to create a pharmaceutical to cure a disease than to ban cosmetic pesticides. After all, crime, sickness, war, and pollution all can increase economic activity and therefore increase the GDP, our marker of success.

That is, the marker that we are told indicates success. How would you like to see success defined?

Feel-Good Friday

Here's a story to warm the cockles of your heart - especially you Saskatchewanians in -30 weather.

You may be familiar with the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model of farming. Eaters subscribe to receive a weekly box of vegetables over the growing season, and pay up front in the spring when the farmer needs to purchase major inputs. They also share a bit of the farmer's risk; if the farm is flooded and some of the vegetables are unharvestable, the subscribers do without. They are supporting local agriculture, typically small family farms, and sustainable growing practices.

Paul's cow*.

CSAs are springing up all over the place, and 30-year-old farmer Paul Slomp has taken the idea even further: he has a beef CSA called Grazing Days, just outside of Ottawa. This article explains how he serves people who want healthy, sustainable local beef but lack freezer space or desire to buy a half a side of beef as they are often sold from a local farmer. “People sign up for how much beef they would like over the course of nine months, and we deliver it to people’s homes in small 10lb to 20lb portions once a month or once every other month – depending on the household’s needs.”



The article mentions Slomp's sustainable practices:

Grazing Days’ Paul Slomp – who often calls himself a “grass farmer” – frequently stresses that properly managed grazing of cattle improves the health of our soils. Managed grazing, he says, protects our streams, rivers and aquifers; it sequesters carbon, and is an effective way to harvest solar energy.

I learned a bit more about Grazing Days this week, and this is why I really get a kick out of it. Slomp started the business when he had $10,000 to his name. He wanted to avoid the debt that hobbles so many farmers, so he sold bond-like contracts with 4% interest to friends and eaters, pre-sold a season's worth of beef, and was able to purchase 14 head of cattle that first season and pay rent on 75 acres of land. He didn't have enough money for a vehicle, so he rides his bicycle 21 km daily to his land from his home and rents a car for delivery days. He also rents freezer space from a warehouse in Ottawa. He's also building up to forty head this coming year.

That's what I call ingenuity!

Happy Friday. I'll be enjoying my evening with family, a grass-fed beef roast, and some Okanagan wine.

*This isn't Paul Slomp's heifer, but it is a heifer (or steer) belonging to my dad, whose name is Paul. The picture is from about 1960. As you can see, the animal is also grass-fed. Cut me some slack. I don't have a lot of cattle pictures on this computer.