Author Topic: Good News  (Read 5043 times)

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Offline RogueFarmer

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Good News
« on: March 11, 2013, 10:45:35 pm »
Ted Talks just hosted Alan Savory and he did a 20 minute piece about how grass fed, holistically managed livestock can reverse desertification and climate change!

http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change.html

I have owned his books for over a year now. Skimmed through them but haven't really totally plowed into it yet. It's thiiiick and hard to wrap my mind around, it also doesn't help that he is African and has a more intelligent way of using the english language such that my poor unintelligent American brain has to re-read half of the paragraphs. But I did read at least half of it and am starting to wrap my brain around it and I definitely got my head around it. The really tricky part for me is all the record keeping they do, it's practically mind boggling. It's a real textbook. Holistic management, a new framework for decision making.

What's great is that if this catches on, basically there would be surplus meat for humanity, eating healthy would be cheaper than eating grains. Imagine a world like that? The only problem is, how to stop ourselves from breeding like bunnies thereafter?

Offline Projectile Vomit

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Re: Good News
« Reply #1 on: March 12, 2013, 01:58:03 am »
...how to stop ourselves from breeding like bunnies thereafter?

Wonderful TED talk, thanks for linking to it. Posts like these are what keep me coming back to this forum.

Regarding your last question, if men allowed women the same social status as they enjoy rather than treating them like second-class citizens (or personal property), that would work wonders to keep birth rates down.

Offline RogueFarmer

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Re: Good News
« Reply #2 on: March 12, 2013, 03:33:15 am »
Yeah but there are probably only three solutions to that, all of which are "unethical".

1 imprisonment and indoctrination
2 legalize murder
3 mass nutting
or perhaps four and slightly more ethical would be to strip men of civil rights, ownership rights, etc.

haha!

Offline Projectile Vomit

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Re: Good News
« Reply #3 on: March 12, 2013, 03:42:45 am »
How are any of these solutions to gender inequality?

Offline Iguana

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Re: Good News
« Reply #4 on: March 12, 2013, 04:24:39 am »
Amazing lecture. So, the problem is not livestock itself, but the way livestock is managed. By managing it in a way which mimics nature, it doesn’t cause desertification but on the contrary reclaims previously desertified land. If it’s true, and it looks like it is, that is the solution to save the planet!

I’m not a great fan of videos, but this one is a must see
Cause and effect are distant in time and space in complex systems, while at the same time there’s a tendency to look for causes near the events sought to be explained. Time delays in feedback in systems result in the condition where the long-run response of a system to an action is often different from its short-run response. — Ronald J. Ziegler

Offline Alive

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Re: Good News
« Reply #5 on: March 12, 2013, 07:26:14 am »
What an amazing video - very encouraging!

It will be interesting to see people start to realise that the cereal based agriculture they think is good for animals and the planet is shown to be unsustainable and that properly managed livestock are very sustainable.

This reminds me of reading about some arid place in the US where they tried to plant grass but couldn't get it to grow. Then they got a guy in who put his cattle on the land, feeding them hay. The stalks and seeds from the hay, the animal manure, and the small depressions left by the hoof prints all helped to get the grass growing, and he was able to turn it back into pasture again!
« Last Edit: March 12, 2013, 07:44:08 am by alive »

Offline RogueFarmer

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Re: Good News
« Reply #6 on: March 12, 2013, 03:44:33 pm »
How are any of these solutions to gender inequality?

Well I don't think there is much hope for the older generations, they are going to keep being sexist. I suppose there is some hope for the future generations though.

Amazing lecture. So, the problem is not livestock itself, but the way livestock is managed. By managing it in a way which mimics nature, it doesn’t cause desertification but on the contrary reclaims previously desertified land. If it’s true, and it looks like it is, that is the solution to save the planet!

I'm just a novice starting out and I am in the east (wet) region of the US, but I practice short duration, long rest rotational grazing and I have watched a field of mostly weeds turn into mostly grass in less than a year.

We rotated pigs through the pasture and they tilled it up and killed a lot of weeds and the old dead growth was trodden by the cows into the ground. Honestly, it's a long story but it was a move of desperation. I didn't believe the land would support my animals, but I had just been screwed hard by a proverbial evil b**** and a friend helped me out... I was trying to figure out what to do, but I watched how my animals were doing and scratched my head and saw my cow making 4 gallons of milk a day on just grass and I just went for it... what I thought couldn't be done, what people told me couldn't be done, worked a hell of a lot better than not at all.

It was just the most amazing thing to watch, the animals secured their own future... though the land was poor and the plants course and weedy, these animals evolved with these plants to live... if we give our animals a varied diet, even one of poor quality and we have the right genetics, they will thrive and with the right management, nature will thrive with them. 

p.s. Yes, like alive said, the first time when I rotated my animals across that field, I fed a hay bale with every new paddock. this also helped I think or at least my animals probably wouldn't have gotten enough to eat without it!

p.p.s. I mean, what happened for me is not anywhere the kind of miracle allan savory is talking about, because a big part of it was simply the animals clearing and tramping the dead vegetation to make room for more grass. Still, it was so instructive and obvious to witness this demonstration and to see the benefit that the livestock gave to the pasture.
« Last Edit: March 12, 2013, 04:02:22 pm by RogueFarmer »

Offline Iguana

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Re: Good News
« Reply #7 on: March 13, 2013, 03:52:29 pm »
This discussion derailed to climate change, so the following posts are here: Climate change
Cause and effect are distant in time and space in complex systems, while at the same time there’s a tendency to look for causes near the events sought to be explained. Time delays in feedback in systems result in the condition where the long-run response of a system to an action is often different from its short-run response. — Ronald J. Ziegler

 

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