At 09:23 23/03/1999 +0100, you wrote:
>Axel:
>
>> what makes you think that a pig can feed exclusively on this surface? for
>> how long? what would he be eating? most likely there will be some kind of
>> foodstuff that has to be brought from outside those 20 square meters,
>> right? this would mean that the pig is actually using up way more land that
>> this environmentally-friendly 20 square meters.
>
>Of course! But since organic and conventional agriculture are about
>equally productive, the space needed to grow plants used for animal
>feeds should be approximately the same, therefore an organic pig uses
>the same space as a non-organic one, plus 20 square meters; these 20
>sq. m. add up to less than one thousandth of France's total surface.


axel:

but, as jean-claude said, you are not considering the lot of land used to
grow food that the organically-raised animals will eat.
environmentally-wise, the basic consideration is, IMHO, between animal
foods and vegetable foods. things like organic, biodynamic, permaculture,
are great and make any kind of food-producing system better and cleaner,
but still the big difference world-wide is that in general vegetable foods
take WAY less resources than animal foods. here too of course not all
vegetable foods are the same and not all animal foods are the same.


>(Note: if the above is wrong, I am very interested in a numeric
>estimate on how much space is needed for each organic pig, cow, sheep,
>chicken, etc. with detailed calculations.)

i think we could roughly estimate it ourselves once we know the average
intake of the main foods of the animals and how much land and other
resources it takes to grow that food. then we can figure that it takes x
space to grow x amount of pig and x for a certain vegetable food. there are
calculations like this, in fact.


axel makaroff