On Wed, 3 Apr 2002 10:00:04 +0900, Tom Bridgeland <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>> Did you think about fruit trees?

>All of these are little different. If they are "farmed" then humans
>must prevent other animals from taking the majority of the crop.

In california there are large walnut farms, and I'm shure they are sprayed
and chemical fertilized. Same for apple and other fruit farms over here.
Thats "conventional" agriculture. It involves some use of
pesticide (chemical insect killers).
If the plant is well adapted to any area (like what I assume of walnut and
almonds in california and apples and walnuts at home here) it is possible
to use very little or no spraying. Organic production works.
The Cherry trees and apples in my gardens do well. Without ever beeing
sprayed.
I know a lot of successfull farms which run very well without any chemical
killers. There's a natural balance, and what the remaining "bad" insects eat
 mostly is less than what the pesticides would cost to buy.

Then there's the problem of competition from various animals in
"harvesting" the nuts/fruit/vegetables. You may have to chase away birds
from cherries or use nets.
Usuall the "harvest competition" is small and easily tolerated.
There are exceptions like the immigrated snails which use to eat radically
whenever I try to grow salad. These snails have no natural enemies.
I could use some kinds of fence. But I simply switched to blackcurrant
and herbs which I like and no animal.

One of the first neolithic cultures (Linearband, 4000BC) used to have
"fences" around their fields. Hedges of blackthorn. At the same time they
kept game animals away and served as a very good vitamin fruit source (I
have blackthorn too a good November Vitamin C).

>Even
>now rodents and birds steal large percentages of crops on many
>countries. In advanced countries rats are controlled by poison.

Yes, I have seen that in India, where great coconut are abundant, I can be
that rats learn to climb coconut trees and plunder the fruit.
Really the have to come to the idea and learn it.
Sometimes the use poison, however that is no cure.
The cure is to apply a very slippery zone on each tree, so that they can't
climb.
Prevention is the right cure.

> I had a snake living
>there a few years that kept the rats down,...

That's a cool story with the snake.
Natural animals live in a balance, and if humans offer good food sources,
like on farms or even food storage it can be disturbed.
This is why rats and mice live so well.

Up to the middle ages the ordinary cat was a very important answer of this.
Harvest yealds were 3 to 4-fold of what was sawed.
1 of this was the next seed
1 of this ate the grain beetles.
1 of this ate the mice
1 of this ate the people.
I see, that a good cat can *double* what people have to eat.
Interesting, how important cats were.

>Let us separate what is politically driven from what is natural. .. The
>entire modern feeder cattle industry is driven by politically
>cheapened grain.

So, the feeder cattle industry is the real tool how to increase the wheat
production? What purpose for? I mean for the country?

>> ..about 10 fold as much (actually for pigs it's about 7-fold and for
>> cattle its about 15-fold).
>
>These numbers are completely bogus, evangelical vegetarian lies.
>Even today cow are not fed pure grain. The great majority of their
>diet is roughage, with some grain and soy added to increase energy and
>protein percentages. So if a cow eats 15 pounds of green plants to
>produce one pound of meat, that certainly does not mean that humans
>"lost" 14 pounds of food we could have eaten.

I don't have the sources at hand, but I can look back.
Two approaches. With numbers from the EU, 1990.
40 % of the (agricultural) area is producing fedder, 40% is producing
"bread" grain (much of it-bran- fedder again). The rest is only vegetables,
sugar (turnip), fruit. Very little vegetables and fruit.
Ok, Germany produces nearly all meat itself with this 40% fedder *plus*
all the imported fedder, soy from America, fish flour etc.
Germany eats 250g meat average for every person every day.
This is about 25% (of 2400kcal).
Result: about double input (40%) for half output(25).
Not bad, but the imported fedder has to be counted.

Then the growth computation.
A 70kg pig eats 36MJ plus 82g protein to gain 500g each day.
500g medium fat pig meat would be 880kcal (take some 25% for "refuse" away).
36MJ are 8640 kcal.
Here you have the factor  8640: 880  that's 10: 1 .
From actual numbers from the agricultural handbook "Faustzahlen".

>We actually GAIN valuable food from the plants we can not
>otherwise eat.

Yes, that's possible. In most cases we actually decide to produce crops
humans cannot eat, to feed them away. Grass is a crop too, and even not a
bad yielding.
Some areas *are* suitable only for animal subsidience. Like dry grasslands
maybe, where goats can survive. Most areas can produce both and much or all
of it (grain or grass) is used as fedder.

>In the last few weeks or months of their life, just
>prior to slaughter, modern feeder cattle are fed concentrated grain
>and soy, along with their normal green plant diet, to increase their
>muscle fat levels. For most of their lives they eat much less grain.
>Adult cattle, except dairy cattle, eat little grain.

Green plants are good yielding, fertilized, managed crops.
They just tont make the cattle so unnatural obese that even their pure lean
muscles contain 5% fat.

> Europe has mountains of grain and dairy
>products that it can not even GIVE away, no one wants them, and so
>does the US, Japan, and every other advanced nation.

>There is NO SHORTAGE of food in the world, and there will not be in
>the future.

I'm afraid this optimistic view will not work out.
First of all because of the population explosion, which will eat up any
resource.
Secondly the overproducing of the rich countries works only at some cost.
The cost is that it can't work very long. The soil limits the amount of
years this is possible. Such a kind of crop production is not sustainable
even not for decades.
Organic agriculture (which is the actual "conventional" or traditional
production) yields only about 1/4 of the harvest, but it was sustainable for
1000'nds of years.
We have to think from this level of production.

>An animal based diet does not increase the death of animals. All
>animals live and die on this earth.

If you decide to shoot one gazelle, well you cause the death of that
gazelle, but it would have died anyway.
If you eat a bunch of mongongo nuts hmmm.
What will do good? Is there something like karma?
Kiosan decide to eat both, mongongo and gazelle.

I cannot tell if you should or anyone should or shouldn't.

But.
As long as you eat cattle, and the cattle is fed in a farm,
I think you shouldn't *rant* about the environmental impact or
animal death impact of the vegetable farming industry.

Cheers,

Amadeus
who likes to drive in his open car in the sunshine and accepts to
cause some environmental impact with this.