Mar 13, 2014

Joel Salatin responds to New York Times’ ‘Myth of Sustainable Meat’ | Grist

By Joel Salatin
The following post originally appeared on the Polyface Farms Facebook page.

Cows at Polyface Farm. Photo by Amber Karnes.

The recent editorial by James McWilliams, titled “The Myth of Sustainable Meat,” contains enough factual errors and skewed assumptions to fill a book, and normally I would dismiss this out of hand as too much nonsense to merit a response. But since it specifically mentionedPolyface, a rebuttal is appropriate. For a more comprehensive rebuttal, read the book Folks, This Ain’t Normal.

Let’s go point by point. First, that grass-grazing cows emit more methane than grain-fed ones. This is factually false. Actually, the amount of methane emitted by fermentation is the same whether it occurs in the cow or outside. Whether the feed is eaten by an herbivore or left to rot on its own, the methane generated is identical. Wetlands emit some 95 percent of all methane in the world; herbivores are insignificant enough to not even merit consideration. Anyone who really wants to stop methane needs to start draining wetlands. Quick, or we’ll all perish. I assume he’s figuring that since it takes longer to grow a beef on grass than on grain, the difference in time adds days to the emissions. But grain production carries a host of maladies far worse than methane. This is simply cherry-picking one negative out of many positives to smear the foundation of how soil builds: herbivore pruning, perennial disturbance-rest cycles, solar-grown biomass, and decomposition. This is like demonizing marriage because a good one will include some arguments.

As for his notion that it takes too much land to grass-finish, his figures of 10 acres per animal are assuming the current normal mismanagement of pastures. At Polyface, we call it neanderthal management, because most livestock farmers have not yet joined the 20th century with electric fencing, ponds, piped water, and modern scientific aerobic composting (only as old as chemical fertilization). Hence, while his figures comparing the relative production of grain to grass may sound compelling, they are like comparing the learning opportunities under a terrible teacher versus a magnificent teacher. Many farmers, in many different climates, are now using space-age technology, biomimicry, and close management to get exponential increases in forage production. The rainforest, by the way, is not being cut to graze cattle. It’s being cut to grow transgenic corn and soybeans. North America had twice as many herbivores 500 years ago than it does today due to the pulsing of the predator-prey-pruning cycle on perennial prairie polycultures. And that was without any corn or soybeans at all.

Apparently if you lie often and big enough, some people will believe it: Pastured chicken has a 20 percent greater impact on global warming? Says who? The truth is that those industrial chicken houses are not stand-alone structures. They require square miles of grain to be carted into them, and square miles of land to handle the manure. Of course, many times that land is not enough. To industrial farmers’ relief, more often than not a hurricane comes along just in time to flush the toilet, kill the fish, and send pathogens into the ocean. That’s a nice way to reduce the alleged footprint, but it’s devilish sleight of hand with the data to assume that ecological toxicity compensates for the true land base needed to sustain a factory farm.

While it’s true that at Polyface our omnivores (poultry and pigs) do eat local GMO (genetically modified organism)-free grain in addition to the forage, the land base required to feed and metabolize the manure is no different than that needed to sustain the same animals in a confinement setting. Even if they ate zero pasturage, the land is the same. The only difference is our animals get sunshine, exercise, fresh pasture salad bars, fresh air, and a respectful life. Chickens walking on pasture certainly do not have any more leg sprains than those walking in a confinement facility. To suggest otherwise, as McWilliams does, is sheer nonsense. Walking is walking — and it’s generally considered to be a healthy practice, unless you’re a tyrant.

Interestingly, in a lone concession to compassion, McWilliams decries ranging hogs with rings in their noses to keep them from rooting, lamenting that this is “one of their most basic instincts.” Notice that he does not reconcile this moral imperative with his love affair with confinement hog factories. Nothing much to use their noses for in there. For the record, Polyface never rings hog noses, and in the few cases where we’ve purchased hogs with rings, we take them out. We want them to fully express their pigness. By moving them frequently using modern electric fencing, polyethylene water piping, high-tech float valves, and scientifically designed feed dispensers, we do not create nor suffer the problems encountered by earlier large-scale outdoor hog operations 100 years ago. McWilliams has apparently never had the privilege of visiting a first-rate, modern, highly managed, pastured hog operation. He thinks we’re all stuck in the early 1900s, and that’s a shame because he’d discover the answers to his concerns are already here. I wonder where his paycheck comes from?

Then McWilliams moves on to the argument that economic realities would kick in if pastured livestock became normal, driving farmers to scale up and end up right where we are today. What a clever ploy: justify the horrible by eliminating the alternatives. At Polyface, we certainly do not discourage scaling up — we actually encourage it. We think more pasture-based farms should scale up. Between the current abysmal state of mismanagement, however, and efficient operations, is an astronomical opportunity to enjoy economic and ecological advantages. McWilliams is basing his data and assumptions on the poorest, the average or below. If you want to demonize something, always pick the lowest performers. But if you compare the best the industry has to offer with the best the pasture-based systems have to offer, the factory farms don’t have a prayer. Using portable infrastructure, tight management, and techno-glitzy tools, farmers running pastured hog operations practically eliminate capitalization costs and vet bills.

Finally, McWilliams moves to the knock-out punch in his discussion of nutrient cycling, charging specifically that Polyface is a charade because it depends on grain from industrial farms to maintain soil fertility. First of all, at Polyface we do not assume that all nutrient movement is anti-environmental. In fact, one of the biggest reasons for animals in nature is to move nutrients uphill, against the natural gravitational flow from high ground to low ground. This is why low lands and valleys are fertile and the uplands are less so. Animals are the only mechanism nature has to defy this natural downward flow. Fortunately, predators make the prey animals want to lounge on high ground (where they can see their enemies), which insures that manure will concentrate on high lookout spots rather than in the valleys. Perhaps this is why no ecosystem exists that is devoid of animals. The fact is that nutrient movement is inherently nature-healing.

But, it doesn’t move very far. And herein lies the difference between grain used at Polyface and that used by the industry: We care where ours comes from. It’s not just a commodity. It has an origin and an ending, start to finish, farmer to eater. The closer we can connect the carbon cycles, the more environmentally normal we will become.

Second, herbivores are the exception to the entire negative nutrient flow argument because by pruning back the forage to restart the rapid biomass accumulation photosynthetic engine, the net carbon flow compensates for anything lost through harvest. Herbivores do not require tillage or annuals, and that is why all historically deep soils have been created by them, not by omnivores. It’s fascinating that McWilliams wants to demonize pasture-based livestock for not closing all the nutrient loops, but has no problem, apparently, with the horrendous nutrient toxicity like dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey created by chemical fertilizer runoff to grow grain so that the life of a beef could be shortened. Unbelievable. In addition, this is one reason Polyface continues to fight for relaxing food safety regulations to allow on-farm slaughtering, precisely so we can indeed keep all these nutrients on the farm and not send them the rendering plants. If the greenies who don’t want historically normal farm activities like slaughter to occur on rural acreage could understand how devastating these government regulations actually are to the environmental economy, perhaps McWilliams wouldn’t have this bullet in his arsenal. And yes, human waste should be put back on the land as well, to help close the loop.

Third, at Polyface, we struggle upstream. Historically, omnivores were salvage operations. Hogs ate spoiled milk, whey, acorns, chestnuts, spoiled fruit, and a host of other farmstead products. Ditto for chickens, who dined on kitchen scraps and garden refuse. That today 50 percent of all the human edible food produced in the world goes into landfills or greenie-endorsed composting operations rather than through omnivores is both ecologically and morally reprehensible. At Polyface, we’ve tried for many, many years to get kitchen scraps back from restaurants to feed our poultry, but the logistics are a nightmare. The fact is that in America we have created a segregated food and farming system. In the perfect world, Polyface would not sell eggs. Instead, every kitchen, both domestic and commercial, would have enough chickens proximate to handle all the scraps. This would eliminate the entire egg industry and current heavy grain feeding paradigm. At Polyface, we only purport to be doing the best we can do as we struggle through a deviant, historically abnormal food and farming system. We didn’t create what is and we may not solve it perfectly. But we’re sure a lot farther toward real solutions than McWilliams can imagine. And if society would move where we want to go, and the government regulators would let us move where we need to go, and the industry would not try to criminalize us as we try to go there, we’ll all be a whole lot better off and the earthworms will dance.

Joel Salatin is the owner of Polyface Farm -- which was featured in Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma and the documentary film Food, Inc. He is a third generation family farmer working his land in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley with his wife, Teresa, son Daniel, daughter Rachel, and their families. Polyface Farm, an organic grass-fed farm, services more than 3,000 families, 10 retail outlets and 50 restaurants through on-farm sales and metropolitan buying clubs. Salatin writes extensively in magazines such as Stockman Grass Farmer, Acres USA, and American Agriculture.

Joel Salatin responds to New York Times’ ‘Myth of Sustainable Meat’ | Grist

How to transfer an inkjet photo to wood - YouTube



Published on Mar 12, 2014

Inkjet to wood photo transfer technique. There is not a lot to the process, but this should help. Here's a recent project of demonstrated use: http://youtu.be/bdo64-wo63Q



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How to transfer an inkjet photo to wood - YouTube



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TOLIET PAPER - Simple Garden Tip: Best Seed Tape Ever: Organic Gardening

Best Seed Tape Ever
Planting tiny seeds is easy with this simple gardening trick.
It’s difficult to space tiny seeds, such as carrots, in the garden. The best way to solve this problem is to make homemade seed tape. Here’s how to do it:

1. Unroll a strip of toilet paper on a table (double ply works best), mist it with a sprayer, and place the seeds along the center of the strip. Be sure to space the seeds based on the seed packet’s recommendation. Tip: Alternate carrot seeds with radish seeds because when the radishes sprout, they help to mark the row and break the ground.

2. Starting along the strip’s long edge, fold a third of the paper over the seeds, then fold the other third over to cover the seeds completely. Lightly tamp the paper, misting it again to secure the seeds. Make as many of these strips as you need. Then carefully carry them to the garden.

3. Make shallow furrows in the prepared soil, lay the strips down, and cover them. In a jiffy, your small seeds will be planted and perfectly spaced.

Simple Garden Tip: Best Seed Tape Ever: Organic Gardening

Mar 11, 2014

A Primal Diet for Modern Times, part 1 - YouTube



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-eaPlmzz94

Published on Mar 10, 2014
Nora Gedgaudas used to believe a plant-based diet was the healthiest. That belief got turned upside down when she spent a summer studying wolves near the North pole. "We are fundamentally ice-age hunter-gatherers," states the nutritionist and author of Primal Body, Primal Mind. She points out that our genes are 99.9% the same as our ancestors - they haven't yet adapted to the relatively recent agriculturally-based lifestyle based on grains. As a result, our bodies have no need for dietary carbohydrates. By contrast, "Fat, to us means survival.... Dietary fat is the most nutrient-dense thing we can consume, rich in fat-soluble nutrients, and essential for the functioning of our brain and nervous systems." Episode 260. [primalbody-primalmind.com]





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UltraBattery a Boon to Renewable Energy, Grid Storage, and EVs > ENGINEERING.com

Tom Lombardo  March 09, 2014

UltraBattery® with its Inventor, Dr. Lan Lam (Image courtesy of CSIRO)

Batteries pack a lot of energy into a small space, but they’re slow to charge, they lose their capacity after several charge-discharge cycles, and many are not environmentally friendly. Supercapacitors (also known as ultracapacitors) can be charged very quickly, can survive a near limitless number of charge-discharge cycles, and are made from relatively benign materials.

Electric and hybrid vehicles (EVs and HEVs) need the benefits of both technologies, and often employ a blend of batteries and supercaps, with the former providing a long driving range and the latter storing energy from regenerative braking and giving quick bursts of energy for rapid acceleration.

Grid-level storage combined with renewable energy has the potential to replace gas fired “peaker plants,” but like the EV, it requires the high energy density of batteries and the quick response time and long life of supercaps.

Using batteries and supercaps together requires control circuitry to move electricity to and from the different storage elements. But what happens if you combine the battery and the supercap in one package? You get the best of both worlds: the UltraBattery®, developed by a team from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and now produced by CSIRO spinoff company Ecoult. The UltraBattery is a lead-acid battery with a built in supercapacitor, as shown here:


Image courtesy of Ecoult

Conventional lead-acid batteries suffer from sulfation, lead sulfate crystals growing on the battery’s plates, causing a decrease in capacity and an increase in internal resistance. Sulfation occurs naturally with age, but it’s made worse by operating the battery at intermediate states of charge (somewhere between full and empty). Since that’s the normal condition for EV batteries and grid-level storage systems, you can see why many of those applications employ more costly NiMH or Li-ion batteries instead of inexpensive lead-acid batteries. According to CSIRO and Ecoult engineers, using a carbon-based supercap in parallel with the battery reduces negative plate sulfation. They don’t explain the chemistry behind that and I’m not a chemist, but independent testing by Sandia National Labs confirmed that the UltraBattery showed very little sulfation compared to standard deep-cycle lead-acid batteries under the same conditions.

Additional tests by Sandia National Labs showed that when subjected to cycles that are typical of grid-level storage applications, the UltraBattery lasted ten times longer than a conventional lead-acid battery. When tested under hybrid EV conditions, the UltraBattery once again outperformed its lead-acid counterpart by a factor of ten, performing at least as well as NiMH batteries but at a significantly lower cost.

UltraBatteries achieved a round-trip efficiency of around 90%, compared to 70% for conventional lead-acid batteries. This occurred under both low-current and high-current charge-discharge cycles. (For more details on the exact testing procedures and results, click the “Read More…” link at the end of this article and download the white paper.)

In addition to its superior electrical characteristics, the UltraBattery is non-flammable and made from materials that are abundant, non-hazardous, and fully recyclable. The UltraBattery is safe, clean, efficient, reliable, and inexpensive. What more can you ask for?

Renewable energy sources like solar and wind are intermittent, sometimes providing more energy than needed while other times not generating enough. Cost effective, efficient grid-level storage is the key to a renewable energy future. Electric vehicles and hybrids demand high capacity, inexpensive, and lightweight batteries. Likewise, storage is the main obstacle standing in the way of universal adoption of EVs. While research into alternative battery chemistry continues, it could be that the good old lead-acid battery, enhanced by a built-in supercapacitor, will satisfy both needs.

[Read More...]

UltraBattery a Boon to Renewable Energy, Grid Storage, and EVs > ENGINEERING.com

Enhancing the Mississippi Watershed with Perennial Bioenergy Crops on Vimeo



Today, non-point source pollution is the greatest threat to the nation’s water and the main reason why our waters remain polluted. 

The vast majority of these nutrients come from corn and soybeans production in the upper Midwest. These nutrients not only contaminate drinking water wells and local surface waters, but are chiefly responsible for the Gulf’s hypoxic zone, the largest hypoxic region in the U.S. and the second largest in the world. 

This CenUSA video, Enhancing The Mississippi River Watershed with Perennial Bioenergy Crops, focuses on the role perennial grass energy crops can play in improving water qualtiy. Compared to row crops, perennial grasses have been shown to reduce runoff, erosion and nutrients by as much as 90%. The video discusses the role perennial grasses can plan in improving the Mississippi River Watershed and the Gulf of Mexico. 

It features interviews with and Gulf Hypoxia co-chairs Nancy Stoner (Acting Assistant Administrator for the Office of Water at EPA) and Bill Northey (Iowa Secretary of Agriculture) and CenUSA project director Ken Moore. It discusses land use modeling research being conducted by CenUSA co-project directors Cathy Kling (Iowa State University) and Jason Hill (University of Minnesota). 

The video also features farmer and bioenergy pioneer Jamie Derr and University of Minnesota scientist Bonnie Keeler.

Enhancing the Mississippi Watershed with Perennial Bioenergy Crops from CenUSA Bioenergy on Vimeo.