onoway

Are you off your meds again? Or just being silly/obtuse deliberately? Either way it's not worth the effort of taking your comments seriously. I hope you enjoy your fantasy world.

Actually in Canada I don't believe that private owners CAN buy mineral rights to the land unless the previous owner had them. The government now sells "leases" and they aren't even to a whole chunk of land but for levels in that land, so actually there could theoretically be a number of companies all drilling at different depths/levels through the same surface area. Companies bid for those that the government decides to put up for tender. I'm not a lawyer and maybe have some details wrong, but that's my understanding from conversations with oil company people such as geologists and engineers.

Allan Savory, when he was involved with developing National Parks in Africa, his research supported by other scientists, was reluctantly responsible for culling over 20,000 elephants with the avowed aim of preventing further degradation/desertification of the land. Kruger National Park followed with the same culling of animals, for the same purpose and with the same result. Desertification got worse instead of better and led to his determination to understand what was going on, which eventually led to his developing techniques now beginning to gain traction in a number of countries. If you want to hear his talk at Tufts it's here http://permaculturenews.org/2013/05/17/allan-savory-reversing-global-warming-while-meeting-human-needs-videos/ or you can google a shorter version at his TED talk this spring. If you have the time, the longer talk fills in many of the gaps. In the longer talk he references some of the other instances, but culling animals to prevent stressing the land is a long and until now at least, "accepted" procedure.

Just one study, which found typical results: In conclusion, we found that all of the characteristics of the nitrate reducer community (size, structure, and activity) were affected by the tillage system. While the use of direct seeding is more sustainable because it improves the soil nutrient status and allows farmers to cut costs and save time and fuel, we showed, along with previous studies, that it also can favor N losses. In the highlands of Madagascar, nitrate reduction activity was stimulated by combined organic and mineral fertilization but not by organic fertilization alone. If you want the study I can give you the link. Nitrate fertilizers are generally manufactured from petrochemicals, to wit, natural gas.They did not look at what running properly managed herds of herbivores would do. It isn't just the manure which is important, that's the simplistic way of looking at it. Aside from that, there's a whole lot of land which cannot be utilized very well in any other way except by herbivores. Land which is abundantly supplied with rock for example, or which is steeply sloped. The latter can sometimes be terraced but that's both highly expensive to establish and generally fairly labour intensive as terraces in such places don't easilly lend themselves to mechanical management. Secondly, look at land which has simply been left without cultivation or herbivore access. It has become less and less diverse in plant matter and eventually has become pretty much desert. Before we started to indulge in modern ag practices the great plains of the US and Canada had millions of herbivores wandering around and the soil was rich and abundant to a depth of meters. Now it is getting shallower every year, in spite of such things as zero till ..which is for sure better, but basically appears to be just a slower way of reaching the same place. You cannot blame cattle for the greed and ignorance of man. The Amazon is also being cleared for lumber, are you going to blame the trees for being valuable as timber? Some of the best water in the world has been contaminated by mine tailings in south America. Are you going to blame the minerals for destroying the water? It's an absurd argument.

NO it is NOT. Please remember that farmers are forced to sell their crops back to the seed company, they cannot sell it directly to the consumer by agreement with the seed company. It was that the farmers had no money to dig new wells and what they had managed to grow had not provided sufficient income to buy the chemicals and seed and fertilizers etc as well. These were farmers who were experienced, and new wells every two years were something they had no reason to expect would be needed. So they were going bankrupt and losing land that had been farmed with some success by their families for generations, land lost because they had believed big ag was going to give them more prosperity. They had nothing TO sell to stores or anyone else and had in effect lost their ability to provide for their families. Anyone who has farmed for more than 3 months knows about allowing for failure. We prop up unsustainable systems of farming which will eventually fail with government subsidies and insurance programs and all sorts of other financial wizardry paid for by taxpayer dollars. It's only delaying the inevitable and will end up costing more and more as the soil breaks down and/or is lost. The cost of food in the store is only a fraction of what you are really paying for it. How long do you think food will stay 'cheap" when only 4 companies control the world's seed and fertilizer supplies as well as the buyers markets? Especially when countries are now subscribing to making laws which restrict the sales and growing out of seed to approved, government certified varieties, not only of big commodity grains but even the veggies you can grow in your garden? Seeds which rely on fossil fuels?

There are all sorts of laws everywhere that determine what someone can do with his/her land, from community associations saying that everyone has to have the same types of flowers (or none) in the front yard or only certain colours of paint are allowed on the house, right up to the government deciding it wants to widen the road (or make a new one right through your living room). In Canada at least, and I can't imagine it's much different anywhere else, if some resource company decides it wants to access the oil or whatever it thinks might be under your land, unless you own the mineral rights, and very few people do because governments figured out pretty early that this was in effect a good way to sell land twice, the outfit that buys those mineral rights is entitled to move equipment needed to look for and/or develop them onto the land. Most companies try as a matter of good community relations to negotiate something with the landowners but when push comes to shove the owners can't stop them. Basically what a landowner "owns" is a few inches of topsoil and even use of that is restricted and controlled. The US may not have a king but try telling the Cherokee that land ownership means anything at all if someone with more influence wants the land. Or the people now who are trying to stop fracking from happening in their area, or trying to stop a pipeline from crossing their land. To be fair, all of this often comes as an unpleasant shock to new property owners who grew up thinking "a man's home is his castle" .

Hmm don't know how to configure this as well as you did, sorry about that! There are several reasons and one of the biggest one is that the way land is cultivated now it cannot absorb water very well. Thus, land which is compacted from heavy machinery, semi sterilized by chemicals and prevented from having anything on it except selected crops does not absorb much of the rainfall that does happen. We are not now seeing the erosion gullies so much but the water is not reaching the aquifers, or even deep into the soil, it's simply evaporating back into the air from the bare land mandated by industrial ag. This has been demonstrated quite dramatically with side by side plots of land in Africa and elsewhere. Thus you get land which alternates between flooding and drought. Even in North America we are beginning to see this and our agricultural lands are hundreds if not thousands of years younger in terms of usage (with few exceptions) than Asia, Africa and Europe. Australia has been battling floods and drought for a number of years in recent history. It also leads to the poisoning of waterways by the chemical runoff, and nobody is arguing that that isn't a severe problem. Farmers in Australia who have changed their management aren't experiencing the same problems with flooding/drought as their neighbors. Australian scientist Bill Mollinson has led the way into a much more sustainable approach to raising food crops which is rapidly being adopted there and increasingly elsewhere as well. Combine compacted soils which don't refresh aquifers or absorb to any degree into the soil with the fact that the chemicals required to spray the GM crops (often several times a season) are highly concentrated and need to be diluted with water, often a large amount of water. This was one of the issues which led to the banning of GM crops in a large area of India after farmers were literally having to deepen or dig new wells every couple of years after switching to GM crops, and one of the issues directly arising out of GM seeds which led to a whole lot of farmer suicides there.

Further to the "dividing Line" thread; it has been a commonplace for generations that large animals cause desertification and we cannot now afford the luxury of eating beef, e.g. as we can no longer spare the land for that purpose. Scientists have slaughtered many hundreds of thousands of large herbivores on every continent in an effort to prevent land degradation and desertification, with remarkable and noticeable lack of success. What a surprise, turns out scientists and everyone else had it all exactly backwards, almost the ONLY (and most certainly the cheapest by far) way to prevent land degradation and promote permanent recovery is with the (proper) handling and use of large herbivores. Like any other problem it sometimes seems, human hubris has caused the problem which we then blame on anything but ourselves. We do insist on thinking we can do a better job of managing things than the interdependent systems evolved over millions of years, and need not seriously consider them because it just makes things too complicated. It's so much easier to work on things in isolation. It's this sort of thing which leads to a strong sense that we are possibly getting way ahead of ourselves with the Genetically Modified bandwagon. The GMO seeds which are supposed to save the world have recently been reported not only to be producing superbugs such as the pesticide resistant corn borer it was designed to thwart but is also producing superweeds which thrive quite nicely when sprayed with the poisons designed to kill them. This as well as requiring more water to grow in an increasingly drought prone world, and being implicated in millions of tons of healthy topsoil being lost each year as well as the poisoning of water through agricultural runoff into lakes and rivers etc. Gotta love science. And politics. And Free enterprise. Except of course neither science nor free enterprise is allowed to thrive when it conflicts with big ag or politics....

When you set up the table you can put the GIBS where you want them to sit. So you can play with or against one, two or three of them in whichever seats you wish. Welcome to BBO!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks8D3WE-PbM

Top Predators Have Sway Over Climate Feb. 19, 2013 — University of British Columbia researchers have found that when the animals at the top of the food chain are removed, freshwater ecosystems emit a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. "Predators are disappearing from our ecosystems at alarming rates because of hunting and fishing pressure and because of human induced changes to their habitats," says Trisha Atwood, a PhD candidate in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences in the Faculty of Forestry at UBC. For their study, published February 19 in the journal Nature Geoscience, Atwood and her colleagues wanted to measure the role predators play in regulating carbon emissions to better understand the consequences of losing these animals. Predators are bigger animals at the top of the food chain and their diets are composed of all the smaller animals and plants in the ecosystem, either directly or indirectly. As a result, the number of predators in an ecosystem regulates the numbers of all the plants and animals lower in the food chain. It's these smaller animals and plants that play a big role in sequestering or emitting carbon. When Atwood and her colleagues removed all the predators from three controlled freshwater ecosystems, 93 per cent more carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere. "People play a big role in predator decline and our study shows that this has significant, global implications for climate change and greenhouse gases," says Atwood. "We knew that predators shaped ecosystems by affecting the abundance of other plants and animals but now we know that their impact extends all the way down to the biogeochemical level."

There may be a few other details to work out..the air isn't breathable, for one. Temperature moderation is another, NASA site says that The temperature on Mars may reach a high of about 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) at noon, at the equator in the summer, or a low of about -225 degrees Fahrenheit (-153 degrees Celsius) at the poles. Obviously this is very inhospitable for humans, but it is also of some concern for the electronics and mechanical parts of a Mars airplane and its instrumentation. In the mid-latitudes, the average temperature would be about -50 degrees Celsius with a nighttime minimum of -60 degrees Celsius and a summer midday maximum of about 0 degrees Celsius. If you think that's appealing, you should come live in Saskatchewan <_< Further down the article it says that Mars is cooling but nobody knows why..we finally know what to blame our global warming on!

OK, FM75, just what are the facts and how do they affect the discussion? Or are you just happy to sneer at someone for not offering details of how they arrived at their impression without actually offering anything at all yourself, much less any reason why his impressions might be wrong? How safe for you to simply criticize without committing yourself to anything at all. Damn the facts, full speed ahead, indeed.

Sometimes you have to use the signs when you're in the middle of a bunch of trees with nothing else in sight! I couldn't figure out how to make the guess map icon work properly until the last one -it wouldn't let me zoom into anything but southern Europe/North Africa and that doesn't help if you're looking for New Mexico! Then put the last one on the wrong side of the Atlantic in Portugal rather than Brazil. B-) Nevertheless 11,400 ish Fun way to spend some time

The thing is, Charles, you are unlikely to go on a shooting rampage because voices in your head tell you to, or you think that someone did you wrong and you're so depressed that you don't think life is worth living but you're gonna take them with you or whatever. Just as I'm sure you wouldn't try to travel 189 mph on a residential street with kids playing on it.I know someone who has had numerous traffic tickets for speeding - sometimes even the wrong way on one way streets, as well as dui, and it's only a matter of time until he kills either himself or someone else, or both. He should not be allowed to get behind the wheel of a car as he has proven himself incapable of responsible behaviour when he is driving. The question becomes when does the freedom to do something need to be restricted because it is highly likely to infringe on someone else's rights, sometimes even the right to live? I am not against guns..used to try to shoot coyotes and took a handgun course at one time, but I think saying that there shouldn't be any restrictions on them is right up there with people who'd let a two year old play with light sockets and a screwdriver. Why would any civilian need something that can kill 30 people in a matter of moments? Let everyone who wants, have a musket, maybe even a bayonet, and good luck to them. Anyone who wants anything else should go through some sort check to see if they have the brains of a mosquito, which these parents obviously don't, or some other reason they shouldn't be trusted with weapons. Also, they should have to demonstrate they know something about the things and the safe way to handle them just as people have to show some idea about driving before they get a license, they can't just go buy a car and have at it on their own. And cars aren't even designed to do damage to teapots. :P If a hunter needs to use a gun that can spray bullets like window cleaner then he's no hunter. Also, it seems to me that there are now some restrictions on TV ads aimed a children as then the kids pester the parents to buy "xyz". Maybe something to do with McDonalds and the Happy Meal toys? Not sure. Anyway I agree with the poster above and would go after the company making and selling these guns for toddlers.

In Canada they ask and are very reluctant to "move in on another doctor's territory". Asking for a second opinion is fine but they don't like people switching primary providers. Or at least that's been my experience.

I have been involved with farming to some degree all my life, though for a good portion of that time mostly as an intense interest.

Yes, they already don't call it hotmail anymore, and apparently it's being turned over to Skype to run. I didn't make the call about declining sales, was just passing on that some business analyst did.

"Learning the original" was virtually instantaneous and over the years I have made several attempts to "learn to love" the new system with no success. I am much more flexible about trying things than most people but if after several attempts I still find it annoying and awkward then why should I waste my time with it when I could be doing something much more productive or pleasant? I play bridge for pleasure, not as a job, so I don't need to do it at all if the circumstances don't allow it to be a pleasurable experience. I have no problem with other people preferring the new version, which I assume is most people although I know quite a few people who feel as I do about it. The topic rarely comes up. It is odd to me that people such as you who haven't even been involved with the process feel somehow justified in trying to mock me because I don't feel about it as you do. I have a great deal of respect for the work and effort which has gone into the web version but it simply doesn't suit me. What's it to you? You make your decisions for your reasons and I make mine for my reasons. You obviously have different priorities. I won't presume to criticize your motivations and it would be nice to have the courtesy reciprocated.

There was some suggestion on the news yesterday that Microsoft has had so many complaints and so much grief with windows 8 that they are going to ditch it. Don't know if they are going backwards or sideways but windows8 is being blamed for the dramatic decline in laptop and desktop sales since it was released. My laptop keeps telling me every time I log in that I have to upgrade and so far I've said no without problems but hotmail or whatever they call it now is a bloody annoying and frustrating mess. I don't mind Skype but I resent being told I have to let them take over my email list and so forth so I won't do it. I've never understood why nobody in Microsoft seems to trial anything out with non geeks before they decide it's an improvement and try to force people to change. Every single hotmail "improved version" has made it worse and worse. Next computer I get I won't be using hotmail. The only reason I haven't switched to Apple is that then I would have to use the web version of BBO and with all due respect to the people who think it's great (and there are many) I'd rather stick a fork in my eye.

How old are they? It sounds as though they haven't run into many situations where their ideas have been given any respect so they have no confidence that what they think has any value. Not uncommon, especially if they have had a series of teachers who take the easy road and demand rote learning (where it isn't especially appropriate)" Ï'll tell you what's what (reality) and if you can tell me exactly what I told you when I ask, then you'll get an A." It sounds as though either they don't trust themselves to have an idea worth the breath to articulate it or you to give whatever they come up with respectful consideration, which may or may not even have anything to do with you. Or both. Building confidence in kids can be difficult if you're trying to reverse years of negative experiences. But if you are trying to get them to think then that's where it has to start.

sorry, you are talking nonsense. Obviously I wasn't talking of what my specific body had evolved to do within my lifetime but of my body as an example or result of the evolution of the human species. No matter what medical miracles we can do today, and there are many, a human body still needs certain nutrients and they are specific, not any old thing will do. Thus cow parsnip is edible but water hemlock which looks similar is deadly poison. We can eat the stalks of rhubarb but not the leaf. Some things affect us in tiny, minute amounts such as selenium. Some is essential. A little too much will cause problems and a lot too much is fatal. I don't in the least understand your posts.

I don't want a flame war either but I have said several times that permaculture is NOT the same as organic farming and yet I keep reading these comments based on what organic farming does. It gets a bit frustrating: B-) I'll try once more. Permaculture is fairly labour intensive to get the system going, and for sure machinery is often used for that stage to create swales and planting trees and such. But the system is designed not to need machinery to plow and harrow and disc and spray five times a year so none of that machinery is needed. It isn't labour which is going to have to be done by hand, it isn't going to be needing done at all. Fencing for cattle and so forth is often best if it's flexible in plan so no post pounder is needed, except perhaps for the perimeter fencing.Electric fencing, either stranded or woven can be used as permanent fence or very easilly moved. It is labour intensive in that someone needs to go out to the field and walk along picking up slim fiberglass posts and moving them over from time to time. Greg Judy doesn't even put up much hay any more as he doesn't need it although he gets lots of winter and snow but the cattle find good feed under it. It's only really bad days he feeds, and his cattle are in excellent shape come spring. So that's a whole lot less haying equipment/buildings needed. Do you see what I mean? You are trying to fit what you know of farming into what I have touched on, and not understood that I am talking about a system of farming that you are likely (clearly) not familiar with. That's sort of what I was talking about when I said that scientists have bias they likely aren't even aware of. I'd guess almost everyone assumes the world basically works how they are familiar with it working so they try to make things fit and it leads to complications, misunderstandings and really really slows down progress. Will Allen supposedly raises about a million pounds of food on his 3 acres per year. That doesn't seem insignificant to me. That's one 3 acre parcel.Most of what he does could be done in abandoned factories or other such places, and there supposedly is a glut of those around with companies moving to offshore or shutting down. Not only that, but perhaps more important, he is making people, in particular kids, understand that their access to food need not be entirely out of their control. Also, look at the numbers and obvious enthusiasm of those kids and young adults. Those kids would likely not only jump at the chance to work on a farm for the season but be a real asset, which is not always the case with interns. BUT, not an agribusiness farm, not one they would be treated like a necessary evil rather than given some respect, and not one where they couldn't learn anything. Also I didn't mean to suggest that permaculture farmers don't ever pay people who work for them. I was pointing out that those who get interns for little or no money seem to have no trouble finding them, so I would guess that those who pay a wage wouldn't have too many problems either. I don't know. As far as rice production and stoop labour, there's a little book called the One Straw Revolution about (by?) Masanobu Fukuoka and I think you would find it interesting. He died in 2008. Although his system didn't include stock of any kind, he is also regarded as an excellent example of a permaculture farmer (and he was also a trained scientist). It isn't full of science, it's a very gentle book talking about his philosophy and not so incidentally how he farmed and why and how it worked out for him. It would give you a MUCH better idea of what permaculture is all about and why/how it doesn't revolve around the biggest tractor or the most acres. His productivity without all of that rivalled or surpassed the average in Japan (if you don't like Rodale you can try Fukuoka :)) I wish I had thought of him earlier but until you mentioned rice paddies he hadn't crossed my mind. It's a small and very readable book. Again as far as seasonal work is concerned (which farming mostly is in terms of intensity) I think that a lot of people simply aren't familiar enough with it and what they do think they know they don't find appealing.A combination of bad press and being outside the comfort zone is going to make it hard to appeal to people. That;s why I think programs such as Will Allen and the Bronx teacher run are so important aside from the food they produce, they are bringing back a sense of connection to food that we have been losing. When kids in school can't identify a beet or green bean when it is held out to them, (Jamie Oliver video) and think that milk comes from the store, full stop, it is not a good situation. As well as all that, it seems ironic to me that people will shriek in disbelieving horror at the idea of carrying a pail of mash to a pig but will be proud of belonging to a gym so they can work out with weights. Anyway, sorry but I don't accept that agribiz as it is now IS needed to feed the world for the next hundred years. I think the sooner we change tactics to a more sustainable form of agriculture the better. Chemicals damage the soil and the soil is the basis of the food which sustains us. Healthy soil, healthy food. Way simplified but that's the basis of it all. I'm realistic enough to know that isn't going to happen anytime soon anyway, unless there is some sort of major disaster so it's an academic question. Someone once told me that Lincoln said that any man could make something of his life no matter what else if he had 5 acres of land and an axe, (or some such, I can't find the reference, maybe it was a cow or chicken or a shovel :)) I tend to think that if we could take the best of what the small farm had to offer, with the best that we now know and take for granted (Central heating, running water, computers are hard to deny) we might end up with the best of both instead of thinking there has to be a choice.

Nobody, least of all me, is suggesting that we go back to the farming techniques of the 1800's and I don't know why you would make so many totally uncalled for comments apparently rising from some personal fantasy, including Rodale getting charitable donations to keep them alive. For someone who is unhappy that some research doesn't instantly jump to his fingertips you are remarkably quick to make totally unsupported statements. I have already said that Permaculture is a system based on several principles, designed by scientists (does that make you happy?) and not just örganic farming. Organic is a suspiciously slippery term now anyway since several of the people in the US Department of Agriculture now overseeing what can be given the designation are ex Monsanto employees. "Organic" is an extremely fast growing market, (because people are getting more and more uneasy about the food being offered by big ag) so there have been active efforts to both dilute the meaning of the term and/or to legislate against the term being used on labels at all. Big ag is determined to get a piece of the action. Anyway that's beside the point. Labour is or can be a problem especially for mega farms which are mindnumbingly boring to work on. How many people do you know who would like to sit alone in a tractor going around fields day after day hour after hour whose only distraction would be for meals or when something breaks? Or bent over in a field cutting lettuce or picking stawberries hour after hour after hour? Have you seen the documentaries about how the people are or have been treated on many farms? All they will call them will be...deportee. People who were given hovels to live in and worked until the harvest was in and then turned over to the authorities to be deported without the wages promised. Is it any wonder farm work isn't seen as desirable? As far as I can tell, the people who are running internships on permaculture farms don't seem to have much trouble finding people who want to come. The internships don't even pay "real" wages any more than internships in city companies do, although the farm ones generally include room and board and a small stipend at least. There's at least one I know of where interns have consistently gone to work and learn and didn't want to leave. It certainly wasn't because of the money, in fact now I think of it they actually charge interns for the privilege of working there, though that is not usually the case. Perhaps the labour problem is not so acute because it isn't so soul destroying (or dangerous because of the absence of the toxic chemicals used on a big ag farm). Perhaps because they found out that successful farmers are not heehawing straw chewing yokels who can barely read or write, but intelligent and thoughtful individuals who care about what they are doing and how they do it. ( well, I've known one or two chew a straw on occassion but I've never met one who was a yokel :P ) To reiterate though, permaculture is designed to need less labor than conventional farming, organic or not. It is designed to use a bare minimum of equipment, so the pressures of massive bank payments are less. A few years ago the AVERAGE farmer who had to declare bankruptcy in Ontario was said to owe around 6 million dollars. Understandable when ONE piece of machinery can cost upwards of a quarter million, not counting the tractor needed to use it. Tell me please, how many people could have productive jobs paying a living wage for a quarter of a million dollars? Or even just the interest on that at 6% or more? Or would you rather have them on welfare/food stamps so the banks can continue to rake in billions of dollars in interest?

I find it a bit bizarre to leap from the idea of millions of people dying of starvation to complain that changing things might mean that only rich people could buy mangos. I would like to know upon what evidence you base your comments about Salatin. He has less than two quarters of land and likely produces a whole lot more on that land in terms of edible food calories than probably any grain farmer working a township or more. He most decidedly produces a multiple of what his neighbors produce on farms with presumably the same environmental conditions and comparable size. He has made a business choice not to ship food further than 100 miles away. It doesn't mean he couldn't, it means he doesn't have to, so he chooses not to because he believes food is better and healthier if it doesn't spend hours or days in transit. What does that have to do with anything? You may have litigated on behalf of farmers but you don't know about building soil. How do you suppose the prairies supported untold numbers of buffalo and other game and the topsoil still grew to be meters deep, as it was before modern farming practices blew most of it away in dust storms and or washed out erosion gullies? Nobody was coming around every few years to top it up with nutrients. Compost is certainly helpful and it is clearly a better option than landfills but it is not and never has been the only way to increase land fertility without resorting to chemicals. You especially don't know about building soils if you have the idea that animals are bad for it. For some years Greg Judy has been tracking and measuring the health of the soil on farms he acquired after they had been abandoned as "worn out". Without any inputs other than moving the cattle over it in carefully managed ways/times it is getting healthier and more productive and deeper every year. Grasses and forbs and herbs volunteered and creeks came back into flow. Wildlife returned. It's a scenario which has been replicated over and over. Scientists like things which can be replicated, right? He is moving a lot of cattle, too, not just a few animals here and there. Managing animals badly is certainly extremely destructive to the land but handling them properly has in many cases been the answer to regenerating land. It's what we do with the animals that makes the difference and feedlots are a prime example of what not to do on a whole lot of levels. Allan Savory established that when he challenged the idea that groups of large herbivores were causing desertification. He had animals move the way they naturally would feed and travel across the land instead of how we move them according to how we see fit. That's ALL he did. The trees and vegetation came back. (he's a scientist as well as a farmer, btw, and his ideas were scorned until the evidence could no longer be denied.) These practices are now finding their way into mainstream ag, I noticed in the Western Producer not long ago a story about a young couple who were successfully using these techniques and the Cattleman's Association was sponsoring classes. There is an old joke which often has more than a grain of truth: those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach teachers. Replace teachers with scientists and it is likely still true of way too many of them. I suspect scientists are too often caught up by the constraints of what they grew up taking for granted as truth and possibly unconsciously working from there. That's possibly why over and over we see scientists sneering and making life very difficult for people who buck the system and dare to challenge their core beliefs. Often the mockers have to reverse themselves later. Think of the ridicule that met the idea that washing your hands between patients might make a difference in the number of deaths from infection, especially when going from perhaps doing an autopsy to delivering a baby. More recently, Linus Pauling was a Nobel Prize winner but when he came out with his ideas about vitamin C as a possibly useful cancer treatment he was sorrowfully designated as an old man who had lost his marbles and dismissed. Now the Mayo clinic has found that using his exact protocols does indeed show promise. All of the people I mentioned have had scientists trailing after them like puppies trying to find out how they do what they do to get the results they get. Holtzer is growing citrus trees (which flower and fruit) outside without a greenhouse in the Austrian Alps. Lawton had fig trees producing fruit after only a few months although the scientists had decreed nothing would grow in those areas, and certainly not productive fig trees. As I mentioned above, the scientists were astounded that he was apparently able to desalinate soils with his techniques, something that is becoming more and more urgently needed in areas which use irrigation heavilly and for which presently scientists can only suggest planting more salt tolerant species. Please explain to me just how/why it is ünrealistic to have other people doing what Will Allen is doing? Other than the reasons why it was unrealistic for him to expect to make a living on 3 acres of land in the first place, that is? Here's another link you might want to check out, again something you would likely have us believe believe is unrealistic. But it's being done and highly successfully. As far as farming is concerned, permaculture techniques are different than simply choosing to use only organic fertilizers and such and I can only suggest ..depending on how deeply you want to get into it - you can read Bill Mollison's A Designer's Manual (btw he was a scientist as well as being a cofounder of what is now known as Permaculture, Lawton is his "heir to the throne" so to speak)) or you look at some of the videos put out by Holtzer or Lawton or Salatin to get a feel of what it's all about, or you could check out a website call Permies.com which is a huge site. Permaculture farms are designed to work with natural systems rather than trying to bludgeon them into submission. It is HIGHLY productive and entirely sustainable. It seems to me to be far far more unrealistic to think that unsustainable agriculture will feed the world in the coming decades and centuries. It may not be only mangos that only the rich can afford but food at all if the system collapses. I for one will stick to food that I know its genetic heritage. I'm not convinced that anyone who wanders along with a Doctorate in Science can do a better job of designing food than the food my body has evolved to handle.