alternatives in land use

Thats cool Gary. I have seen pictures of that kind of saw.

Its really cool to think about the stuff the old guys did. Nowadays we just buy something that someone else has made, but the old timers and the guys on the cutting edge did not have that luxury.

I am blown away by the ingenuity of the folks on this site. Not only in the tools they make and use but the rigging and the problem solving you tree folks do every day. Hats off!
 
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Thanks for the explanation, Jim. It pisses me off that people that go around and promote new information are so friggin hard to get a hold of.
 
Not sure how this will come through...just tracked this down on the US Patent site:
 

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This "new" way is a mix of old and new. We are working with, not against nature.

There is a lot of cutting edge science involved though. We are figuring out why things work, why they have worked for thousands of years. Well, not we, but they. I am just reading their work.

I have probably said this before, but dad told me about some of the farming practices that were cutting edge a hundred years or so ago. A lot of that knowledge was brought up here with James J Hill and the Great Northern railway. He wanted the homesteaders to produce lots of stuff that he could haul away on his trains. With out the farmers he would be sunk.

A lot of those practices were forgotten, like cover crops and crop rotations. We were also forced out of those practices by the Feds and their crop insurance programs.

Sounds like there is a book idea in there once you get a little further along in The Conrad Saga, as Gary put it.
 
Pie in the Sky?

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Thats what it pointed out, most of the loss is on private land.
 
Haha! Are my buttons so obvious now?

Anyway, what is the solution? Buy private land? More conservation easements? Personally, I have some real problems with Govt ownership of land. I do not like when folks need to compete with the govt to buy land. They are not running a lemonade stand to come up with the funds. They take it from you and give it to your neighbors.

What these guys are talking about is not just urban sprawl. They are talking about ALL human activities. Power lines!?!?

Its a power trip, soon enough you will have to ask permission to see anything in the West, if these people get their way. Think Home Owners Assn., but on a massive scale.

The Cities, towns and counties are broke, so they try to up the population.
 
I wouldn't say they feel that way. I think they feel it is unfortuanate that so much private land is beiing developed as that has a negative effect on ecosystems.
 
A film on alternative land use and food production, by Patagonia.

Very good stuff, imo.

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The researchers in that first link were kind of wasting time by basing their models on current practices and recommendations. For sustainability, all that needs to change.

The second one had some good stuff. They have been working on the perennial grass/wheat cross for some time now. I wish them luck. Breeding for health and sustainability traits beyond maximum yield is a good start and at least a step in the right direction. I really like buffalo but would have preferred that they had left out the spiritual stuff. Lots of animals can be good at land use it is mostly us not them that screw things up. That fishing gig was sweet.
 
None of this is of interest to y'all?

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Oh, boy. We could sit down over coffee and never run out of things to talk about Cory. I have so many theories and ideas tumbling around in my addled brain, to try and put it out on the web is a challenge.

It was a very good video. I agree with most of what was covered.

My hesitation is that there is too much us vs them in this movement. We get an idea that there is only one "right" solution. Feedlots are evil, large scale farming is evil, grocery stores are evil....on and on. The advertising I see from the Organic industry is the same as from the conventional industry. A lot of it is blue sky.

Having said that, I am fully on board with the movement!

The perennial cereal grains is not a new idea. A variety was developed years and years ago, and it worked. That variety was bought, and destroyed. It did not fit the "model" of expensive inputs. At the end of the day, no one is lower on the food chain than the producer. It is an upside down pyramid.

The buffalo thing is contentious with me as well. Comparing range buffalo with feed lot beef is not a direct comparison. apples to oranges. Beef, chickens, pork, lamb, nearly every protein can be raised like the buffalo in the film.

There is no difference between grass fat cattle and grass fat buffalo. Gabe Brown has proven this. His cattle dont get babied in the winter, but by the same token, buffalo were not year round residents in Norther ND and Northern MT.

To maintain a sustainable model, there needs to be some input in the winter time. Thats what we are trying to accomplish with cover crops. We will produce crops and protein on the same land.

Nothing wrong at all with buffalo, but cattle operations can use the same techniques and still be "one with Nature".

I really like the fishing deal. In fact, I believe that there need to be more people involved in food. Where one boat can do the work of the entire fleet of the other guy's operation, well, I dont like that. Bigger and bigger farms, bigger and bigger operations.

We need more jobs, more labor, more profit and less enviromental impact.

Keep the torch burning Cory, as producers we cant make these changes without the consumer. If you wont pay for it, wont buy it, and wont support the changes that need to be made, we cant survive.

I could go on and on.....
 
Dave, glad you liked the vid.

Jimbo, hella post.

I didn't know grass fat buffler=grass fat cattle. You know a lot more than me about it but I guess the buff people would argue the point.

Anyway, nice to read your thoughts. And you keep the torch burning too. Stuff so right can't be wrong, including economically.

Yeah, I (we) always buy what seems to be best, organic stuff. Ha but then there is the whole organic=tilling issues. To paraphrase Chouinard, when you look into what it is you are eating, its a complicated pain in the ass!
 
Interesting about the plant breeding. I have maintained for a while now that our varieties are not as good as they used to be. Yes, they yield like never before, but the profitability is not there anymore.

It takes far to many inputs to raise an acceptable crop. When dad started fertilizing a long time ago he used so little it seems like a joke today. I use three times the fertilizer that he did, and raise fewer bushels.

The varieties are less drought tolerant as well.

One upside has been disease resistance. The new varieties are less susceptible than before. That is kind of a double edged sword though. The breeders needed to address that problem because more and more acres were being raised in a mono culture with less and less crop rotations. You can now raise wheat forever on the same land.

Wheat is a political crop, and the Govt has mandated us into raising it. To raise the amount of wheat needed to satisfy everyone, it needed to be raised year after year, on huge farms, with huge machinery.

The old varieties were not designed to be raised without crop rotation. James J. Hill, of the Great Norther Rail Road knew this, the old timers knew this. But the govt needs a surplus of cheap wheat.



I went on a crop tour a few weeks ago, (thanks for the reminder DMc!) to an organic farm in the county to the west. It is owned by Bob Quinn, an organic celebrity. He has done a huge amount for the industry. He does a lot of crop rotations as well.

They had a goal of using only Heirloom varieties on the farm. The disease got to be too much and they abandoned the plan in order to use modern varieties.

The problem I see with their operation is that they rely completely on tillage. I was shocked. Yes, they are diverse, but they continue to till and their soil looks no better than mine. I asked if they were going to try cover crops, and they said no. They were worried that the covers would use too much water.

Gabe Brown abandoned fallow and he does not have a disease problem, he is not the only one.

Not saying that Quinn is doing a bad job, I just think that he is not seeing the full benefit of regenerative ag.





We participated in a cover crop tour yesterday. I did not want too, as I am not happy with my covers, or most of them.

Some of them look like shit, some look pretty good. As always it was a learning oppertunity.

I put my head together with the NRCS man in town and I think we figured it out.

The covers look much better on the fallow land, the re-crop land looks poor. It is not a moisture problem. It is a nutrition problem.

The soil biology is so poor anymore, that it takes a full year of fallow to produce enough nutrition to raise a crop. What we have done by planting a diverse cover crop is jump start the soil biology. Eventually the land will be able to produce a crop every year. We killed off the biology and had to replace it with chemicals.

Man are we a bunch of suckers or what!
 
From my experience Cory, any animal that is intensively fattened in a feed lot produces an excess of muscle fat and cholesterol.

Up until I went to New Zealand I had only eaten wild deer. In New Zealand I ate farmed deer that was fattened with grain. It was as fatty and as marbled as any feed lot beef.

When I used to help at the slaughter house in town, we got the opportunity to butcher buffalo. Some of the buffalo was range type and some was feedlot.

The range type was lean as lean can be, the feedlot meat was fatty as feed lot beef. A range beef butchered off of native prairie is a lean as a buffalo. That was my experience working in a slaughter house anyway.

I am not a scientist however! The beef industry has as much data out as the buffalo industry. As per usual, I believe the truth is somewhere in the middle.
 
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