Hi Chip Thanks - yes, interesting.
"And I'm not talking about imposing some utopian vision of small organic farms on the world," says the NYT's Mr Bittman. :-) But, sadly, "long rotation, pasture grazing (ruminate based) plot management (old school)" still only means that the ruminants get rotated, but not the pastures. If they'd used ley farming techniques it wouldn't have been just interesting, it would have been a first-round knockout. "Sow a piece of land with a good pasture mixture and then divide it in two with a fence. Graze one half heavily and repeatedly with cattle, mow the other half as necessary and leave the mowings there in place to decay back into the soil. On the grazed half, you've removed the crop (several times) and taken away a large yield of milk and beef. On the other half you've removed nothing. Plough up both halves and plant a grain crop, or any crop. Which half has the bigger and better yield? The grazed half, by far. "Ley Farming" explains why "grass is the most important crop" and how to manage grass leys. Leys are temporary pastures in a rotation, and provide more than enough fertility for the succeeding crops: working together, grass and grazing animals turn the land into a huge living compost pile. Stapledon draws on the work of Robert H. Elliot of Clifton Park, whose work with deep-rooting leys was the culmination of hundreds of years of development in grass rotation farming. Full-text online." http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library.html#ley Please let us know if you track down a copy of the study. All best Keith >An interesting read: >http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/a-simple-fix-for-food/?src=recg > > >Summary: >Seems the folks at Iowa State Univ, at their Marsden Farm did a >medium term experiment >comparing short rotation chem intensive conventional industrial >model ag with a hybrid >long rotation, pasture grazing (ruminate based) plot management (old >school) with a result >of conventional like outputs and 'profits' with radically reduced >chem and fertilizer >inputs. > >Interesting aspects include how far afield the university had to go >in order to publish >their study, and how totally deaf Vilsack's USDA has been to it. > >On a personal note, a lot of it makes perfect sense to me, and while >I am a great big >fan of no chem, no how, no way, ever, wholly ruminate field and >pasture management, etc >I certainly won't dismiss this study out of hand, it's very interesting. > >I'm trying to get a copy of the study now. > >-- _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
