Re: WRECKING THE PLANET In environmental terms, meat-eating is a costly habit.

From: Oz (oz_at_farmeroz.port995.com)
Date: 09/16/04 

Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 07:55:53 +0100

Anoid <doug@zing.icom43.net> writes

> It is of no use when it doesn't rain. Water shortages world wide is a growing
>problem, made worse by wasting water on farm animals when it could be used more
>productively on crops.

<sigh>

That depends. In low stocked areas where you could never grow a crop,
the poorer, arid, rocky parts of the world for example, then watering
cattle (or more likely sheep/goats) harvests more than arable would.

A small borehole or river extraction will water stock that will graze
say 3000m from the bore and cover some 900Ha or say 1000 sheep. Allow
4l/sheep-day and that's 4000L/day or 120,000 L or 120m^3 per month. An
arable crop would need over 50mm/month or 500m^3/Ha so you could have
about 1/4Ha in arable producing less (most likely much less) than 2.5T
of grains. Your 1000 sheep ought to produce you 600 carcasses which at
20kg each amounts to 12T worth of sheep (plus innards). Not only that
but you have wool, leather, glues and many other useful things that you
can process and sell. In practice the situation seems to be that the
nomads sell meat and animal products to the arable farmers and get veg
and grains in exchange.

Equally arable produces vast amounts of byproducts like straws and
chaffs, and usually has fallow times (which may be months or a year)
where stock can be grazed on aftermaths. Since this is in essence 'free'
food, it clearly pays to have stock even in arable areas.

So its best not to be naive, generally local people know what they are
doing, usually honed by 1000's of years of practice.

The problem isn't a shortage of water, its an excess of people. 

-- 
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.
BTOPENWORLD address about to cease.      DEMON address no longer in use.
>>Use oz@farmeroz.port995.com<<
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