Cob RE: sustainability and straw (long)

[Carol M.]

Mr. Schinerer,

You seem to be preaching to the choir with your post.  The people on this news list are some of the most environmentally conscious people I know of.  Building homes with cob and/or straw seems to be  the most eco-friendly way of providing housing that is available to us today.  And providing people with low cost, easily built homes, ones they can do the building of themselves, is one of the _most_ critical needs we face now.

I'm not at all sure where you are coming from with your statement that farmers can "afford" to sell only 10 to 20% of their crops or they will be depleting the soil beyond recovery in a short time.  You might want to look into crop rotation - something that is widely practiced today.

Farming is very hard work and there is absolutely no sense in growing anything that you just harvest in order to put in the compost heap so you can return it to the soil.  It would be much easier on the farmer just to grow what he needs for himself and the family.  Check it out for yourself.

And if farmers start doing that - in order to "save" their soil - then civilization as we know it will come tumbling down around our ears when starvation hits and people must revert to becoming savages just to get enough to eat.  So "saving" the soil by growing crops to be composted and returned to the soil they grew in just is not a workable solution.

Carol M.