Cob RE: sustainability and straw

[John Schinnerer]

Aloha,

-----Original Message-----
From:	Carol M. [SMTP:cllee at SWBell.net]
>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...

I don't recall saying they weren't.  This is all just an invitation to inquire more deeply.  No one will participate who doesn't feel like doing so...

>Building homes with cob and/or straw seems to be  the most eco-friendly way of >providing housing that is available to us today.

I think that's roughly what I said at the end of my post...and what about tomorrow?

>  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.

Yes, *one of*, but addressed in isolation it will be unlikely to do any good in the long run.  Sprawling tracts of cob houses are still sprawling tracts.  Anyone else recall when providing people with low-cost, personalized transportation (cars) was one of the *most* critical needs we faced?  :-p

>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.

The research of John Jeavons and Ecology Action over the past 20 years is one source of such info.  Introductory info is available at:  http://www.crest.org/sustainable/ecology_action/index.html
Much of what they base their statistics on, besides their own work, are publicly available statistics from state, federal and private agencies and research. 
Permaculture methods offer related alternatives; they are less well-researched than Biointensive methods but offer more diversity of scale.  Having studied and practiced both, I see them converging and learning from each other.

I'm quite aware of crop rotation - it's not sufficient.  Agribusiness-scale farming methods have shown how unsustainable they are in less than a century (the "dust bowl" of the 30's was a result of these practices, as are the salination and heavy-metal problems in the CA central valley in the last several decades).  In the US we lose six pounds of topsoil for every pound of food produced by these methods.  In China (which had sustainable agriculture for thousands of years until "modern" methods were recently imported) it is about eighteen pounds of topsoil lost per pound of food produced. 

>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.

There is less sense in depleting one's soil so that one can no longer grow anything at all, which is what all of "modern" mechanized agriculture is doing.  And it would indeed be much easier on the farmer for she or he to grow what they and their family need, and then market a small sustainably produced surplus for income.  They would no longer need huge subsidized loans, huge expensive machinery, hundreds of acres of topsoil-losing farmland, and so on in order to be farmers, and it would be less work overall.  

>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.

Unfortunately, neither is using up all the soil, because then the exact same scenario you outline will occur.  A percentage of what's grown can of course be harvested for eating.  A larger percentage needs to be used to feed the soil, or the soil can't feed us.  

Everywhere in nature, the systems that have been operating for thousands of years follow these principles - animals eat only a tiny fraction of the plant matter, and the rest decays into the forest floor to feed the soil that feeds the plants that the animals eat a bit of.  When the animals eat too much, the forest produces less, so a bunch of the animals starve and then (sometimes) the forest recovers, and so on.

Hi Ho,
John Schinnerer