MORE BURNING STATS

            The sheer volume of biomass burning on the planet never ceases to amaze me.  Jill English in CBC News just came out with a story about Roundup and fires in Canada, especially British Columbia.

             For reference, here at Polyface we use about 20 tractor trailer loads of wood chips a year in our animal bedding/composting program.  That includes what we use on leased properties as well.  For example, one one of our leased farms we have a couple of large hoop houses where we winter up to 200 hogs; they need a foot and a half of bedding.

             How much forest land supplies all these chips?  Less than 1 acre per year.  And of course that acre also supplies firewood and saw logs.  The point is that 1 acre of forest supplies all the carbon needed for all our housed livestock in the winter.  If we could do the deep bedding and pigaearating for all the cows instead of only 40 percent, we'd probably need another 5 or 6 loads.  And that supplies compost for more than 50 acres.  So even if we're crazy liberal and say 2 acres to 50, that's a 1:25 ratio. 

            My rule of thumb for proper forestal percentage on any regenerative farm is 25 percent.  So if you have 100 acres, you'd have 25 acres of forest.   If you apply compost every other year and half of the acreage doesn't need it, you'd be cutting a half acre of forest per 100 acres of pasture per year, which is a 50-year cycle.  Of course, these things are never as precise as this formula would seem, but you get the idea.

             Now, let's go back to Canada and Jill's story.  rRight now nearly 3 million acres of forest burn per year in Canada.  One of the big reasons is because the industry favors conifers rather than hardwoods.  Spraying Roundup to kill hardwoods makes the forests completely coniferous.  Hardwoods provide more shade and more moisture, which dampens the ferocity and size of wildfires.  This Roundup application procedure receives "sustainable forestry" designation.

             At any rate, with my crude ratios listed above, this amount of forest would provide compost for 600,000,000 acres.  Did you get that?    Read it again.  Every time people say regenerative farming can't feed the world, I point out the wastage ongoing in our modern production systems.  If we chipped those trees for compost instead of encouraging a system that burns them, we would have more compost for soil building and fertility than anyone can imagine.  And that's just Canada.

             So don't let anyone push you around with this need for high tech stackable urban LED hydroponic farms and GMOs and cloning and every other mechanistic ecology-bashing proposal out there.  We have all the resources we need.  We have all the information we need.  We have all the money we need.

             What we don't have is a nurturing worldview.  I agree with the environmentalists who are furious over the Roundup spraying that simplifies the natural complexity of these northern forests.  I wonder if these same folks would be as quick to endorse my cutting and chipping protocol for keeping things green and fresh and integrated with open land fertility?

             When Al Gore said the chainsaw was the worst invention of humankind, he couldn't have been more wrong. 

             Do you like chainsaws in the right hands?