Great Plains Running Out of Water

I have been sounding the alarm about this since I lived in TX - over a decade ago. People there use water like there's no tomorrow to have the grass, flowers and trees they grew up with in the Northern states. I was disgusted by their lack of respect for an exhaustable supply of water, particularly given the state's history during the dust bowl years.

They need to change the way they irrigate, WHAT they irrigate and how often. This is a massive task that must be successfully accomplished if we, as a nation, are going to continue feeding ourselves.

Excerpts:

People have been warning about the aquifer's depletion for years, but coordinating conservation programs among farmers has proved difficult. Recently, Texas has imposed state controls on the amount of groundwater that farmers can pump, requiring 16 groundwater districts to each provide a target for an acceptable groundwater level in 50 years.

"The magnitude of this is incredible," he continued. "We're talking about, for the last 20 years, 20 percent of the irrigated acreage of this nation is over the Ogallala."

For an idea of what a severe drought could do to the communities of the Great Plains, consider the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when gigantic "black blizzards" ravaged farms and forced thousands of families to give up their land and try to make a living elsewhere.

Egg Information

I did the research for this to become a tri-fold for the eggs my brother is selling from his nearly 60 hens. I can't promise it'll all make sense, but please read it. It's pretty important information for anyone trying to eat right.

The following are statistics for the chickens and the eggs, comparing naturally foraging “pastured” chickens to their industrial caged “battered” (so appropriately named!) counterparts.
Life Span
Pastured 7-20 years
Battered 12-23 months
Fryers 41 days

Chickens are like any other bird. They forage for their food. Pastured chickens spend their days clucking about, scratching the earth for bugs, grass, and even the occasional mouse. Caged battered chickens are forced to eat cottonseed meal and soy proteins, with an elongated daylight period to enhance their egg laying. This means they can lay up to 380 eggs in a few months, but their life’s energy is literally gone in that short period. A pastured chicken will lay 400-600 eggs in her life, all in a more natural setting.

The eggs from the pastured hen are also far more nutritious than those of the battered chicken. Mother Earth News has corroborated 15 years of research in extensive testing to prove exactly how healthful these eggs are.

Comparing pastured eggs to egg substitutes is apples to golf balls. However, if you like a little egg with your chemicals, we can crunch the numbers!

Vitamins

Vitamin A
You need anywhere from 4,000 (infant) to 12,000 (lactating woman) international units (iu) of Vitamin A per day.
The Egg Substitute - 180
The Industrial Egg - 244
The Pastured Egg - 405

Vitamin D
The old RDA was 400 iu. It has since been increased to 1000 iu since everyone has become severely deficient.
The Egg Substitute - 0
The Industrial Egg - 18
The Pastured Egg - 73

Vitamin E
You should get at least 30 iu of E per day, about half for children. Many people are deficient in E as well, so please pay attention.
The Egg Substitute - .13
The Industrial Egg - .49
The Pasture Egg - 1.46

Beta Carotene
This is a provitamin, meaning it is only 1 step away from being a vitamin - namely vitamin A. A is so vital to all aspects of the cells that make up your body, affecting every organ and its function. Most people recognize vitamin A for it's work with eye function, but that is only one of hundreds of functions it aids.
So, by having both Vitamin A and Beta Carotene available in 1 place, it will help serve the body for both immediate needs and easier storage for use later.
The Egg Substitute - a synthetic form - 108
The Industrial Egg - 5
The Pastured Egg - 35

More Reasons To Buy Pastured Eggs
Now that you know why it is so much better for you to eat pastured eggs, here are other reasons you should buy them:

Extinction – There are over 40 breeds of heritage chickens, 12 of which are original to the US. These breeds are all threatened with extinction by the breeds used in industrial farming. The majority of pastured eggs are from these 12 heritage breeds.

Diversification – all 7 or 8 of NYS industrial egg farmers are supplied by only 3 breeders. As we have seen with lettuce, spinach, beef and peanuts, the ability to damage an entire sector of farming that is so centralized is frightening. By supporting small farms, this ability is reduced significantly.

Economic – Studies throughout the world have proven money spent at locally owned businesses is far more valuable than money spent at regional, national or international stores. $1 spent locally (at small farms or businesses) equals $1.86 in locally re-spent capitol. $1 spent at a chain store equals $.83 in locally re-spent capitol.

Environmental – Industrial Animal Farming is estimated to account for 55% of soil and sediment erosion, 37% of nationwide pesticide use, 80% of antibiotic usage, and more than 30% of the total nitrogen and phosphorus dumped into drinking water resources. By supporting your local farmers, you significantly decrease these numbers, and assist in the rebalancing of the environment. By having small flocks of chickens, all of these issues are balanced out. Bugs and weeds are controlled, the soil is fertilized naturally, and the birds are healthier for being outside, so there is no need for antibiotics for health or growth.

50-Year Farming Plan

Sent to me by Jerome Rigot

A 50-Year Farm Bill
By WES JACKSON and WENDELL BERRY
Published: January 4, 2009

THE extraordinary rainstorms last June caused catastrophic soil erosion in the grain lands of Iowa, where there were gullies 200 feet wide. But even worse damage is done over the long term under normal rainfall — by tthe little rills and sheets of erosion on incompletely covered or denuded cropland, and by various degradations resulting from industrial procedures and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.

Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — annd no powerful friends in the halls of government.

Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.

To the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has added pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. Some of this toxicity is associated with the widely acclaimed method of minimum tillage. We should not poison our soils to save them.

Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological "solutions" for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.

Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities.

For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.

Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and grazing animals.

But a more radical response is necessary if we are to keep eating and preserve our land at the same time. In fact, research in Canada, Australia, China and the United States over the last 30 years suggests that perennialization of the major grain crops like wheat, rice, sorghum and sunflowers can be developed in the foreseeable future. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can better protect the soil and substantially reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution.

Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient. And with an increase in the use of perennial plants and grazing animals would come more employment opportunities in agriculture — provided, of course,, that farmers would be paid justly for their work and their goods.

Thoughtful farmers and consumers everywhere are already making many necessary changes in the production and marketing of food. But we also need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.

This is a political issue, certainly, but it far transcends the farm politics we are used to. It is an issue as close to every one of us as our own stomachs.

Wes Jackson is a plant geneticist and president of The Land Institute in Salina, Kan. Wendell Berry is a farmer and writer in Port Royal, Ky.

Factory Farms Effluent

These are exerpts of the article on Grist.com. For the entire article, please click on the title - it'll take you directly to the article...

Agriculture has long been a top source of water pollution in the U.S., but in the last two decades the scale of the problem has grown dramatically with the proliferation of large-scale pork, poultry, beef, and dairy facilities, known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). From 2002 to 2005, the CAFO industry in the U.S. expanded by about 22 percent -- with substantially more animals per facility, and ever-larger piles of their droppings

Today these facilities are responsible for some 500 million tons of animal manure a year -- three times more waste than humans in this country produce, activists say. According to a 1998 report from the Department of Agriculture and U.S. EPA, CAFO muck has fouled roughly 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states and groundwater in 17 states. More recent data show that 29 states have reported water contamination from these feedlots.Last week, the EPA proposed a rule [PDF] that purports to address this problem. It would revise a set of rules issued in 2003 that revamped the permitting process required of CAFOs under the Clean Water Act, with the aim of better tracking discharge levels at each facility and holding factory farms accountable for their water pollution.

"The loophole basically renders the Clean Water Act meaningless when it comes to regulating the fecal discharge from CAFOs," says Merkel. "It says to these massive facilities, 'Hey, figure out if you need a permit to pollute, and then come and get one.' It's appalling."The agriculture industry, meanwhile, is applauding the proposed rule. Don Parish, senior director of regulatory relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation, says it would lighten the regulatory burden on CAFOs. Obtaining permits, he says, is "an onerous process. When you have a permit, every 'i' that you don't dot and every 't' you don't cross is a problem, and creates substantial liability concerns."

"In 2003, EPA's position was that if you're a large-scale facility, it's nearly impossible not to have some amount of discharge," says Merkel. "Therefore all large facilities should have permits."

And yet today the vast majority of factory farms still don't have permits for this runaway pollution: Of the roughly 18,800 CAFOs currently in the United States, the EPA says only about 8,500 have permits.