teonanacatl
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Posts posted by teonanacatl
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Ok so here are some references on farm dams.
http://www.clw.csiro.au/publications/waterforahealthycountry/2008/UWSRA-tr7.pdf
http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/9329/waterreform.pdf
Basically farm dams result ~1ML reduction in runoff for every 1ML stored. So whilst a few dams on one farm are minor comparison to the large dams built by government when counted in total they represent a significant cause of stream flow reduction. Though I do think having the equivalent volume in farm dams would be better then damning up a main river for one big dam. Dams, swales etc would also act to slow the movement of water to the creek, perhaps the creeks would run lower but for longer though quite a lot of water is lost through evaporation ~10% and plenty more through transpiration of crops and removal of produce.
Swales and dams have their place in farms, its really just a matter of population as to whether something is low impact, sustainable and eco-friendly etc.
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My motor controls go to shit when high so Im useless at creativity then. I also loose mental sharpness and my memory goes to shit so even if I think up a good idea its probably not that good or I forget it. The only drug Ive found useful is ayahuasca, I didnt get any mental fuzz and memory is fine. Motor controls are gone still though....
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TI: Ill search for the references when I get my internet speed back. I was looking it up to see if all farms in an area adopted the keyline/permaculture plan would it be better then a large town type dam.Reality is anything you do to a property is going to affect the natural system which is why I think most choose degraded agricultural land. If there is agriculture then one has made the choice and effecting the environment/ waterway is a side product that one is happy with. Then it becomes about doing it as low impact, sustainably and intelligently as it can be done which is keyline and swales.
Cant argue with that either DL, one has to wonder if that was Mollison's original plan- if it was then he is even smarter then I thought
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Would think every extremist group in the world would be on flights to the infected area as we speak?
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Ive been listening to a bunch of permaculture podcasts whilst carving of late and the american presenters and the people asking questions are terrible. The presenters were greedy, economically minded though they claimed otherwise, naive puritans who used the interviews to boost their ego. The guests were brilliant- Paul Stamets, Darren Doherty Bill Theil? and even Geoff Lawton impressed me. I find Geoff rambles to much and makes up sentences that dont make sense and just repeats key words, his lack of chemistry understanding drives me nuts too. Geoff did redeem himself though in telling people to take up lands that were full of pesticides, herbicides, lands that had been raped etc as it was out pollution as a whole and therefore we had a responsibility to deal with it. One thing that also became apparent to me was that a lot of the permaculture places making money run a non-profit and profit organisation, the tax is fed back through the non-profit and so much seemed focused on how to build the right business plan which I think is good if one is going to do it. They also kept saying how labour costs were so expensive these days that one had to rely on free labour to do all these things which is exactly true.
They talked about the productivity of each zone and obviously zone 1 was the biggest producer, but it quickly fell away as one approached zone 3. Most people use intensive garden beds in this area anyway with lots of stacking regardless of permaculture.
I read P.A. Yeomans book on water and farm development and it was great (the new edition is poorly edited but the info is good) and Id highly recommend it. I think Darren Doherty has the right idea as well, very much a system designed around doing agriculture better without the fluff. I think the initial layout is very important and once that is done your are 80% of the way there, its more about smart designing then permaculture. People focus too much on the food forest aspect of the permaculture. The agree wholeheartedly with your advice DL
Maybe the point of permaculture is to give people a way to make money whilst spreading the idea of smart designing?I did some research on the implications of dams on waterways and one cannot really do any dams whether smaller farm dams or large town dams without influencing the river ecosystem in someway. Large town dams rarely were economical and neither were a lot of hydroelectric dams. It did surprise me that even small farm dams had an effect. I think a reasonable number that was thrown around was storing
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Dremel is fine for starters, they are cheap and will last for long enough till one saves for a foredom. I use a foredom micromotor and a fordom flexshaft.
Im making another green python now, will be larger. Logan river? In SEQ? You should take a photo! They are only recorded as being found in the iron range/mcIllwraith range area if Cape york and then in PNG, it would be quite significant if they were found there as well! Thanks for the comments
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Here it is, doubt there is any copyright issues anymore. He also goes to Arnhem land on a sailing holiday and the aborigines there are quick to want to trade but they want opium and reluctantly take tobacco when they realise he has no opium
The god without a job is pretty funny :D
Jack McLarens My Crowded Solitude.pdf
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A much fairer and more realistic statement is " Death follows change in an ecosystem", whether that be from humans, weather, new predators etc.
One more thing, oil, coal, nuclear power etc are not evil, we are just using them above their sustainability levels. With a much reduced population we could burn as many tyres as we wanted. The problem is people dont have a clue what the real price of food, clothing, water, electricity etc are, the real prices for everything needs to fairly represent their true values, but that doesnt make much economic sense. Try and do everything yourself, live without them and you will realise the true value of these things. We have plenty of resources, people just need to learn to use them efficiently.
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A big difference between aboriginal inhabitation of Australia and european inhabitation was population numbers. Impacts are less when there is less people, simple as that. Humans are not innately more evil than any other animal, we are just tool makers that have progressed to some pretty epic tools. If you ask my dogs if they could get rid of all fleas would they, they would say yes without caring about what ecological problems that would have down the line.
The aboriginals did farm, on a broad scale and it did affect the environment! They still had low food security and honestly it would have been a plain lifestyle, remember aboriginals had about three options to cook things, in the coals, in ground oven, or not at all. People dont realise how nutrient dense our foods are these days, even just using oil when cooking.
Ive got a great book written in the early 1900's up here in Cape York, it was written by a man who started a copra plantation here and used aboriginal labour (paid) to help him. He was as far as Ive read a fair and honest man who treated others well. He isnt an anthropologist but his account of the aboriginal lifestyle and things he saw is in a way better then that of an anthropologist. A few things of note are that before he had much of an influence on their lifestyle (after a year or two of working for him they chose to settle rather than be nomadic so they could have food security) he said their days consisted of sleeping, finding something to eat, cooking it if need be (animals were thrown whole on the fire hair guts and all and everything was eaten), if still hungry finding more, sleeping, get up when hungry and get something else, dance and sing a few nights of the week and generally gossip lots. He also give an interesting account of when he first introduces them to boiling food in water, and everything they then boiled all their food for a while after that and took anything that one could use to boil things in. In the end he taught them to farm, something they much preferred over their nomadic lifestyle, they then chose to formed one of the only aboriginal settlements that was done without without white intervention.
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Its crazy to see how the tide has turned as soon as they saw how profitable it can be!
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Thanks YM. That hammerhead has surprised me how popular its been, some of the pieces I make like the little dugong, hammerhead, simple abstract shapes for necklaces and earrings dont really make it to the website or my facebook page, the hammerhead was one of those but it got more attention then blue jade flower I made. Just goes to show you never know what people will like. The hammerhead is quite small and was a lesson that going small doesnt always mean it will be easier and quicker! Ive got a large block of blue nephrite from canada and I plan to carve a much larger hammerhead from it. Skills are paying some of the bills
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yeah now to refine
Im excited because it only looks better and better from now on, still a long way to go before its done though. Ive clocked 84hrs on this piece already and it will be another 100hrs at least till its done I think.YT the fish and the hammerhead are all thats left, good to see your still around bro!
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Finished all of the roughing, not to refine, smooth and polish!
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Ill probably post an update on that piece tomorrow, Im 1/3 done, so if I get 2/3rds done Ill post a pic. Im running out of diamond burrs at a rapid rate though!
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Wait until its done! Its going to be epic!
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Opps and a few more.....
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Havent posted anything for awhile so here are some new ones.
And a larger sculptural piece Im working on at the moment.
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I use this site for qld data- contours, cadastral, ecosystem, soil etc. The cadastral maps are invaluable when searching for land, as are the soils etc.
You can convert them and overlay on google earth, I use QGIS as well.
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No criticism aimed at those diets, just poorly worded.
Problem with looking for fat in wild animals is that lots of them are lean buggers (speaking of aus) and eating just lean meat can cause rabbit starvation- eat the offal first is your best bet!
Coconuts are the shit!
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The exact point made in this article- http://foragersharvest.com/into-the-wild-and-other-poisonous-plant-fables/
He was definitely not eating enough food to sustain himself.
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Ill go out tomorrow and see what I can harvest
This is the time of plenty up Cape York, plenty yams, polynesian arrowroot (Tacca leontopetaloides), water lilly bulbs and native ginger all of which starch can be obtained from.-
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Note: Damn stupid non SI units: 1 Cal (note the capital) is ~4kJ, apparently a cal is a different unit (1 cal= ~4J) and happens to be the one Im most use to. So just to clarify we are talking 3000 Cal = 12500kJ.
That article was mainly focused on "survival situations". Though it really is an eye opener to just how use to calorie dense foods we are in todays world! Around me the easiest source of pure carbs is yams, basically Id need to eat ~2.5kg of yams/day to get ~3000 Cal, or 5kg of nonda plums (I dread to ever have to eat that many!). Now I know the land immediately around my house cannot sustain that sort of harvest for one person.
A more realistic diet is 1kg of meat and 1kg of yam/day with a good load of pandanus or terminalia seeds supplemented.
Keeping in mind that 3000Cal is for a decent bit of exercise, so one could probably cut that to ~2000Cal on a lazy day (1.6kg of yams).
Something to keep in mind is Rabbit starvation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation
I had heard about it before, apparently it was a real problem for the pioneers who ate meat heavy diets. So one is risking rabbit starvation when they eat 1kg+ of lean meat with no carb or fat inputs. No doubt this could be higher with a bit of time for the body to adjust. Daily protein requirements for amino acids are about 55g.
So in such a "survival situation" one should eat the offal first, then the meat. With the offal being quite high in vitamins and minerals there is less chance of malnutrition also. Supplementation with some greens would set you on a good path!
In terms of surviving off the land in a farming situ if one wants to grow all their own carbs (for me its cassava) then you'll need 1.2-1.8kg/day depending on how much work (1800-3000 Cal). Id estimate I get 5-6kg/ plant and my rotation is designed for me to eat one plant/ week. Meat is easy to get so the rest of my RDI is composed of fish, pig, beef etc with other bits and pieces. If I had the room I could quite easily double my cassava production.
Here is a nice paper looking at plant based vs meat based diets: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full.pdf+html
The conclusion being that plant based diets need .4ha, animal based diets need .5ha/ person to provide all the food requirements. This is utilising the current world production so I sure an intensive garden could be made to produce more from a smaller amount of land. Re the animal based diet- for me animals allow you to store energy in the form of a living animal and you can convert poor feed sources into quality feed sources. For me farming takes care of the basic carbs, hunting and fishing gives me quality protein and Im left craving fruit and veg. I use aibika as a highly nutritious green for vit and minerals.
If you want to search for the nutrition of foods here is a great site- http://nutritiondata.self.com
It also allows you to search for complimentary foods to get all your amino acids etc.
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Looking at nutrition data, 3000cal is pretty significant. To get ~3000cal one would need to eat just under 3kg of cooked rice/day, which works out at just under 1kg raw. I guess this is why farming became so popular
Did you go into ketosis? My experience of PNG was plenty of carbs so no ketosis.
Lean people are up shits creek faster then larger people, though a lean person requires less carbs to maintain their weight.
Anonymous Friend No More.
in Chill Space
Posted
I had this idea today, imagine if the mining companies in Australia were run by the people of Australia for the people of Australia! What a ridiculous idea! Marxism!
Everything is overinflated in our society because its made cheaply in third world countries that underpay workers. You can see this when the cost of making something is more expensive then buying it already made. Global minimum wage would sort that out but then if everything was at its actual value people couldnt own so much shit- what a tragedy!