You’re right of course in everything you say, but only in the perspective of now current/modern agriculture.

I think calling it vegan farming is an unfortunate name, and only serves to make it more of a devisive issue than it needs to be. I for one don’t think it’s necessary to grow vegetables totally without animal inputs.

At the same time, with global warming and the urgent need to cut greenhouse gasses, it’s impossible not to take into account agriculture, livestock and the greenhouse gasses generated from the food we eat.

I’m assuming here you’re a farmer.

While there’s no denying the usefulness of animals in agriculture like you describe, it is also possible to grow vegetables without them. The UK for example has a program to certify vegetables as vegan. Even though I don’t call it vegan, this is mostly how I grow my own vegetables in my own garden, and they do grow well.

It may not be the way you want to farm, and it may be more expensive and labour intensive, but it is certainly possible.

Please come back! Your comments are always welcome here.

You’re right, I live in the city, Amsterdam, Netherlands to be exact, and you probably know a lot of things I don’t.

My computer tells me you’re in Ennis, Montana.

While I was born and grew up in the US, I’ve never been to Montana, and I’ve spend most of my life in cities. Montana is probably very different from here.

If you have the time and feel like it, I’d like to hear more about you. What’s your job or do you own a business? How is the bad economy changing things for you? What kinds of things are important for you from one day to the next? What do you think of Obama? Anything you want to say or not say is okay with me.

I’d also like to hear anything you have to say about whatever I write here.

We may not agree on meat or climate change, but we must have something in common!

I think it’s a little funny you choose a dietary/lifestyle preference to describe a way of farming, but only because that’s how I often do it. On Homegrown Goodness I recently said

I am completely un-phased by any COMMERCIAL breeding effort aimed at health benefit. Lycopene in tradtional tomatoes, anthocyanin in GM or traditional tomatoes, golden rice, whatever the vitamin du jour is, I don’t think it’s interesting. By the same token I don’t drink diet soda because I’m afraid sugar might be bad for me, if I smoked it wouldn’t be light cigarettes, I don’t eat low salt, low fat, high protein, low carbohydrate, low calorie, high fiber, oily fish, high Omega-3, low Omega-6, vitamin enriched cereals or anything else with health claims or supposed dietary benefits. For what it’s worth, I never really have.

My focus is on whole foods of traditional origin, produced and prepared in a natural way. If any of you read Michael Pollan, this is largely his position too.

For decades now the food industry has been making huge profits by dividing up the foods we eat into their component parts and selling them to us one at a time. Making us afraid of what we eat because it might make us fat, or sick, or we might be missing some critical vitamin.

I manage my garden in a similar way. Again for decades, since the agricultural industry is the same as the food industry, it has been dividing up the components in our garden soil and selling them to us one at a time in a box at the garden center (plant vitamins, if you like). I just don’t pay attention to the individual components, at least not for the purposes of adding vitamins to my garden. This is mostly what I see in your second comment here; blood bone meal, seaweed, soymeal, alfalfa meal, composts made with manures, greenmanure, in the context you present them these all seem like vitamins you are planning to add to the soil. For me it’s not a matter of being anti-animal, it’s a matter of being anti-vitamin.

It’s very possible for anyone to discover a deficiency in their soil, and need to do something about it. Maybe for example your phosphate levels are low, so you add rock phosphate. Maybe you need some lime. You might notice these things from a soil test, or you may notice problems with your plants and determine the problem that way.

Once you fix whatever problems you may have, with the exception of maybe needing to add more lime over time, in theory you don’t need any more inputs. It’s true, you will harvest some things that may take trace elements with them, but this is pretty minor. Some nutrients will temporarily become in short supply with heavy feeding plants, and you need to manage this with rotations. As long as you recycle your waste back into the land, by composting directly or feeding it to animals and reusing the manure, except for carbon and nitrogen (I’ll get to these two in a second), it’s a closed system. If you think you need something along the lines of plant vitamins, you are probably pouring something unnecessary into the ground that mostly washes away.

Okay, I know this is a very unscientific and a little oversimplified way of describing nitrogen, but it’s the way I think of it. There are basically three main forms of nitrogen; gas, soluble and fixed. Nitrogen is constantly moving between these forms, nitrogen fixing plants will convert the gas in the air into fixed nitrogen, the soluble nitrogen in manure mostly turns into the gas form if you age it, if you combine manure with a source of carbon and compost it the soluble nitrogen becomes fixed, and so on.

In order for plants to be able to use any nutrient, but in this case nitrogen in particular, it must be available in the soil. The ideal situation if for the nitrogen to be fixed, because it tends to become available as the plants need it.

If you grow your plants with soluble nitrogen, it’s all available immediately, which can make the plants big and green and maybe make the gardener feel good about what they’re growing, but really this is an unhealthy situation and can lead to a lot of problems like plant diseases or ‘burning’ of young plants. The other thing about soluble nitrogen is, per definition, it rinses away (usually contaminating the ground water or passing into the air as a greenhouse gas). This means you need to keep adding it like a vitamin. Of course it’s not just manure, but any fertilizer you add to the ground with nitrogen in it will contain soluble nitrogen.

Compost is not normally a great source of fixed nitrogen. Yes it has some, but the whole process of combining with carbon is pretty inefficient. When you are composting something like fresh manure, which is very high in nitrogen, you also need a tremendous amount of carbon for a proper mix. Given enough time, compost tends to balance out it’s carbon/nitrogen ratio by converting soluble nitrogen to gas or gas in the air to fixed. Properly made compost has no remaining soluble nitrogen, and if you notice a difference between compost made with or without manure, you are probably using too much manure for the available carbon and are ending up with a lot of soluble nitrogen left over. If your compost smells like ammonia, you have soluble nitrogen.

The most efficient way to fix nitrogen into the ground is to use nitrogen fixing plants. The important aspect of this is that these plants tend to fix nitrogen according to their needs. If there is soluble nitrogen available in the ground, they will fix considerable less!

What happens when you start growing plants without manure, and only with fixed nitrogen, there becomes a lot more inertia in the situation. In effect what you are doing is fixing nitrogen into topsoil and you don’t have the problem of needing to keep soluble nitrogen at the right level in the ground. The more topsoil you build up, the more nitrogen it holds, which it releases according to the needs of the plants. Once you have good topsoil built up, it’s very forgiving when it comes to rotations and nitrogen deficiency. You only need to grow beans or peas from time to time, or use a nitrogen fixing green manure.

When I grew up my parents were organic (mostly ornamental) gardeners, and my mother hated manures so we never used them. In my early years they added chemical fertilizer to our suburban lawn, but by the time I was 10 or so they didn’t even do that any more. Otherwise gardening was completely without inputs, only home made compost and some nitrogen fixing plants. The lawn did go a little brown after a while, but otherwise they had a great garden with few problems and very rich soil.

Certainly agriculture plays a role, but are some getting carried away….and pushing this idea simply as a way to promote their own beliefs – as in “organic” or vegetarian lifestyles or something else?

I certainly agree with you that livestock are essential for small holdings. They are critical for the whole waste and land management cycle, and they give farmers something productive to do in seasons when crops can’t be grown. No argument from me here!

It’s not that there aren’t some environmental issues even with livestock on small holdings, but the same is true when we turn on the light. Everything has to be put in perspective. The real problems are the feedlots and industrial slash and burn style farming.

However, small holdings aren’t going to be able to supply the amount of meat the world is now consuming or projected future consumption. Everyone still needs to eat less meat, and now is the best time to start!

Anne, I’m not sure I agree completely when you say:

Its difficult, not impossible to grow food without composted manure – it requires more land to rotate crops (more equipment and labour) or purchased inputs, the production and transport of which produce carbon.

Animals require land too. Don’t you need something like 5 acres for a pasture raised cow? You guys are the expert here, I’m not a farmer. This extra land could handle a lot of rotated crops.

Which produces more greenhouse gases, a tractor or a cow? There’s a philosophical debate! I don’t think I better go there, but it is an open question. It’s true a cow potentially needs fewer external inputs.

My understanding of how the whole green revolution got started was basically farmers were having a problem in that ‘cash’ crops could not be intensively grown on the same land without rotations from less valuable crops. Farmers began adding manures in various ways to extend the amount of time the more lucrative crops could be regrown on the same spot, and found that it helped but wasn’t a complete solution because among other problems pests started becoming established.

Along came the chemical companies with artificial ‘manures’ containing a more complete and balanced mix of plant nutrients, as well as products to combat pests.

This is how we got ourselves in this whole mess in the first place!

Like I said, I’m not a farmer and you guys are really the experts here. I’m also certainly not trying to grow cash crops.

My experience in my own garden however, is that animal manure is not very useful. I use it sometimes to make my compost go faster, but nitrogen fixing plants are a much better way to put nitrogen into the ground and plant materials are a better source of organic material.

Alan,

The issue of a ‘cow tax’ is all in the details.

Obviously something needs to be done to keep it from becoming a burden on small farmers, but livestock does now account for 18% of man made green house gases on the planet, and a tax may be one way of addressing the issue.

For example, if you have a ‘tax’ of $100 per cow and at the same time give every farmer a $500 subsidy, there would be no net cost for all farmers with less than 5 cows. In fact, farmers with fewer cows would in effect be paid for the cows they didn’t have. If you have 10 cows, the effective tax would only be $50 per cow, because you still get the $500 subsidy to offset the tax. If however you run a feedlot, you end up with a pretty hefty tax bill.

By the way, this is how they tax home electric use in the Netherlands, and if you use a very small amount of electricity it’s possible to get money back from the utility company instead of paying something.

Something like a fair ‘cow tax’ would be complicated to work out, and the US is a very political place. It may not be possible to do in the end, but the potential is there. In my mind it’s not as simple a thing to do to just openly oppose it. I do understand your position however.

I agree with Anne myself, animals will have to be an ever important part of agriculture in sustainable systems, most of these emissions are coming from large feed lots and slash and burn methods, many of these methods are the type used by corporate farmers, but when it comes time to point fingers, world governments will point at the self sustainable farmer and let the corporate idiots get away with their unsustainable practices, it’s a way to control what people do, how they do it, and where their money and power goes.

Composting and using animal manures is one of the most important practices of self sustainable farming, and in small scale farming, even collectively around the world, the amount of emissions released would be nothing compared to a huge feedlot.

Bio-Char is an interesting concept, unfortunately in the technological hands that it lies now it will be used as a “feel good” economic crutch for someone with less than stellar and pristine morals to further rape the environment and rip off the people.

In today’s world us small and sustainable farmers have to stand up for what is right and truly sustainable and take the power back from the power brokers, particularly when they are talking about “cow taxes” which would ultimately include carbon taxes on activities such as composting as well, this would effectively shut down the last of the small self sustainable farms across the U.S. and eventually the world.