Example of "solving in the pattern" as suggested by Wendell Berry
How many cattle can you raise on a piece of land for either milk or beef production?
Farmer needs to make money to support their farm and family.
The cattle lead to degradation of the land and production of excess waste material.
three choices:
a. don't actually solve the problem
b. push it somewhere else
c. solve it in the pattern
A healthy ecosystem will have a large amount of materials recycling to support abundant energy flow through the system.
Nutrients will move from the plants to the herbivores, to secondary consumers and then to the soil. In the soil, organic material will be acted on by microbial population to create soil components and release inorganic nutrients. This step in the soil is often the slowest step.
examine which rate is slowest and figure out how to accelerate this rate
may be pulsing of rates - not all exactly equal all the time
compared to what the soil can regenerate
this becomes "waste" from the system
exported off the farm through unintentional runoff or intentional treatment
cost of dealing with this waste treatment is high
example: Boardman milk plant has huge facility for dealing with cow waste
http://www.threemilecanyonfarms.com/
collects waste and uses it in a biogas digester to create methane and uses that methane to generate electrical power
16,000 to 53,000 cows generate 500,000 tons of manure each year
(a person produces about 700 pounds per year --> a city of 1.5 million people)
this facility may be a closed loop for carbon nutrients, but seems to be exporting nitrogen oxides into the air
A study of the atmospheric depostion of nitrogen and sulfur pollutants in the Gorge has used the pattern of lichen as an indicator species.
http://www.swcleanair.org/pdf/GorgeAtmosphericDeposition.pdf
decrease the number of cows
increase the efficiency of how the manure was returned to the soil (spread out across the pastures)
increased profits because of decreased waste treatment costs
other similar examples such as in Pollan - Omnivores Dilemma discussion of Joel Salatin's Polyface farm in Virginia
Interesting to compare the scale of these operations: Three Mile Canyon vs. Polyface.
