shinester
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Post by shinester on Jun 2, 2015 12:05:38 GMT 10
As preppers we store food, we store water, perhaps we think about security and so on. From there we start to think about how to resupply these thing. Water, is straight forward enough, rain takes care of that in one way or another but food is the other component, how do we take care of our food needs? Well typically we think we'll just grow a garden and so what would that take? How much space do we actually need? How much food do we need to grow? How do we provide the nutrients for that garden and so on. There's people on here who are 'almost' sustainable and I'm sure they can add much more from real life experience than I can, though perhaps I can offer some thoughts on what is required from, as I call it, 'the sums', that is from data. Obviously data's not perfect and will vary depending on lots of factors, what you would eat, what you would/could grow, though it gives us a starting point of what's actually required. So lets get to the numbers, and I know this is a giant task in reality, what do we need to grow if we're eating vegetables alone. This is not ideal as it's not to most people's paets but worth looking at what it actually take and combined with some thoughts of how we might actually come close to having a closed loop. Obviously from this foundation [and I wouldn't want to eat only vegetables!], we can add in fruit trees, eggs, chickens perhaps other livestock. Which would all reduced both the labor and increase the output, which is why farming throughout the ages has had a combination of them both for labor costs and for taste. So I'll just go with growing your own vegetables, in a hydroponic and greenhouse system. I've chosen hydroponics and in a greenhouse because it keeps our yields at near maximum, keeps out weeds [less labor], keeps out pests [generally no insecticide/netting], uses little water [95% less than in the garden], keeps our nutrients [no run off], uses the least space, uses no power if done with Kratky method hydroponics and is the least labor intensive after setting up. The material costs are pretty low, old pallets [free], plastic sheeting, stone/sand and of course plastic sheeting for the greenhouse, though not of course as cheap as putting in the ground. We can extrapolate and approximate the yields for the ground by dividing by 4. So we need to eat 3.7kgs of vegetables every day! We need an area 89m² and whilst you're probably not going to be a body builder, 66g of protein is more than enough. Whilst the spreadsheet I made allows lots of variation, I've focused on potatoes as the staple energy crop as it's the best in terms of space/and nutrition. I've included the figures for approximate macro nutrients for the output of the plants [what we eat] and calculated the amount as a percentage of the crop yield [which is not shown]. In effect, it gives us 'some' indications of what they require so we can attempt to correctly fertilize correctly. If we can't we will get reduced yields. I've included the number of plants you need to grow, though this is a yearly figure and we would want to plant according to both season and in stages so we always have free plants to harvest and we have maximum crop outputs. So, now we have some indications of how much food we actually need and the area in which is required to grow it. Next up we'll get into how to actually feed the plants. Attachments:
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shinester
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Post by shinester on Jun 2, 2015 13:00:26 GMT 10
We've worked out approximate nutrients for the plants, that is their Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium. I say approximate because it's based on the output vegetable's nutritional content and the crop yield, so what the stem and roots need is unknown with any precision, nor is what the plant can convert into nutrients or what concentration of nutrients [NPK] is ideal for the plants. So whilst some of these things can be discovered [with more research], I think it's fair to say that the plants are going to need around these figures, perhaps more or perhaps less as plants put a lot of their effort into fruit/vegetable growth. So, where do we get those nutrients from? When we eat food we get what we need from the carbohydrates/protein/fats from plants [or from animals that ate those plants] who put them together from their macro-nutrients [NPK], sunlight, water, air. We store some of those macro nutrients, such as using protein to build muscle, and we also excrete the broken down versions. This excretion is part of the cycle, plants then take up these macro-nutrients [NPK], well at least eventually and so on. In terms of a system, animals excrete 50-95% of those macro nutrients with 89% being the average. This would depend on if they're growing and so on. Obviously there's losses through shedding of skin too [which is what most dust is in homes!] and when they die, the rest of those macro nutrients are returned to the soil. Some is lost to the air in nitrogen dioxide [smelly part of flatulence], some is put back into the soil through lightning and rain [nitric acid] and some plants like legumes can take that nitrogen back from the air. So, what we have is a cycle in which already exists and if we wish to be sustainable, we really want to tap into, so we can provide both the plants with what they need and what the humans need. So it can be said that our excretions contain 89% of what the plants we eat need. That's all good and well but how do we use them and most importantly use them safely and what about the other 11%?
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shinester
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Post by shinester on Jun 2, 2015 13:58:42 GMT 10
So, when we say excretions, we know we're talking about human waste. Yes, I know it's squeamish, though it's worth looking around the world as human manure is used in many countries as agricultural fertilizer, for instance in Norway, 48% of human manure is used, in Finland it's 39%, Sweden 30%. Obviously it has to be processed to be safe for such applications and I will attempt to work through some small scale ways of doing that soon. Below I've included the numbers on the nutrient content of our excretions. It's worth noting that urine is mostly inert when excreted and when diluted 20:1 hardly has any smell to it. The smell is mostly ammonia, a nitrogen based compound.
Urine 4-7kg of nitrogen 0.4-1.8kg phosphorus 0.9-1.8kg potassium 0.5kg sulfur 40g magnesium 100g calcium
Human Manure 0.5-2.5kg of nitrogen 0.2-1.5kg phosphorus 0.4-0.9kg of potassium Various trace elements
Average totals Nitrogen, 7Kg Phosphorous 2kg Potassium 2kg.
So we're short approximately 7kg of Nitrogen and 9kg of potassium, we've also got an issue due to a lack of solubility of some of these nutrients at least in the application I'm proposing. We'll come back to that, though ash from your fire place, that is 'potash' is a good start for the potassium and it's easily soluble [lye].
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shinester
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Post by shinester on Jun 2, 2015 16:22:50 GMT 10
So, we have the easy to use urine that we can age [or not, though it's better to] in sealed containers as it builds up the ammonia and kills off anything that might want to grow in there, which should keep it quite sterile. Yes it smells, but diluted with 20 times the water, it's hardly noticable and that ammonia quickly turns into usable nitrogen in hydroponic media.
Potassium's obtainable through fires in the form of potash as I've already mentioned, we can even get it in the soluble form very easily by adding water [and filter] and when we add that to our diluted urine, we have a fairly complete soluble fertilizer. A more complete liquid plant food. We could probably save the potash over the winter. I'm not sure on the quantity needed at this point, though I'll be sure to add that info in.
We have some human manure which is mostly solids, we have some vegetable and post harvest plant scraps too. Even if we used everything and could make it available [soluble]. What I propose we do to make it both more available to plants and to get some energy in the form of methane from this is to make biogas. The process of making biogas turns the solid wastes into a sludge [we add water in the process] and we do a good deal of turning that into usable soluble nutrients. It takes time to get the biodigester running [4-6 weeks] and once it's running we can keep adding whatever organic material we have. This is where other forms of nitrogen can be introduced, be it lawn clippings, legumes, stock dung, whatever. It's worth noting that manure is not the best source for methane [you're wrong Mad Max 2], but it is a good way to convert it to both a safer and usable form.
For some numbers, I'm still learning about biodigesting and I'll edit or add on to this as I go down that path, though from cursory looking, it seems like it can be the pathway to both energy production [methane] and turning waste into a more usable fertilizer. Here's some basic outputs.
Minutes of cooking/day Digester Min[winter] Max[Summer] 2000L 120 240 1000L 60 120 500L 30 60 250L 15 30 50L 3 6
An example of creating biogas [there's other ways too] the difference being I'm suggesting to use the 'grey water' in feeding the plants. This system once established, takes in up to 20kgs of waste and makes 3hrs of cooking gas a day.
Turning biogas into power - obviously cooking might be a priority but it's worth noting.
You could compress the gas into cylinders for farming or vehicles though I doubt you'd make enough to be driving to work every day.
Cheap unsafe version, using a fridge compressor
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arkane
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Post by arkane on Jun 2, 2015 17:17:03 GMT 10
So that's for a herbivore
Now what about for a real human! an OMNIVORE
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Post by Peter on Jun 2, 2015 17:20:05 GMT 10
So that's for a herbivore Now what about for a real human! an OMNIVORE Use these methods to grow plants. Use said plants to feed animals. Then eat the animals.
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arkane
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Post by arkane on Jun 2, 2015 17:34:28 GMT 10
So that's for a herbivore Now what about for a real human! an OMNIVORE Use these methods to grow plants. Use said plants to feed animals. Then eat the animals. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO open grazing then harvest/hunt the meat! Use the residue to add nutrients to the garden not just recycle the nutrients you have!
Just using a closed cycle system you get atrophy! not good!
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shinester
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Post by shinester on Jun 2, 2015 17:56:57 GMT 10
So that's for a herbivore Now what about for a real human! an OMNIVORE Yeah, clearly you missed a whole paragraph, and the point of this, so let me repeat it for you. I'm no farmer, so you might have extensive knowledge on the subject. How do the chickens/pigs etc feed themselves? How do you provide nutrition for them? Do you really want to feed them before you feed yourself? They use food we could have eaten. When we're not even able to make a closed loop for nutrients then how did you envision being able to also feed the livestock? Sure I get it, grass and do what they have done throughout the eons, cycle what each field is used for. You also need lots of space for that. You also need to use nitrogen fixing plants to get more nitrogen into the soil. It might be possible to do but there's no magic to the nutrients available. I would agree that 'entropy' is apparent, though losses we can't do much about, such as farting [release of nitrogen] and that we certainly need options for other inputs, I've stated that to be about 11%, though it might be more or less and in the sums it appears to be closer to 50% for humans, at least for what we can optain. Yes grazing and changing fields is an option, the downside is space required. It's not too hard to get enough nutrients for 10 years, they're not too expensive and I've done some of that already. It doesn't take away that it's not a closed loop. Most people throughout history 'hardly' ate meat, we eat better than kings today. There's a reason we can, it's because we have fertilizer which mostly comes from oil production, which is why we don't contemplate other systems.
What's the area you need to feed yourself with grazing and hunting? Who else is going to be using that same area. Can you defend it? What are the numbers, what are the facts?
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Post by graynomad on Jun 3, 2015 0:55:55 GMT 10
Yikes! Great info shinester, way above my pay grade though I hope to start growing at least some spuds before long, is hydro/aquaponics suitable for potatoes, or are they better off in the ground?
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Post by Fractus on Jun 3, 2015 6:23:17 GMT 10
Chooks are great way to harvest from surrounding environs and can get by without supplementary foods (not recommended unless unavoidable) eggs are an ideal pre packaged long life food. Yes there are down sides. Foxes, noise, theft etc etc. but in a fierce down turn they are ideal. In shtf there are some obstacles to be overcome but they tick many boxes for self sustainabilty
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VegHead
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Post by VegHead on Jun 3, 2015 10:28:47 GMT 10
Bio-gas? No you've got me thinking!!!
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shinester
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Post by shinester on Jun 3, 2015 11:10:49 GMT 10
Yikes! Great info shinester, way above my pay grade though I hope to start growing at least some spuds before long, is hydro/aquaponics suitable for potatoes, or are they better off in the ground? ... lost my really detailed answer yaaay! Ok, so short answer, it's easier growing in tubs [not ground] using compost and would be reasonably sustainable if you were composting 'everything'. So long as you're not loosing much from your composting. You'll get higher yields, use less space and labor [once set up] to grow in sand/perlite/vermiculite hydroponically. Both would work fine. The same goes for growing any plants really and in the end, if you've got the space and tubs to hold your vegetables in a 'wick' style garden, it would be an easier option for most and fairly sustainable. You could grow slightly raised garden beds and compost everything and be a little less sustainable, more labor intensive and get lower yields [therefor takes more space] but it also requires no initial resources for tubs or what have you. So, sure you can grow them in the ground in a semi-sustainable way. I'm exploring this to see how far you can push it in terms of space and the reality is I'd probably grow as much as I could in tubs with hydroponics and wick system. If I can't grow enough in tubs that I might have, I'd grow in the ground and pay the water labor/supply costs. Long answer: We need to make a definition: Sustainability - the quality of not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting long-term ecological balance. So, when we look at how we do things now, we eat food that is grown with the help of fertilizer which comes mostly from petroleum. We eat that food and our poop and pee is sent to sewage farms [sew-age and farms... because they used to be farms for fertilizer, look it up] and off it goes into the sea or what have you. The nutrients are thrown away. This works because we have plenty of oil, fertilizer's cheap cool. When we look at 'most' veggie patches, people get organic fertilizer [often animal poop who are fed on grain/grass grown with inorganic fertilizer] or inorganic and then grow their veggies. Of course people often add compost [veggie scraps/garden waste often with some fertilizer added] which is great for soil and so on. I would argue that the problem we have is that there's a gap, and especially for us with a prepper mindset, how do we keep the crops blooming without fertilizer? We could add some to our stores which will give us some leeway sure. Though how do we go all the way? It's tricky and it seems that we still have entropy, that is losses that we can't easily get back, in our nutrients. I also don't think we would need a lot if we think like the ways we used to do it and we also think in terms of what we know now, particularly hygiene and science. So, once we understand that we can get close to having most of the nutrients that the spuds need consistently, then we can look at how to grow them. Grown in the ground it's easy. We do have problems with that however, water, fertilizer, labor. Water runs off and into the ground, which when there's plenty of rainfall or there's electricity for pumps, it's of no real consequence. What if you had to move all of the water your crops need by hand by the 20L bucket? Hydroponics uses at least 20 times less water. Having said that 'wick' style gardens are close to hydroponics in terms of water usage, but lower in yield. Fertilizer. We can compost as I said before and you can get a great organic fertilizer from the liquid that oozes out of compost as well as from the compost itself which takes longer to break down. You could mix this into your potato beds and give the spuds plenty of food. Of course some of those nutrients leach out and down the hill though if you put it into tubs, it would tend to hold both the water and the nutrients better. Weeds of course require labor to pull and if we've got a LOT of plants in, that's a big job. Labor: If things have gone SHTF, the most precious of resources will be labor. Depending on how things are, we might need a great deal of labor in security full time, perhaps a third [re: Hibernian Sons on youtubes suggestions], leaving far less labor yet needing at times LOTS of it. The constant work required for enough food without labor saving devices such as the tractor or the horse significant. So we have to do whatever we can to keep this cost down, so we can use it in other areas. Growing hydroponically in stones [could be river stones/driveway stones/whatever] allows the plants roots to be supported whilst growing into the nutrients solution. Any weed seeds trying to germinate have to touch the nutrient solutions to start with which is too far down generally. Grown this way ought to remove almost all weeds. Grown in the nutrient solution allows the plant to collect what nutrients it wants when it wants it and not have to have it's roots find nutrients. This increases yields, so when we harvest, there's more from each plant. There's good examples of doing it with little space and with dirt, and with 400square meters which seems to defy the sums I've seen on yields. and their guessatmation is that they get 55% of their food from their garden in Winter, 65% in Spring and Fall and 85% in Summer, so even with their methods they need about 800sqm [1/2 acre] to feed themselves fully. They started with 6" of compost added all over, companion plant, have chickens and a goat for milk and I also like what this guys says, 'start with what you have'. Whilst the sums I've made are not precise they come from real yields so hydroponics [with greenhouse] it seems to be twice the yield for the area. Of course, when you grow without the hydroponic fertilizer, we might be looking at not as good, to which only experimenting could show. I'd agree, there's people out there who claim they don't feed their chocks grain. They're also good at converting food to food at the rate of about 2:1. Probably higher if they're grazing but sure. You could supplement their diets with insects too as per below, or with things such as black soilder flys. Unfortunately BSFs die out in our winters Fractus. Rabbits would be great, they can live on grass but we've got 2 diseases in this country which makes them at great risk and guinnea pigs might also be an option. Sheep/goats seem to need little looking after though I've got a big gap there and I don't have the space to contemplate. Yeah bud, with your set up, I think it'd be a good addition, the composting it does give you the nutrients and you also get cooking gas out of the equation. I'm still working on the learning, have lots of questions such as how well they work in our climate as they work better in warmer climates. Some approximations are your 1000L [IBC container size] fermenter gives you about 2 hours of cooking gas a day. The downside is you'd need to feed it 10kg [and 10L of water] of organic waste a day. Of course that can be anything, manure, leaves, grass, whatever. I'd be interested to know what quantity of organic waste you guys produce. Oh and this is a discussion, whilst I've got some ideas, some data, I in no way have the answers, some options might be better in certain situations than others and I could very well be wrong. So share your own experiences and knowledge.
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Post by graynomad on Jun 4, 2015 10:35:27 GMT 10
I'll digest this later, but just quickly, by "wick system" are you referring to wicking beds?
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shinester
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Post by shinester on Jun 4, 2015 12:22:25 GMT 10
Ha, 'digest'. Oh and about it being above your paygrade, I'm not qualified in this area, it's just about putting together research and ideas and I could well be wrong, or are drawing the wrong conclusions so share away if you've got some thoughts. Re: 'wicking beds', yeah that's the one. I'm guessing you can even do it with a layer of screen [shade cloth etc] and rocks underneath which is the water reserve and the plants will establish roots into the bottom area with a little time and we've found through Kratky method [and how roots get into old water pipes!] that they're fine with being immersed in water so long as the root ball also has some oxygen in it. I'm not sure if that works for soil based plants as well as hydroponics as there's a LOT more oxygen between volcanic rock than dirt, but I'll guess that it would be fine. It's like plants are ok with getting their toes wet [they develop different roots if in water] but not with getting their legs wet. In thinking about how to feed people post SHTF, there's problems with some of these ideas, in that if this isn't pre-planned, where do you get all of the tubs from to hold the rocks/sand/dirt? What about the greenhouse? You could line tubs with plastic [would have to have some on hand] I suppose and throw in river stones. I'll preserve on this plan to work on the closest I can to a closed loop system as it shows how to get the most from the least, though I think the reality would be compost/digesting/utilizing everything in a larger space having lower yields with more labor, yet being able to do it. Having ran the numbers on the number of plants, I ordered seeds [except for potatoes/sweet potatoe] for enough for at least 2 for more than a year and it cost me $65. Yields will probably be lower with doing this via composting everything as will not having a greenhouse [I've got a little one]. I sourced them through www.edenseeds.com.au/ for the larger quantities and ebay for the smaller quantities, all heirloom. I'm reading some interesting data on leaching of nutrients from soil that shows up in run off water. I wasn't planning on going too far to prove the point of nutrient loss, though it's interesting.
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VegHead
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Post by VegHead on Jun 5, 2015 10:00:58 GMT 10
Hi Shinester, I believe this new book due for release may contain many of the answers to the questions you have asked in the above threads: Will Bonsall's Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening Innovative Techniques for Growing Vegetables, Grains, and Perennial Food Crops with Minimal Fossil Fuel and Animal Inputs
"Society does not generally expect its farmers to be visionaries." Perhaps not, but longtime Maine farmer and homesteader Will Bonsall does possess a unique clarity of vision that extends all the way from the finer points of soil fertility and seed saving to exploring how we can transform civilization and make our world a better, more resilient place.
In Will Bonsall's Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening, Bonsall maintains that to achieve real wealth we first need to understand the economy of the land, to realize that things that might make sense economically don't always make sense ecologically, and vice versa. The marketplace distorts our values, and our modern dependence on petroleum in particular presents a serious barrier to creating a truly sustainable agriculture.
For him the solution is, first and foremost, greater self-reliance, especially in the areas of food and energy. By avoiding any off-farm inputs (fertilizers, minerals, and animal manures), Bonsall has learned how to practice a purely veganic, or plant-based, agriculture—not from a strictly moralistic or philosophical perspective, but because it makes good business sense: spend less instead of making more.
What this means in practical terms is that Bonsall draws upon the fertility of on-farm plant materials: compost, green manures, perennial grasses, and forest products like leaves and ramial wood chips. And he grows and harvests a diversity of crops from both cultivated and perennial plants: vegetables, grains, pulses, oilseeds, fruits and nuts—even uncommon but useful permaculture plants like groundnut (Apios).
In a friendly, almost conversational way, Bonsall imparts a wealth of knowledge drawn from his more than forty years of farming experience.
"My goal," he writes, "is not to feed the world, but to feed myself and let others feed themselves. If we all did that, it might be a good beginning."- See more at: www.chelseagreen.com/I know I'll be getting a copy!!!Also, one that I am reading now is The Nourishing Homestead (A Practiculture Way to Grow Nutrient-Dense Food, Produce Healthy Fats, and Live the Good Life) by Ben Hewitt. Granted, almost my entire library on such titles are American, simply because we don't do books here very well with our limited population. That said, authors such as Handreck, French, Coleby and Bennett (and Cundall to a degree) are not to be sneezed at. The best of the Yank stuff is still being written and published - they are finally changing their ideologies towards their food, society, etc. Exciting times in the print world! On another thread, about building and keeping nutrients in the soil we practice Actively Aerated Composts Teas, Composting, Manure Teas, Green Manuring, Animal Manuring and Humanure (yes, my wife even squats in the veg patch for a urine hit!), with very little outside stuff brought in and NO manufactured fertilisers at all. What is produced on our plot stays on the plot also. Veg. And as a late EDIT: John Jeavons and his French-inspired Biointensive Methods are brilliant but be warned that you can 'burn out' your soil very, very quickly if you muck up this way of intensive gardening. I follow a number of his principles and they do indeed work, but requite a lot of work (watering three times a day as an example) so not for everyone. Carol Deppe's Resilient Gardener is another book that I cannot recommend highly enough; it is based on veg growing in hard times (injury, unemployment, droughts, etc) and focusses on the five main food staples. There's just so much info out there and so little time to augment the words to action. Oh well, not dead yet so must keep trying
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Post by graynomad on Jun 5, 2015 12:41:26 GMT 10
Man this is all great stuff, wouldn't it be good to hardly ever need anything from town? My goal is to get to a state whereby if its absolutely necessary I can do that, meanwhile I'm happy to buy Tim Tams from Woollies We have the chance now to live the best of the 1800s combined with the best of the 2000s, I really hope things don't turn to shite because in most ways this could be a very exciting era.
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shinester
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Post by shinester on Jun 6, 2015 2:09:56 GMT 10
Veg: Yeah bud, I'd agree on Veggie only in terms of resources and return on input. Obviously adding in fruit, nuts and so on while you're at it. With larger spaces [pasture] I can see how a mix would then come in, and be much better on the taste buds. Soils get depleted of nutrients in time as you know, plant roots go looking for nutrients and have to look harder and harder because of the depletion. I would imagine that intensive farming just speeds that up. We can certainly put back some of those nutrients with composting and other ways to get it back there like bio-reactors and as I'm discovering [and suspected] there's losses even with these, though they are less because we're throwing away less. As you mentioned, the addition of grasses, leaf litter and so on add to the nutrients available, though isn't that just moving the problem a little wider? In terms of farmers, unless we're putting back what we take out [nutrients] there's zero way to make it sustainable, there's going to be net losses, no matter the approach on a commercial level because we're not doing what we used to, put the sew-age back into the soil in some way. So we get them from fossil fuels based fertilizers. Sure we can [and many farmers do] certainly do something about the nitrogen with nitrogen fixing plants such as legumes, to which permiculture works with too. Ultimately there's a LOT you can do with a lot of space too. Water brings in new nutrients from other fields and from other areas to a certain extent. I would argue that smaller spaces can be done [at least in theory] using hydroponics, to which the soil has no nutrients and you quickly know when there's not enough nutrients available as the plant will show signs of distress. "Minimal Fossil Fuel and Animal Inputs" - Animal inputs, such as poop come from the grass grown in the field. If you then take the nutrients from the field, eventually where do they end up if you sell them elsewhere? People Poop [and pee] and we wash that away, again the lack of 'sew-age farms' that use those valuable nutrients and I get it, it was also unsafe in past practices. In terms of small scale, you could go a LONG way to sustainability by getting that back into the ground [or hydroponic medium ha ha]. Biogas digesters Thinking like a prepper, how do we do what we want without the fossil fuels? Well we can keep our labor costs down, if we have space we can have fields and eat and compost. How do you resupply fossil fuels? Well with a biogas set up, you could conceivably create your own fuel source as detailed. The CO2 impurities which reduce performance can also be reduced by bubbling it through limed [and probably lye from woodash] water. We can get the lye [pretty sure it would work as it should form a carbonate, though I haven't looked it up] from trees we burnt. What about tree replacement... *pulls out hair* Yeah we can do that with enough space. I get in practical terms we're going to trade off this or that for something else, much like most 'semi-self sufficient' people who don't grow grain as it's not worth the labor and returns.
Some limitations of the biogas digester are coming to light, that of temperature, such a fun thing for us Victorians. They slow down [and can stop] below 10C and the reaction rate doubles every 10-15 to their optimum temperature of 35C. Without heating the digester's going to be the same temp as outside and in winter there's times it's not going to do much at all. Obviously a digester would benefit greatly from some solar heating and insulation to keep that heat. Keeping it in the ground would give it thermal mass, but that means it stays the temperature of the ground. I've looked into heating before for aquaponics and I suspect we could probably do something with solar pool heating rolls or even just black
Source and more info
The source claims it can heat water to 40c, though not sure about winter. I'll probably just use convection [heat rises] so I don't need a pump and how that goes. --------- Graynomad: Ha, yep, it'd be great to not 'have to'. I will probably never go 'full' self sufficient, rather I plan on being 'able' to do it if I had to. Knowing what paths might work and what probably won't for an extended amount of time are worth working out. We've still got a LOT of fossile fuels lying around, but increasing costs might position things that rely heavily on them to increased pricing. Much like happened in the 'special' time in cuba, in which an embargo caused large fuel and import shortages, meaning that everyone started growing something. Being ahead of such a curve might also give great business opportunities in such a situation. Either way it aligns with what I'm about, being responsible for myself. I'm of the opinion that I want to live in the modern age, all of the info I have gathered wasn't around in the 1800's and if it was I wouldn't have found it in my local library ha ha. I'm curious though bud, what would you like from the 1800's? Exciting era, absolutely, one way or another. ---- I've got a long road of experiments to do already and as such I'll try some stuff out [already have some of it going now], make some small and massive mistakes and go at it as a system [6sqm] this spring.
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VegHead
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Post by VegHead on Jun 6, 2015 9:41:03 GMT 10
Shinester, Could you please explain what you mean by 'moving the problem a little wider?' Cheers.
Another great book for nutrient recycling is "HUMANURE HANDBOOK" A GUIDE TO COMPOSTING HUMAN MANURE. Might even be a source for your bio-gas? If I remember correctly, Geoff Lawton did a video on a farm bio-digestor that I thought was rather good.
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arkane
Senior Member
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Post by arkane on Jun 6, 2015 10:08:03 GMT 10
Put some blue metal road base in your soil and each winter give it a little acidic rain! Most of your nutrient problems solved!
And keep it wet as much as possible over winter (cover in plastic)
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shinester
Senior Member
China's white trash
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Email: shiny@ausprep.org
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Post by shinester on Jun 6, 2015 15:19:35 GMT 10
Veg: Sure bud. Where do the grass, trees and so on get their nutrients[NPK]? From the soil. If you use their leaf litter and trimmings, aren't we moving the nutrients that were originally going back into the soil into our garden? Aka slowly depleting the soil. Yeah I know it's pretty slow as trees in particular can get nutrients from a great distances. It's probably not a big deal if you're not selling [exporting] your nutrients [NPK] as plenty of run off from your garden [and the neighbors] will end up in the soil from elsewhere, though it's worth noting and contemplating in terms of sustainability. If you rely on outside fertilization, we're not really 'sustainable'. Arkane: Yeah bud, a good plan for adding in nutrients if you've got it locally. Heck I'm sure I'll have a stack of fertilizer too [already have a bit], just wondering how we might keep on going after such items aren't around. The reality is it's been done for eons in the past with crop rotation and the like, as we wouldn't be here without the agriculture that has made us. What is of concern is that we've not kept those traditions and we throw away what was once one of the most valuable resources [Soil nutrients NPK] and what if oil and therefor everything that goes with it was unavailable say a post SHTF event? You've certainly highlighted pasture as being a decent option to which is an excellent example. This is of concern if we were to have massive reductions in supply as there's going to be a lot of unfed and hungry people. We need 90sqm for growing enough nutrients as a veggie patch [Fruit trees may give better yields, haven't got that far yet and require little labor] for one and yet that is when it's from optimally set up! Since that's 1/10 of an acre or so for a family of 4, which is about the backyard space people have [at least in older homes, newer ones often use that space] and we might use every space [roof included] it gives a chance for the neighbors to grow food and not have to kill one another. Whilst I'm prepping for myself first, having your whole town/neighborhood bouncing back will add in far more stability and as I said could also be a great financial opportunity if some order was maintained. Such as what happened in Cuba's 'special time' or a financial collapse that puts food as a very expensive commodity which I think is far more likely to happen than a war in the streets scenario. It's old school, it's what 2 generations ago did to a certain extent. Again, having space makes the whole thing easy, though I don't live on acreage [yet], I live in a rural town with lots of space and water around it. In understanding how to, the whole town can easily grow it's own, can probably eek out surviving mostly because people have so much fat on them [10kgs of fat = 40 days of full energy] and we only have to get to the first harvest [about 90 days] with what we have lying around to push on through. Whatever might happen, trade will quickly show up [well it might be months] as will co-operation at some point [again might be months or even years], because historically this has always been true, so food will be barter-able, people will work together, order will return [even if it's a new paradigm] ---- The advantages of putting things into a spreadsheet is that I can plug in various numbers and try different things out, such as working out what it would take to feed a 1000 people. There's many ways of doing it but to keep down storage costs I've gone with pumpkin as they're very cheap/yield, readily available [health food section], get a decent yield/area. To put a crop in for 1000 people, hydroponically it would need about 6 acres, 28,000 plants, 3.3kg of seed ( about $35) , to provide enough [8700kj/day] energy for 90 days, aka the next harvest. Obviously no breathing space there, and people have to make it to the first harvest and hope it's the right time of year but it's an exercise in possibility. Pumpkin is reported to last 4 years or so and I suppose if you're sticking them in the freezer in an air tight container [with moisture absorber] they'll probably last longer.
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