I have double bracketed yours.
Message: 4
Date: Fri, 14 May 2004 14:16:10 -0500
From: "Mary Baker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [StPaul] Living off the land
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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I have bracketed your responses too.
[I wouldn't think that having a small home garden
would
require all this, do you? ]
[[Yes, it does. Although a person can live off of the
product of less than 2 acres, that requires intensive
fertilization,pesticide use, modern grains bred for
excess productivity (and, as a side effect are often
sterile, meaning you can't be self supporting), and
specialization. I will hazard that most people own
less than one acre of land. Thus, AT MINIMUM, we
would have to have different land distribution if each
individual was to
raise enough food to feed themselves. Distances
between households would increase, which makes it
harder to get any cash crop you raise to a suitable
market.]]
Response:
All this? To have a little garden in the back yard?
My neighbor grows more food in his back yard and gives
over 80% of it away! Because he ALWAYS has much, much
more that he and his family can use. B/t/w �he has a
10x20 foot garden and he grows EVERYTHING back there,
right in the heart of the city.
You either don't know how to garden or you�re a
republican.
[[Note that this sort of process greatly reduces the
variety of
foodstocks you will have available, which greatly
increases the chance of malnutrition and vitamin
deficiency. This is not mentioning the additional
land required for livestock. Even under the best of
commercial conditions, chickens (one of
the "cheapest" meats to raise industrially) require
about a pound and a half of grain for each pound of
usable protein you'll get out of them. Again, to
attain this rate you have to have commercial cages,
temperature
regulation, modern breeds (which aren't very hardy,
which leads to...), medications, supplements and
today's high quality animal-grade foodstuffs.]]
Response:
Stay on the subject. Whose talking about chickens????
Do you have a some sort of a weird "chicken fetish"?
[[So yes, I do think that a "small home garden"
sufficient to support a person would require this.
The hang up in your scenario is not that it requires
all this stuff for a small home garden -it's that it
requires all this stuff for ONE PERSON to handle,
raise and grow ALL the food they eat year-round. God
forbid you become sick during a critical time
(planting or
harvesting). Or the weather is bad, or the
grasshoppers overproduce, or a mystery fungus lands on
your crops like blighted all my zucchini plants last
year.]]
Response:
Sickness?
If you eat right, you probably won't get sick, but if
you do, that's what you got neighbors and the U.S.
Government for.
[Doctors and medications can be replaced with natural
remedies. Education is a nice and noble goal and we do
need more of it and less national defense. Again, I
don't think that having a small personal garden in the
back yard would lead to all this. ]
[[No, having a small personal garden in the back yard
doesn't lead to all this, but a widespread attempt to
have EVERY PERSON (that includes the teachers!
They're people too, and so are the students) grow,
raise and handle their own food, all the food, DOES
lead to this. Natural remedies. Ha. The reason why
we have medicine is because in general it works better
than nature. Death is natural. Tuberculosis is
natural. Small pox is natural. Malnutrition is
natural. Death by exposure is natural. "Natural"
does not automatically mean "good".]]
Response:
Malnutrition is natural? Death is and it should be
that way. Natural IS the best. For your info, medicine
tries to imitate what is natural and does a lousy job.
Remember, doctors don't cure anything, never have and
never will. Polio has not been "cured". All medicine
did is prevent the symptoms of it, artificially.
Doctors don't "cure" anything, they just mask the
symtoms and fix your bones and vessels. That's really
all they do. What "cures" you comes from your immune
system.
We don't need some crapitalist pimp to over-work our
immune systems. In fact, because they do, we should be
CHARGING THEM for the over load they cause our
internal systems. Not having to time to cook a decent
meal is no reason to ruin your health down at McD's.
An immune system is worth more that anything 'ol lady
Croc would ever sell ya.
If McD's is good, I would want to know if Mrs. Croc
eats her 3 squares at one everyday. I would bet you
all the money in you pocket, that she doesn't.
[Those factory workers don't need more work, they need
more income. It's seems that their too damm busy
working instead of demanding an income.]
[[You do understand the link between working and
getting an income, right?]]
Response:
Do you understand that you are brainwashed into
believing that?
[Even a small garden produces more food that one
person
or even a family can reasonably eat. If each of us
would donate, even 1 hour per week, nobody would go
hungry. Best of all, there would be no profit to pay
for, just cost and labor, if applicable. ]
[[No, a small garden does not produce more food than a
person could eat in a year. As I've remarked and the
current numbers show, it takes about two acres to feed
a SINGLE person for a year. The average family of
four requires at least eight acres. Back in the day
when we had less yield and
larger families, it was judged that a person needed
20-30 acres to raise enough for their family to eat,
plus 10-20 acres for saleable livestock and cash crop.
"40 acres and a mule" -remember that from history
class?]]
Response:
The "forty acres" business wasn't for the purpose of
providing the minimum necessary for self support.
If you need two acres, you should meet my neighbor. If
he used his just HALF of his OWN BACKYARD, he could
feed the entire block! If he's unable to do the work,
because of broken leg, one of the neighbors comes over
a helps out. Imagine what he could do if this was his
full time endeavor?
[[Plus, if we're only donating an hour per week (or
five hours, or
whatever), then we aren't the only person handling,
growing and raising our food. Already we are at the
mercy of the other people who are donating their
efforts.
Profit exists to cover times when things go wrong. It
exists to fund research into better ways of doing
things. It exists to enable investments in capital,
be they a new plow, a tractor or a good draft horse.
Even in the most subsistence agriculture, you need to
be making a profit and laying up enough extra stores
to guard against calamity. If you don't, then the
first bad year will kill you.]]
Response:
Again, your brainwashed and not too observant. Profits
don't cover the bad times, that's what you have a
government for. The first place the multi-nationals
head for, when their junk fails to sell, is the
government. Corporate welfare, anybody?
You talking about running a business and my post was
mentioning a home garden, which are two different
things.
[I would generally agree, providing that these people
care about you. Those "butt scratching profit pimps"
only care about what's in your wallet. If you got the
money, they got the time. ]
Money represents effort and smarts. That's why it
matters. It is a high-tech barter system, where when
I give the grocer $5 for some apples and a bag of
lettuce, he can take that $5 and apply it to his
lighting bill, or pay the clerk for spending time
minding the store and checking customers.
It's more convenient to use dollars than rutabagas or
salmon or conch shells. Money is easily divisible and
most people agree on what it's worth on a national
scale. That people want money is unsurprising. Most
people want to eat. They want a warm place to sleep
at night. Thus they can either spend their effort and
smarts to have these things, or they can spend money
(which is the same thing). If I can spend my effort
and smarts on something I do well - say, contracting -
and get someone else who is skilled
in house building or crop growing to spend their
effort on that
enterprise, then I can take a part of my salary and
trade with them.
Response:
Money does not represent smarts and effort. Money
represents wealth. Any talk about self reliance and
promotion is nonsense without mentioning the essential
ingredient of luck. Bill Gates attributes much of what
he has to being in the right time and place as
everybody else who are described as "self made". In
fact, the more wealth one has, the more one realizes
that we're not independent�we're INTERDEPENDENT.
Nobody is an island.
[[I've already mentioned why everyone needs a profit.
It's to cover for catastrophe. It's also used to
raise the standard of living - that old pleasure
principle. I could eat oatmeal for cheap or artisan
bread for expensive. If whatever I do is valued real
high and I get paid a lot for
it, then I'll have enough profit to cover catastrophe
plus have my
artisan bread. There's nothing evil, butt-scratching
or pimp-ish about wanting to have extra money to blow
on the good life.]]
Response:
Yes, there are evil ways to "make and take" a buck and
the unions see to it that the bidness pimps don't get
that way in the first place. In a country as rich as
this one, everybody should be guaranteed the good life
and not force to live under a bridge. In Norway,
Sweden and Finland, you don't see that as they share
the national wealth and everybody participates in the
creation of it and reaps it's rewards. There are
better places to live that are free of religious and
economic oppression.
Mary Baker
East Side
I have a garden and I grew up on a farm.
Thks for your response.
R. Hanson.
St. Paul.
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