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It doesn’t take much to fill your upload box. I think I have 3 or 4 pics but maybe I’m supposed to do something to alter the “file size” prior to uploading.

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Not to put words in his mouth but IMU Carl is saying – was the information you were looking for made more valuable by knowing (although you didn’t likely know this at the time) it could be found here (either already in text form or brought out from the wealth of knowledge and experience of the community here)? So I thinnk that is the difference between finding the information here (as opposed to somewhere else) and being able to find it here (knowing that here is THE PLACE to go for that information).

Not sure about addressing the “testing = right/wrong” thing without getting philosophical so I’ll leave it alone.

I do appreciate seeing the numbers you compiled and pondering about what they mean and how they can be used. Thanks for doing that Andy.

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“…. remember it isn’t The Sopranos here.” 😮 And I thought I had a post as chief enforcer coming my way. Thanks Vito.

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Whew! Now that’s an answer.

As I said earlier, here it depends on who you’re talking to. They’ll “straighten you out” on the cork v calk useage and I can always use some straightening out every once in a while.

Thanks.

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Ben – you can use an online translator like Babelfish to translate into English (sometimes the interpretation is a little loose but workable).

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“We were able to get another truck and actually made it to our job only 1 hour late. The horses actually loaded fine into the trailer after the crash and performed well all day. “

That resilience a testament to both the team and teamster. Well done amd glad everything turned out alright (except the truck).

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Great idea. I did try to participate in a webinar once and used up all my download for that day in pretty short order (200MB). I have watched the some of the Cornell small farming videos (including Donn’s place) — very well done and are on Youtube.

Jim – where is the Scandanavian video?

We probably should think about how to group/store/library these when we do it.

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Here’s something encouraging — http://www.pdxmeat.com

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Fogish,

You are now nominated as chief archivist/librarian/keeper of the knowledge.

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You have my deepest sympathy, James. The loss of a loved one is always difficult and must be extremely challenging with such a tragic sudden death. May you all find solace in each other and condolences to your family.

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First – thanks for doing some sort of quantification. It is interesting and probably a good starting point for evaluating forum use. Just a thought or two – “number of posts” doesn’t indicate the “number of views” of a thread etc. I was surprised how many people rarely, if ever, post but still come here to read through what’s being posted by others. This isn’t unique to DAP.com as it happens on many forums and goes unseen until someone pops up and posts that they’ve been lurking for a long time etc. In addition, there is an “archival” element that allows folks to go back and reread posts on various topics (EX – ground manners). The value of that component might be underestimated if we just look at the number of posts.

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I’ll try to get a copy of a photo from the Ag Museum at Pomeroy, WA that shows 6 abreast oxen – I think on a plow. That’s a wide load for sure.

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I think nature is sustainable because it IS the rulemaker. Sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy. Since the first single-celled goober burped up in the primordial soup X billion yrs ago, there has never been evidence that life has not existed. That’s a pretty flexible, plastic and sustainable system. Now species have changed for sure. And I think at a very basic level we’re thinking of sustainability in terms of a “system that will allow humans to continue to exist” rather than “life” or “nature” exist. I’m pretty confident that life will continue long after humans are gone.

“Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.”

I know this is drifting off a bit but I subscribe to the “puntuated equilibrium” theory of evolution put forth by Stephen J Gould in that I think it describes how change/no change works. The theory is that during a period of ecological stasis (no catastrophic change in one’s environment), there is no strong selection pressure to elicit a change (we’re talking species at this point). But when there is a change in that stasis, those organisms that are fortuitously preadapted will dome to dominate the newly changed environment while those not so lucky will perish or at least become diminished in their role in the new environment. That is one theory regarding the long reign of dinosaurs – that they were the best adapted species (plural) to the environment at that time and that environemtn was static enough to allow them to dominate for over 130 million years (a frickin’ long time).

So while not discounting humans in this, they/we are the anomaly in that we know what many of the population regulators (disease and food availability are 2 that quickly come to mind) and manipulate them to our advantage. And that has been our (humans) adaptation but it is like bringing a gun to a knife fight. We have the distinct advantage and, like yeast fermenting sugar to make wine, keep growing and dividing, consuming more of the resource until we finally use them up (and make alcohol that poisons us – the yeast).

How does this have diddily to do with sustainability? I think that Jason’s comment about “not being able to sustain a decline” needs modification. Since we as humans have altered the balance here (and that was/is our adaptation since we’re slow, weak and wimpy)we are and will always be on some sort of a declining slope but we can lessen that rate by employing specific “life practices” that reduce the rate of resource depletion and environmental degradation – that’s where I find my definition of sustainable.

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Oh no! I’m so sorry for you and your family, Kevin. You’re in my thoughts.

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I’ve been reading the responses and enjoyed them immensely but have struggled to get ideas of my own to gel into anything of substance but I’ll see if I can’t put something downright here.

It seems to me that we are using the word “sustainable” to mean “the ability to maintain” a practice. Until relatively recent history, if a practice depleted a resource either completely or faster than it could be regenerated, we (humans) just moved on to a new area where the same resources had not been depleted yet. But eventually there was no place left and we had become very efficient at how rapidly and completely we could harvest a resource. Instead of asking how long we could keep this up (sustain/maintain), we were already on the runaway train that wasn’t willing to contemplate changing how we live. In the book Collapse, Jared Diamond points out that’s what happened on Easter Island. Nobody asked if cutting down every last tree there was sustainable – and the end result was “no it was not sustainable” and the society disappeared/perished.

The main reason I posed this question is that the term unsustainable has been used by the global vegan movement to berate GMC’s animal ag program with data collected from farming systems completely unlike GMCs. Recognizing this argument is BS is one thing but figuring out what constitutes a sustainable practice is more difficult.

On a different note – it is interesting that after centuries of manipulating our environment and trying to “do it better than nature”, the best model for sustainability has been the natural ecosystems around us.

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