March 2011
22 posts
Permaculture Suburban Conversion Satellite Photos
Just three years ago, there was a house and garden in Wollongong NSW Australia that looked pretty similar to all the others…
How different it looks now! A flourishing forest of food, mosaiced with mulched paths and dotted with water tanks, a chook house and nursery…and doesn’t the little solar power system and solar hot water system look cute from above?
These new November...
Rainwater Catchment Calculator using Google Maps
he World Bank Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) include a target to Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger by 2015. Water productivity is an essential key to help meet the World Bank’s target. Did you know water use in agriculture consumes more than 75 percent of water in the developing world? Demand for more food goes hand in hand with population increases. Water...
Damaging Effects of Glyphosate and GM Morgellans...
An article in a recent newsletter about a new virus being found in GM plants. He apparently knows Don Huber personally and confirms my suspicion that the letter became public due to the public nature of his concerns. He pointed me to a paper published by Johal and Huber in 2009 - Glyphosate Effects on Diseases of Plants.
And it appears the story is spreading rapidly…but there are other...
Who owns your government? Corporatocracy vs...
I do so like these simple but effective videos made by the ‘The Story of Stuff’ people. This one is about the role of corporations in the affairs of government, with the message that we can get clever instead of just angry. Very very good and follows the rant I have had for a long time - corporations are not people and are run purely (and legally) for profit - real people are ...
Gas Drilling Being Linked to Earthquakes?
A rash of earthquakes affecting two small American cities in the past week have baffled geologists - though locals are blaming gas companies. A total of 700 earthquakes have occurred in the region in the last six months. Drillers free up the gas by using hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’ — injecting pressurized water to create fractures deep in the ground.
Protest Against Gas...
More Scientists Speak Up About GM Food
Apart from the ongoing discoveries of animal infertility and other anomalies when fed GM crops, many of the scientists who have questioned GM science are hounded out of their jobs or silenced in other ways. It’s all one huge uncontrolled experiment on our food, our children and ourselves.
Calling all GM Farmers - Monsanto Shifts All...
Farmers who plant Monsanto’s GM crops probably don’t realize what they bargain for when they sign the Monsanto Technology Stewardship Agreement contract. “…In no event shall Monsanto or any seller be liable for any incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages.”
Benchmark Study of Grazing Landcare Innovators
The Benchmark Study of Innovators aims to involve landholders across a wide range of grazing management regimes and evaluate the present and potential impact of their management practices. Ten paired sites were identified, and this report provides the results from the property mentioned (and photographed) in the article above. It was found that increased perenniality and ground cover lead to...
The World According to Monsanto Book
I have seen the movie and was moved by it, but I have to say the book, The World According to Monsanto, is absolutely phenomenal. It dispassionately opens up the behind-the-scenes manoeuves of Monsanto and government. While I thought I knew an awful lot about Monsanto, especially in regards to GM crops, this book took me even deeper than I imagined, and you can’t help reading pro-GM...
DIY On-Farm Mycorrhizae Propagation
While commercially produced inoculum is available, it comes at a cost to farmers. The Rodale Institute has developed an on-farm inoculum production system that generates a potent, effective, species rich inoculum that is inexpensive to produce. Mycorrhizal spores, pieces of colonized crop roots, and viable mycorrhizal hyphae function as active propagules of AM fungi can be used as inoculum to...
Landscape Rehabilitation
Capital Wind Farm near Bungendore, NSW, Australia, had a gully erosion problem which threatened their power-poles and power line infrastructure. A landscape rehabilitation and stabilization project was undertaken to protect the infrastructure. This project was very different to the normal hard engineering solution. It utilized Permaculture design principles combined with a soft engineering...
Restarting Carbon Flows
This is a long term claypan at Yelarbon, where the soil component of resilience had failed years ago.
This is an image is Old Man Saltbush 12 months after it was planted under instruction from Alan Lauder of Carbon Grazing.
This is a year later. Sheep are responsible for the lack of leaves. You can see the carbon cycle is expanding away from the shrubs. In other words, the landscape is...
Soils Alive!
The free booklet Soils Alive!, published by Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment, Tasmania, sets out to provide a context for soil health by looking at soil ecosystems and how they function, give descriptions and colour photographs of soil organisms likely to be found, guide understanding of what may be good or bad populations of organisms, and outline a range of management...
Soil Ecology and the Soil Food Web
I was recently referred to Soil Secrets and the work of Michael Martin Melendrez in the arid region of New Mexico US. I was particularly taken with this well laid-out summary of Soil Ecology and the Soil Food Web, with the role of each microbe group player. As he states, our historical use of fertilisers has been to prop up the health of our plants, effectively by growing plants hydroponically...
Organic Biological Natural Farming - Compost,...
Part I
7 week Border King maize produced with grass humus
There are many articles now written about organic farming and there are many experts in the field. Noteworthy from these articles is that the land as such is never addressed.
It does not suit us to acknowledge that we, as agriculturists, know nothing of the biological ground. It is claimed that we currently have only discovered 2%...
Hardcore Oil Issues In Europe - Feeling The Pinch...
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
Should we reduce the speed limit to cut oil consumption? Should we impose new taxes on the banks? Should we stop hawking weapons in the Middle East? The answer in all these cases is obvious, but none of these reforms will happen until we’ve brave enough to tackle vested interests.
...
Bamboo: a Great Building Material Gets Even Better
The easiest, strongest, cheapest, and most durable material for building structures may now come from your garden. A new book describes best practices, and a workshop is coming up shortly in Australia.
When architect Darrel DeBoer first encountered bamboo as a building material, he knew it was going to be revolutionary. He had a long history of researching and teaching about building with...
The Price of Food is at the Heart of this Wave of...
Also of important note: Australia has sold off massive tracts of prime farm land and food production to foreign interests including the Middle East, Europe and the USA. In one poorly thought out sweep those companies and countries who know the truth about falling food production world wide are rushing in to grab as much of Australia as possible. Produce food and sell to their own domestically...
Wa`a Moloka`i: Island-Sized Food Security Through...
Original Atrwork by Anthony Dohanos of Pahoa, Hawaii
by Permaculture Research Institute USA branch,
Food security and canoes go hand-in-hand in Hawaii. When the Hawaiian Islands were first settled around 750 A.D., and for many generations after that, Polynesian voyagers stocked their massive double-hauled canoes with specific crops necessary for colonization. While a wide variety of...
Why I Literally Bought The Farm! - World Food...
With the ever increasing failure of so-called “modern agriculture” to feed the world there is no where to go but greater and greater shortages of food, increasing poverty and starvation in our world. One of the *worst* places a person could be is living in the cities of this world where you cannot support your self let alone your family with food clear of genetic modification,...
The truth about BioTech Industry and GMO food
Phil Chandler got me on to this, cheers Phil!
From GMWatch www.gmwatch.org The last 12 months have seen a number of biotech industry lies bite the dust. One of them is that developing countries are hot for GMOs with only affluent Westerners obstructing their acceptance. In fact, the opposite has been shown to be the case with deeply rooted resistance to GM crops becoming more and more...
Natural Sequence Farming (NSF) - Australia's other...
NSF - Principles & Applications
Introduction
Peter Andrews, is a third generation farmer who has been involved in farming and horse breeding for 60 years. He believes that heavy grazing of streambed banks following European settlement has, mainly by reducing vegetation, significantly increased stream velocities. This has resulted in...
