SHC BIOLOGICAL POTENTIAL PROJECT
BIOLOGICAL POTENTIAL PROJECT
- Like business, agriculture tends to limit the number of tasks involved in growing crops in the name of efficiency. If you can use entire acreages for one crop and plant, weed, fertilize and harvest with a limited amount of equipment, you can reduce costs and increase profits. A self-help corporation can use a different approach. Because it has the labor available, it can collect animal feed that would otherwise go to waste, and raise animals that would not otherwise be raised. All that is needed is to identify those plants that will produce fruit, seed, or hay without human input in the local climate and propagate them on marginal lands. See [ Environmental Principles ]. This concept presents both Design and Research Challenges for experiments using native plants to raise insects to feed poultry.
- I have read that there are some 2000 edible plants of which we know. Humans cultivate about 200 of those. I believe that there is an untapped potential for protein production through utilizing insects and seed and fruit producing plants. In my own area, the flowering crabapple tree is a landscaping favorite. In most years, around September, the flowering crabapples produce tons of fruit that goes to waste. If someone would harvest those crabapples, they could feed the apples to hogs.
- As discussed in [ Environmental Principles ], wastewater should be biologically filtered locally before it is returned to the rivers. One of the best filters would be a hay field. When the hay is cut it could be fed to grasshoppers and then the grasshoppers fed to poultry.
- Where forest is the natural flora, the trees may be used to grow caterpillars to feed poultry. For each tree, there is a species of insect that feeds on its leaves. If egg cases for that species where attached to a portion of the branches and those branches covered by netting, the caterpillars would grow to size without being eaten by wild birds. The branch could then be cut and the caterpillars fed to poultry. The tree would continue to grow and produce new branches to repeat the process.
- Almost every climate has native species that produce fruits or nuts that could be fed to hogs or poultry. If all the marginal land in an area were permacultured utilizing a mix of plants including those species, a self-help corporation would have an annual yield of animal feed free for the gathering. All that would be required would be an agreement with the landowner or government that, if the corporation did the planting, it could also do the harvesting.
- In dryer climates, there are fewer plants that produce fruits and nuts. In these areas, grasslands predominate. Some of the native grasses produce better seeds for food than other grasses. A self-help coropration that identified useful native seed producing plants could permaculture those plants to establish a sustainable yield of animal feed.
- In addition to feeding seeds to the animals directly, some of the seeds could be sprouted. Sprouting the seeds increases the nutrient value. Sprouting seeds requires a rack of screened trays and someone to poor water over the seeds a couple times a day.
- If a self-help corporation had access to areas for collecting fruits, nuts and seeds for animal feed, it should establish a value for the labor to collect the fruits, nuts and seeds. The amount that could be collected by a person working steadily for a day would serve as a base line. A self-help corporation would then issue the number of shares paid for one day's unskilled labor in exchange for that volume of fruit, nuts or seeds. That way, anyone with time on their hands can go out collecting and no one has to supervise them.
- A self-help corporation could also raise earthworms for poultry feed. If the poultry barns were raked every day and the rakings applied to a worm bed, the worms would reduce the organic matter to a usable planting medium and the worms could be fed to poultry.
- When animals are butchered, the intestines, hair, bones, etc. become waste products. That portion of the waste product that is appropriate should be dried and ground and used to feed fish. Bone meal and blood meal are valuable as plant nutrients.
- I have designed a grass powered nutrient factory. Grass grown on wastewater is harvested and fed to grasshoppers that are, in turn, fed to chickens. In addition, grass seed from the surrounding hillsides is collected, sprouted and fed to chickens. More grass is cut from the hillsides and used as bedding for the chickens. The bedding and chicken manure is collected daily and added to worm beds. As the worms grow they are harvested and fed to the chickens. The worm castings are used to grow tomatoes, chili peppers and onions. Some of the chickens are harvested for meat and others are raised to lay eggs. Some of the eggs are eaten and some of the eggs are incubated to make more chickens. Some of the chicken meat is cooked with the tomatoes, peppers and onions to make green chili. When the green chili is combined with beans or rice and flour tortillas, it makes a balanced diet. To feed its shareholders, a self-help corporation operating such a nutrient factory would need only access to grass and the labor of its shareholders.
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