Lex Anteinternet: The coyotes were howling in the distance, and not ...

Lex Anteinternet: The coyotes were howling in the distance, and not ...: I don't know if a person can pick up moods or attitudes by reading a blog. I.e., I don't know if you can read a blog and detect the...

Towns and Nature: Leesburg, FL: Paquette's Historical Farmall Museum

Towns and Nature: Leesburg, FL: Paquette's Historical Farmall Museum: ( Satellite ) This is one of those topics for which I took so many photos in the museum that I was intimated by the prospect of discussing t...

Lex Anteinternet: "All along the watchtower".

Lex Anteinternet: "All along the watchtower".: There must be some kind of way outta here Said the joker to the thief There's too much confusion can't get no relief Bob Dylan, &...

Blog Mirror: Losing Time

A new entry by South Roane:

Losing Time

This gets a bit to a topic I've addressed elsewhere, both here and on Lex Anteinternet, that being that if I'd had my ruthers, I'd just get by on what I grow, shoot or catch. That wouldn't be my wife's ruthers, however, so a volunteer cow and one of her cousin's pigs is in the freezer right now. And with my really bad luck on hunting license draws recently, if we got by on what I shot or caught, we'd be eating a lot, and I do mean a lot, of rabbit, as it's the only thing that in recent years I could be nearly guaranteed of getting.

Having said that, I did get a deer last year with a general draw license.

I posted a comment on the linked in blog entry, which is as always well worth reading, but what I'd note again here is that when we look back, and some do, and think "I'd live just like my ancestors. . . ", well, they didn't have freezers. At least not until the 1950s.

Related threads:

Hunting (and fishing), Stateside, during World War Two.

Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Years Ago: The Last Fresh Vegetable Month

So you're living in Wyoming (or the West in general) during the Great War and there's talk of food conservation, and you are a hunter. . .

Food: Seasonal, local, and from the grocery store. A revolution we don't often recognize.

Lex Anteinternet: Carbon Hypocrisy

Lex Anteinternet: Carbon Hypocrisy:

Carbon Hypocrisy

Off to the side, in the blogs we follow section, is one called Buzzard's Beat.

"Buzzard" is a female rancher in southeast Kansas. I know that everyone who isn't too familiar with Kansas thinks of it as one giant wheat field, but it isn't. In actuality, there's a lot of ranch ground in Kansas.

I've had the opportunity to drive across Kansas twice. People complain about places like Kansas and Nebraska being boring, but I really enjoy the states. Moreover, I've driven across the back roads of those states in addition to the long, boring interstate highways. This true of North and South Dakota as well. I really love them, even though I'm not from there.

This isn't, however, a travelogue of the farm belt, but rather to point out two posts she makes.

One is entitled: Dear Richard Branson: What's worse, a rocket or a steak?

It's pretty clearly the rocket.

What I want to point out here is hypocrisy, and not just the hypocrisy of Sir Richard Branson, although I do want to point out that.

Rather, what I want to point out is that in the discussion on global warming, everyone seems to feel free to blame others while their own conduct goes unnoticed.

It's become trendy to blame agriculture, more particularly stock raising, for global warming. That gets both to this post and another she's put up, that one being Raising Cattle for a Healthy Climate. Both are well worth reading, as well as a number of other posts she's put up, including Dear Epicurious: Your Meat-Free Resolution Confuses Me.

This also gets to the recent trend of the dim giving up meat as they think it helps the planet somehow.

Seemingly missed by the dim are some basic facts of animal production. Every domestic meat animal can be raised on food, for it, that you can't eat. You really can't eat prairie grass, for instance, but cows can. You sure can't eat the crap that sheep do. And even the finish grain that's used, unless you are buying "grass fed" beef (or simply eating a volunteer grass fed cow, like we are), that being corn, is a grain that you can barely actually eat. I know that maize is a worldwide staple, but frankly unless its ground up and processed into something it's actually a human foodstuff that you can't really digest for the most part. Corn on the cob may be delicious, and it is, but it, um, mostly passes through you. And we all know that it's really a vehicle for butter, salt and pepper anyhow.

As she points out, the greenhouse gasses that are produced by livestock globally are really small. And contrary to what those self-declared non meat eating environmentalist may imagine, the carbon footprint of nearly everything produced by a "dirt" farm is massive.

Put another way, if you are dining on a big bowl of nice health brussels sprouts, unless you grew them yourself, they didn't get to your bowl during the annual brussels sprout migration. No, they were grown by somebody using some pretty heavy-duty diesel powered things, and then trucked to market by a pretty heavy diesel powered thing, kept cool by something that was electric, and then you probably fired up your car and drove to the store to get them.

Hmmm. . . .

Also, while we're at it, if you are vegan or a vegetarian, you should be aware that production crop agriculture is a major killer of animal life, so you can pretend you don't have blood on your hands, but they're at least as bloody as somebody's who eats meat. I'm not dissing farmers for this, it's just the way things are. But if you spend a day on a combine you are going to mow down something, and that's just the start of it.

It's not that there aren't things everyone can do about this, but feeling sanctimonious about your own personal dinner plate isn't it. The more you think that your bowl is planetary benign, the more likely it isn't. Ideally, if we really wanted to be fully green, we'd grow our own vegetables, as much as possible (and it wouldn't be 100% possible) on our big urban lawns, and we'd buy a local beef or go hunting in the fall. If you aren't doing at least one of those things, you aren't the least bit green and should quit pretending that you are.

And if you are so massively wealthy that you can afford to blast yourself into space, unless you are a neo Tolstoy living the peasant life, you're mere existence is carbon positive, let alone indulging yourself in being a space cowboy.

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: “Since Time Out of Mind.” Asserting ...

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: “Since Time Out of Mind.” Asserting ...: “Since Time Out of Mind.” Asserting Woodland Rights in an English Village

The Agrarian's Lament

Lex Anteinternet: Poster Saturday. The Elk and the Antelope

Poster Saturday. The Elk and the Antelope