LET THEM EAT GRASS Understanding pasture-finished beef cattle farms in the American Appalachians

Treebook 6 Treebooks are freebooks. They are published by Treemail according to the criteria of free, independent, original thinking and high quality warranted by the scientific performance of its authors. Treebook 3: Chinantec shifting cultivation: InTERAcTIVE landuse. A case-study in the Chinantla, Mexico, on secondary vegetation, soils and crop performance under indigenous shifting cultivation. Hans van der Wal; 1999. Treebook 4: An exploratory study to improve the predictive capacity of the Crop Growth Monitoring System as applied by the European Commission. Iwan Supit; 2000. Treebook 5: Five thousand years of sustainability? A case study on Gedeo land use (Southern Ethiopia). Tadesse Kippie; 2002. Preface The title of the present report by Jane Shaw is too modest. It does not cover the true scope of her analysis. Indeed, the core is not the feeding regime of cattle in a US region, but the sustainable management of a landscape, keyed to optimize beef production by durably keeping both the environment and the cattle in good health. The same dilemma, says recent research, is at the core of old, traditional land use in faraway countries where modernism has not succeeded in eradicating it. and so many others, substantiated this. Remmers in the Mediterranean and postgraduate work by Domptail in France, Cieremans in Russia and now Jane Shaw in the US showed this constant concern to exist in temperate climates too. All systems sustained successfully during centuries to millennia, rested on biological resistance against ecological or genetic wear and tear, combined with high long-term productivity, with the following essentials. Remmers' " reproduction of biodiversity " is their motor, not today's museum-like " conservation ". Wherever local vegetation once was forest, a mosaic of small fields, hedges, woodlots formed the basic pattern, not huge single-crop fields. Finally, an ever-continuing balance among ecological maintenance, economical flexibility and the highest compatible production was the priority. Maximal biomass production of one crop or product in itself never was the unique objective. Twentieth-century " organic " forms of land use increasingly converge to this pattern. Every method of land use has its own science, geared to its basic assumptions. In industrial and monocrop systems, statistical analysis and ensuing computer models logically support research of systems basically conceived as populations of identical crop plants or domestic animals on homogeneous substrates. Deviations of standard sizes, numbers or weights are seen as statistical errors, aberrant values due either to errors of measurement, …