A Midwest Journal

If Al Gore’s histrionics and his data-massaging chronies at the Climate Academia weren’t enough, we actually find out that they are missing the boat entirely. Not that they are wrong, but they are only looking at a small part of the problem.

The reason? Money fixation.

Al Gore is personally profiting from his doom scenario – funneling government funds (read: our taxes) into his own pocket. And those Climate Gate scientists are riding a cash cow, since foreign governments and petro-chemical companies are pouring money into this area. So it pays to keep a controversy growing.

**update** Climate-data-related scandals list keeps growing…

The problem is – they are shouting down the wrong rain barrel. So-called “greenhouse gases” are the symptom, not the cause. They factually are not even the real problem, but a relatively minor distraction.

Yesterday, I ran across a couple of links to some fascinating data.

• Alan Savory’s talk at Colorado College
• Jim Snyder posted a link to a dire list of the environmental troubles we face (Mother Earth News article).

When you view these together, you’ll see that we have been being lead in the wrong direction. Too narrow a view.

The Situation: Government-Sponsored Commodity Bankruptcy

The problem has been that we’ve been steadily moving away from our own land as it ceased to provide a viable  living for the families involved. Instead, these generations flocked to the cities for “jobs” and our culture started living off petroleum- and mining-based products, both exhaustible resources.

Our current president has been funneling billions into “green energy” jobs and payola – but the problem is that this is again the narrow view. According to the capitalist/free market explanation, we’ll start recycling when it’s profitable to do so. And our environmental activists (read: Alinsky radicals) would take all the power they can get, even if it means destroying any ability to fix the actual problem.

The core problem is that the land has quit producing a viable living for the families on it. Two factors in this: commoditization of produce, and increasing advertising dominance.

Farm produce has been cheapened by creating a few product lines of commercial value. All corn is yellow. All beef is black. All sheep are white. And what the farmer pays isn’t enough to keep them farming – unless they also manage to carry substantial debt. So profits are sucked into bankers’ salaries, bonuses and benefits. Meanwhile, they use corporate and government-backed university research to use a pesticide/herbicide/fertilizer cocktail to genericize the produce so it can fit into an assembly-line model.

Advertising, meanwhile, has been used to base our society on instant gratification and subconscious desires instead of working to educate and raise the sights of people to attain their best qualities.  TV and media are advertising supported, so their quality (and trustworthiness) also goes into the tank — along with the culture. Why? because advertising is based on psychological profiles (as Cialdini covers in “Influence”) which take advantage of subconscious desires, rather than pragmatic wants and actual needs. (Just look at what’s happening to the credit card industry in this recession to see what happens when people wise up…)

Look, it’s really simple. There is no need to continually centralize any industry. Or locate them on the coasts. Consider Wal-Mart’s hub-and-spoke model. Rural cities are tending to fall over each other to give tax credits in order to lure factories and warehouses for their jobs. (Of course, some companies simply pick up and move when the tax credits run out…) But the point is that there, again, are people who want and need jobs in rural areas because the farms don’t produce enough income to support everyone – despite agriculture being the leading industy for the area. (Remember that high-debt overhead farmers are carrying? It’s invested in monster machinery which is able to handle massive acres in days. A handful of people with thousands of acres – compared to a building which doesn’t even cover a quarter acre that pays several hundred people to unload, sort, store, find, pick, and ship boxes. Do the math: which one pays more taxes?)

And so you see how the government scam we are under has a vested interest in making sure we all live in big cities, bunched up together – like cattle in a feed lot. “Economies of scale – subsidized.”

Solution: Farm Your Way Out

Naturalists such as Alan Savory have been studying this particular situation for years. And they have been looking to the historical evidence of our earlier civilizations going the exact same route we are currently going – only they did it just for local empires, not globally as we are currently doing.

The trick is in rebuilding the soil through restoring the natural intensive grazing of heavy hoofed animals. The government policy has been to remove more and more animals from the land, which actually results in top soil loss through erosion – and ultimately creates deserts, as Savory reports in the above MP3.

For me as a cattle farmer, the fascinating point is that it’s far more profitable to raise grass-fed beef than it is to raise it through “conventional” (commodity-style) means.  Inputs drop dramatically, while a premium is paid to enterprising farmers who market directly to environmentally-responsible consumers. The beef produced is healthier, higher in nutrients and omega-3’s.

The bottom line, however it that by improving the soil through proper intensive grazing, you increase the density of plant life, which actually increases carbon sequestration. So instead of using fossil fuels to raise grain, ship it to central feedlots, feed it to masses of cattle who stand and live in their own manure (creating more methane meanwhile, which is released to the atmosphere instead of being absorbed by nearby plants) – grass fed beef simply add pounds of beef while being part of the ecosystem.

The land improves and adds topsoil which in turn sequesters more carbon. It is possible to have agriculture be a net sequestor of carbon instead of the contributor.

Now, as you add topsoil with permanent pastures, the increased density of plants require more animals added to continue the process. You have to add more cattle to “keep up” with the improved growth. Several different studies show that this tops out at about 400% of the earlier stocking density.

Back-of-the-envelope calculations shows that where you earlier could keep only one cow per 2.5 acres, this increases to an average of one cow per .8 acres. Same land, same water supply (which improves, BTW).  At an average commodity auction level of $800 per animal, this gives you a potential income of selling four yearing calves off that same acreage, or $3200 for the same land area. After paying off inputs for fencing only (don’t need other supplements, and even vet bills can disappear), and subtracting winter hay (which isn’t needed in a true mob grazing/ultra-high density grazing scenario) – where some local farmers get $60 profit per head, grass fed beef gets around $600 per head.

10x profit potential. You don’t have to raise corn, just shift pastures every day. Leave the tractor in the barn, sell the combine and grain silos. Invest in more fencing.

Go from grain-fed beef to grass-fed and see 4000% increase in profitability. At least on the back of that envelope.

Practical results? Better quality beef, improved quality of rural living, less dependence on foriegn fossil fuels. And you get to enjoy the pleasures a life surrounded by Nature’s environment for the rest of your life. (And it only takes a few hours a day to do this – looking for a part time job that pays 4x what you’re making now?)

It’s not that money is bad. But if you look at the broader picture, you can improve your life quality and have all you want. Just have to get smart and take the blinders off to see the whole picture.

Now, this takes into account the paradigm that you believe (or tolerate) the idea that some gases can create a “greenhouse effect” and add or detract from global temperatures. Jury is still out – and has been for some time. Another discussion, another time…

But Time Magazine recently did an article covering how some “greenies” on the East Coastal have decided to get into raising beef in order to save the environment. Not just any of these academic megalopolis types, but real bona-fide environmentally-resonsible authors who walk their talk:

None of this would be remarkable if it weren’t for the fact that [these] …are two of the most highly regarded organic-vegetable farmers in the country: Eliot Coleman wrote the bible of organic farming, The New Organic Grower, and Barbara Damrosch is the Washington Post’s gardening columnist. At a time when a growing number of environmental activists are calling for an end to eating meat, this veggie-centric power couple is beginning to raise it.

Turns out that the studies these radical activists are quoting (and I have a great deal more on how bogus thse are in a later post) are actually missing part of the data.

When you spend all that fuel raising corn or other grains, and then all that fuel transporting this grain to feedlots, then coop up animals in unhealthy conditions where their manure ferments and creates more gases – guess what? You’ve just made a ton of all sorts of these gasses to get your beef.

Now, grass fed beef, especially in mob grazing, takes a different approach. Perennial grass consumes these gasses. Beef, when rotated in a managed grazing program (especially in high-density mob grazing) actually stimulate this growth by cropping, fertilizing, aerating, and cultivating that pasture so that it actually gets healthier and lusher – making it grow more and consume more of these “greenhouse gasses”. The article covers this:

“Much of the carbon footprint of beef comes from growing grain to feed the animals, which requires fossil-fuel-based fertilizers, pesticides, transportation,” says Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “Grass-fed beef has a much lighter carbon footprint.” Indeed, although grass-fed cattle may produce more methane than conventional ones, their net emissions are lower because they help the soil sequester carbon.

When you add that in with local processing (not trucked hundreds of miles), you then cut the net gas level enormously.

You also have to take into account that a lot of the studies producing this data are very, very flawed. But I’ll go into that later.

Some interesting quotes out of this article :

By many standards, pastured beef is healthier. That’s certainly the case for the animals involved; grass feeding obviates the antibiotics that feedlots are forced to administer in order to prevent the acidosis that occurs when cows are fed grain. But it also appears to be true for people who eat cows. Compared with conventional beef, grass-fed is lower in saturated fat and higher in omega-3s, the heart-healthy fatty acids found in salmon.

But the activist radical vegans will argue that if you don’t eat meat, it will save you eating those hormones and so the greenhouse gasses as well. Time rebuts this:

To Allan Savory, the economies-of-scale mentality ignores the role that grass-fed herbivores can play in fighting climate change. A former wildlife conservationist in Zimbabwe, Savory once blamed overgrazing for desertification. “I was prepared to shoot every bloody rancher in the country,” he recalls. But through rotational grazing of large herds of ruminants, he found he could reverse land degradation, turning dead soil into thriving grassland. (See TIME’s special report on the environment.)

Like him, Coleman now scoffs at the environmentalist vogue for vilifying meat eating. “The idea that giving up meat is the solution for the world’s ills is ridiculous,” he says at his Maine farm. “A vegetarian eating tofu made in a factory from soybeans grown in Brazil is responsible for a lot more CO2 than I am.” A lifetime raising vegetables year-round has taught him to value the elegance of natural systems. Once he and Damrosch have brought in their livestock, they’ll “be able to use the manure to feed the plants, and the plant waste to feed the animals,” he says. “And even though we can’t eat the grass, we’ll be turning it into something we can.”

As I’ve said, there’s a lot more to bring to light in this area. I hope to do more this week on this, as the research has been stacking up and needs an outlet.

For now, check out the Time article and decide for yourself.

Choice cuts of Grass Fed Beef taste better and are healthier for you – unless it’s Federally inspected, and then even Obama can’t keep you safe, despite all his bail-outs.

I’ve been assembling my notes on mob grazing and grassfed beef in order to get this all lined up for work this winter.

Some salient points:

• It appears our e coli problems with beef were first noticed as coming from a corn-raised feedlot setup and has since been also noticed in grassfed beef.
• But the trick is in how it’s processed, not what’s in that animal.
• All the infections we’ve had in this country (as far as current research shows) were each USDA inspected.

One interesting quote comes from a NYT article, which tells about a person surviving the e coli infection to live a partially-paralyzed existence:

The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

Four states and two countries. Nice work. All USDA inspected to begin with – but that infected manure found it’s way into the beef somehow.  Not to mention that the “fatty trimmings” are treated with ammonia before you get a chance to eat it…

Look: know your farmer and know your processor. Your safest route is to trace your own beef.

And also, it’s actually cheaper to buy it direct from the farmer. Ask Joel Salatin.

This week’s articles are pretty interesting along this line:

Grass Fed Beef Still Has E. Coli Danger : Eat. Drink. Better. by John Chappell The benefits of organic and grass fed beef have been well documented. Numerous studies have shown that organic and grass fed beef has significantly higher levels of Omega 3s and lower levels of saturated fats than conventionally …

A Myth of Grass-Fed Beef « by Phil Reid This claim, which has become a mantra in sustainable agriculture, is more often than not dispatched to rally support for grass-fed beef—a supposedly healthier and more environmentally sound way to feed cattle—which is to say, …

Grass Fed Beef Education Week by Annette This weeks postings will be about grass fed beef. We have grass fed beef for sale. We tried the hamburgers tonight and they are Tasty! The meat is very lean and has a great beef flavor. We’ve been told that grass fed beef needs to be …

What Ever Happened to the Venerable Hamburger? Huffington Post (blog) – ?2 hours ago? Choose organic meat, or grass fed beef and you’ll be glad you learned to make your own chopped meat, because while the flavor is flawless, this meat can be …

Choice cuts: Dungeness farm putting grass-fed beef on local market Peninsula Daily – Diane Urbani de la Paz – ?Jan 31, 2010? Photo by Diane Urbani de la Paz/Peninsula Daily News LOCALLY RAISED GRASS-FED beef is available from the Clark family farm, 322 Clark Road, Sequim, …

Pasture to plate | Area consumers’ desire for local foods spurs an entrepreneur. The Register-Guard – Tim Christie – ?Jan 30, 2010? Mike Wooley, owner of Long’s, said the grain-fed beef from Oregon Natural Meats will complement the grass-fed beef he carries. …

Beware the Myth of Grass-Fed BeefCows raised at pasture are not immune to … Slate – James E. McWilliams – ?Jan 22, 2010? Grass-fed beef should account for 10 percent of America’s beef consumption overall by 2016, she says—a more than threefold increase from 2006. …

When a mob is profitable – grazing because they like it that way. I’ve been doing my homework lately on mob grazing and Missouri grass fed beef cattle – so thought to let you know what I’ve come up with. Here’s some PDF’s for you…

Not just a board game: Live for Others in order to Improve Your Own Life Some rules to moving your lifestyle choice pieces – you only help yourself by helping others. Any success you look for, find for others first – and then yours arrives faster…

More about moving to Mob Grazing from conventional farming Still working to improve the profits on my grass fed beef cattle. Here’s a post about moving to mob grazing from conventional practices, some tips and results…

Eat your own cooking, drink your own Kool-Aid: part 3 How the government has it wrong – everything valuable isn’t always taxable. Why the poor in pocket aren’t necessarily poor in spirit. Living affluent cheaply…

Making Missouri Mob Grazing pay – a laundry list Some pointers from a 2000 mob grazing presentation by Greg Judy of Columbia, Missouri – how to raise grass-fed beef cattle simply and cheaply.

So what am I up to?

Oh, other than saving the world, I check my cows every day. Run the farm, which right now is checking on loggers who are hell-bent on making ruts and then apologizing and filling them in as best they can. And people who want firewood who come every now and then, but not effectively removing the tree tops the loggers left.

And chuckling with myself when I take everything so seriously and being critical of others.

I’m in the middle, or mostly done, with promoting “Get Your Self Scam Free” and having someone edit “Freedom Is – (period)” for me. More of a collaboration.

But next on my list after that promotion is to write up what I’ve researched on mob grazing and grass fed beef.

Of course, my day job in designing web pages goes on apace. Slow over the holidays, but at least I’m working and getting paid for it.

When that Freedom book is finished, it will be published to Amazon and maybe I’ll start giving talks on it or something. Lots of promotion to do on it, both online and otherwise.

After that, I’m done with writing about self-help, which has taken most of my lifetime so far. Once I made that trip and discovered Levenson and his Sedona Method, everything was over. That was the base that actually then explained and dissolved all the stuff above it.

I’m just going to let others write about it and move on to comics – which has been my real bent all the time. Amusing to myself and others.

Sure, I’ll footnote what I’m talking about and there will be the occasional “heavy” blog post here to keep everthing rolling. But most of it will show up in comics as parody of what is happening around us.

And I think that this will keep us all amused as long as this body lasts. Entertaining, Educational, and Enlightening. Should be fun, too.

So, I’m writing this perfectly non-SEO’d post just to give you fair warning. Oh – it won’t be happening for probably a month or so, since I have some work to do on the above to wrap it all up, plus my comic blog to ramp up.

Lots of stuff to do.

Cheers.

Just saw this well-produced video on YouTube and thought it good enough to promote.

For those of you who are hear to find out about Sedona releasing or Bert Goldman scam, I apologize.Of course, this just gives us some stuff to release, doesn’t it?

Should be back to more interesting releasing technique fare shortly. Though it might be about mob grazing grass fed beef cattle…

Anyway – enjoy:

I’ve been one to cross compare data constantly in order to find commonality. So I go back to the area of my PhD in order to get the commonalities of world religions.

On the surface, they have various similarities. This is quite despite the work of various vested interests which say there can be only one “Way”.

So to start off, I’ve been studying and comparing the original Jesus sayings with the Tao and Levenson. Sure enough, they are essentially saying exactly the same points over and over.

To beat this, I’ve gotten a DVD full  of around 3 GB of data from The Internet Sacred Text Archive. So now this makes all my studies much, much easier. There’s incredible cross-overs here, like Buddhism with the Tao to form Zen Buddhism and influence Bushido as well as Kung Fu.

So there’s a wide approach to a huge tent here. When I can just casually see how all these tend to cross and reaffirm each other, then there’s even more to learn here. And I haven’t touched Huna or Islam or Swedenborg. But when you see the Golden Rule and concepts like Huna’s “There are not limits” telling us what  our Quantum Physicists are just now finding out — well, you can see how this just fuels this fire of research all the more.

- – - -

Now, just so you don’t think I went off the deep end, I’m about to take a hiatus back over into grass fed beef. I’ve accumulated a lot of part-time research on mob grazing and other data and want to put this all together so it’s ready for use this spring when I’ll be deciding what beef to keep and fatten up to full size. And since how you raise this beef also determines your cost, profits, and sustainability – it will be a good time to do this now that I’m spending a great deal of time inside.

So expect more on Levenson, my Freedom Is book (as well as my Go Thunk Yourself series) and all that metaphysical scene. But after I finish up working out the business plan for grass fed and finished beef cattle.

Regardless of the graphic there is really only one way to play the game of life. It’s how you win.

Here’s the bottom line – we are each individually and personally here to evolve, to get better, to make the best of life in this existence that we can.

Now, despite all the various “Laws” which have come up over the years, there is only one which is observed by every known religion, philosophic, and deep thinker on this planet – from time immemorial up to the present moment. Because it can be proved by every single person to exist and work.

“You only get back what you give away.”

And this Law governs all success, all health, all the wants, dreams, and desires any human could expect to be, do, acquire, or attain in any life. It governs everything.

For some, this means “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In other, older versions, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

(And there was that famous judge who put an end to the physical interpretation of this by agreeing that they could have their pound of flesh, but they could take only that – no blood or other fluids, nothing else.)

It is the Golden Rule in various versions, the Koran as well as the Bible, as well as ancient Druid texts, Hindu, Egyptian, and even earlier to the oldest philosophies that still survive in remote Polynesian islands.

We are all connected, there are no limits – so this rule says that when you hurt someone else, you hurt yourself, when you help someone else, you help yourself.

If you look at any millionaire, billionaire or better (or worse), you’ll see that their money acquisition was on the backs of making other people rich at the same time. Ray Kroc (founder of McDonald’s chain) made far more millionaires than he could count. Sam Walton’s (Wal-Mart) expanded the sales of his suppliers many times over and was constantly working to improve the quality of life of his customers.

And that is the point to all this. To the degree you want to succeed in business, to get a great amount of income flowing toward you, to have a great home, nice stuff all around you – what do you have to do? What do you have to put your attention on?

The value of the product or service you are giving away.

Now, this doesn’t mean we need to all be paupers. Quite the reverse. The oddest thing is that people won’t value something, won’t really use it, unless they have to give something of value in return. That is really the only reason profitable commerce continues to exist and communism/socialism always fails.

That Rolls Royce or that Cadillac is worth every penny. People will pay more for grass-fed beef which is raised naturally without hormones or excessive growth-producing chemicals – that they know where it came from. They’ll pay several times what it took to create that beef and grow it for the two years it took to get to that size. Several times what they could have paid for that same beef at an auction yard and gotten it processed.

The added value is in bringing that specific product to them in a way they can use it best.

That’s more to our point:

Any business or individual will only succeed
to the exact degree that they help others succeed.

For better or worse, Bill Gates’ billions didn’t arrive without giving a great deal of value to the computer industry and the personal computer buyers. Us, in other words. Take any industry leader and the also-rans. The best, the top of their class always, always gives value in greater quantity than they extract. Sure, there are “other factors” – but that is the key one. (And why Apple and the Linux community hold onto major shares of this market? Even better value.)

Your own success it really just this point:

Whatever it is that you want – help someone else get it, or better, several someone’s. If you want help, help others. If you want to get rich, help others get rich. Want better health? – Work to improve others’ health. There are examples all around of how this works.

The reverse is true – run a ripoff scheme on other people and you can’t hold on to your own money. It’s only temporary. If you want permanent wealth around you – you’ll build wealth for others many times over in advance of your own, or at the same time. Not afterwards. (Ripoff artists and politicians only have to hide when they are hiding something.)

This isn’t a government job, which by definition is always taking something away by threat of force to “help” someone. I’ll dissect government at another time. The deal here: all help is a personal thing. What ever you personally want, you have to help others get it first, or at least at the same time you do. Only then can you really fulfill your desires.

And once you get everything you could possibly want or need? Then just keep helping others learn how to do it for themselves. That’s why all the really rich turn to helping others, even giving all their wealth away (like Buffet, Gates, and earlier, Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.) Because now that you’re there, what else do you have to do?

And how about those who amassed great fortunes only to die bankrupt — they didn’t follow that Golden Rule. Help others all the time. Every way you can.

That’s the only way out of this human existence we share on this planet at this time. Remember, Jesus said that “Heaven is within you.” And hell-on-earth is just ignoring this one rule.

Your choice.