grazing riparian areas vs. salmon

What a massive and complicated topic. 

And there are such enormous passions on both sides. 

On the one side, we have farmers all over the US that are told "10% of your land is a riparian area and you are no longer allowed to use it." and then a few years later "30% of your land is now considered a riparian area and you are now longer allowed to use it."

On the other side, with the massive reductions in riparian areas, the water water has been significantly warmed and salmon habitat reduced. 

I suspect that there is a great deal I do not yet understand here.  Because with what little I know at this point ....  I think the gub'mint is going about this all wrong. 

First, my understanding is that most of the trouble with riparian habitat is tied to the army corps of engineers removing swamp lands and straightening rivers.  Our tax dollars at work.  Granted, this was done decades ago. 

Second, here in the PNW, my impression is that 95% of the salmon have been wiped out by dams.  So it would seem that the first step would be to fix this problem.  Unless, of course, that industry has lots of lawyers and somebody with 5 acres cannot afford a lawyer - so the gub'mint fixes their problems by beating up on millions of little guys. 

Next up, it would seem that the problem with the salmon has to do with keeping the water cool.  Especially during the summer.    So if one were to have a quarter mile of a creek and it were surround with a thick deciduous forest canopy - I would think that would fix it right up.    That doesn't seem to be quite the same as keeping the animals off of it.  I suppose that some animals could come in and eat some of the stuff that makes for shade.  But, at the same time, wouldn't those animals leave stuff behind (manure) that would make for thicker canopy shade?

I suppose one could be concerned with animal poop in the water.  First, my impression is that the danger of pathogens with animal manure is greatly less than with people poop.  Is that accurate?  Next, are there not paths where this can be mitigated?  Plus, if we keep our animals from eating that feed, and thus, they don't poop in the water, doesn't that just leave more for wildlife that eats the same feed and then poops in the same water?

And one could be concerned with waters edge being destroyed by excessive animal traffic.  I would think there are ways to mitigate that too. 

I was recently studying under Sepp Holzer - the famous austrian permaculture farmer.  He has about 100 acres.  I would guess that it had zero creeks when he started:  zero riparian area.  By carefully working the land, it now has 70 ponds and loads of tiny creeks.  One massive riparian area.  It is my opinion that he is the leading agricultural genius of our day.

At his first presentation, there was a Q&A at the end.  I asked if he would run pigs in a riparian area.  "Absolutely!" and then somebody sitting behind me made some sort of snide remark about how that is not salmon safe. 

In Sepp's 70 ponds and heaps of creeks, he raises all sorts of fish including the cold loving trout.  On land that before was bone dry and nothing but conifer forest. 

I suspect that Sepp knows a thousand times more about this stuff than the guy sitting behind me.  My gut reaction is to put more faith in what Sepp says.

There must be a great deal that I currently do not yet understand.  What am I not seeing?

paul wheaton wrote:


I suppose one could be concerned with animal poop in the water.  First, my impression is that the danger of pathogens with animal manure is greatly less than with people poop.  Is that accurate?  Next, are there not paths where this can be mitigated?  Plus, if we keep our animals from eating that feed, and thus, they don't poop in the water, doesn't that just leave more for wildlife that eats the same feed and then poops in the same water?

And one could be concerned with waters edge being destroyed by excessive animal traffic.  I would think there are ways to mitigate that too. 



There must be a great deal that I currently do not yet understand.  What am I not seeing?

super complicated issue. one major thing that needs to be recognized pertaining to the quote I saved is that when domestic animals are removed they are not replaced in nearly the numbers by wild animals.  you can run 50 head of cattle on 100 acres. if you remove them I can gaurantee they won't be replaced with 50 head of pronghorn. does that make sense?

domestic animals are able to survive in larger numbers due to the protection (in many ways) of humans. protection from disease, parasites, 'bad' years, predation etc....

so the domestic manure is not just replaced with wild manure and poses a much more serious threat to waterways as does their traffic on the banks.

there are serious issues being addressed near here concerning our rivers and chicken waste. (we seem to be the broiler capital of the freakin world). great big chicken farm right across the street from me.  sorry off topic sort of. but this stuff is a pretty big concern for me.

I agree with your analysis. 

The important part, to me, is that removing livestock does not reduce water based poop by 100%.  More like 40%.  And you can probably get a 30% reduction by rigging up some water troughs away from the water. 

I think it would be less than 40% but it would be interesting to get some concrete calculations on that. that 100 acres isn't going to be populated with 20 head of pronghorn either. wild populations are generaly pretty sparse in comparison to domestic stocking rates.  I'm not trying to rain on the parade I think that there is a way to raise stock and protect waterways. providing water source far from the natural water is a fantastic observation that may be one of those things that is so simple it gets missed.

wanted to point out that a major problem with the animal poop isn't the pathogens neccessarily but the nitrogen that runs off into the water feeding the algae and smothering the fish. pathogens must be addressed too of course. fairly recently in oklahoma there was the largest ecoli outbreak of its kind (so said the news) although the source was never officially identified (of that particular strain) supposedly they did find e. coli in the well that might have made it there from runnoff of poultry manure being spread as fertilizer. tin foil hat time. 

As usual, while searching for another article, I came across this one that I found fascinating.   More vegetation and larger herbivores before humans arrived and then our attempt to "garden" for ourselves reduced everything. 

http://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs/rmrs_p036/rmrs_p036_026_034.pdf

Ted Turner's bison ranch in New Mexico with cattle and fences removed showed that the bison only entered the riparian areas once a day for water.   Whereas the cattle hung out in the riparian areas.

http://www.hcn.org/issues/132/4210


"Cattle tend to stick to streamsides or prairie potholes, trampling whatever riparian vegetation they don't kill with their nibbling style of grazing, which brings them back to the same plants they like time after time, until those species disappear. During hot weather, they often seek shelter in woody draws, where their overgrazing causes erosion and facilitates the invasion of more woody plants and noxious weeds."

"Bison are natural roamers. They range up to three miles from water, returning only once a day to drink and then moving off again. When it gets hot, they move to high ground and just keep on roaming as they feed - aggressively biting off a plant at the surface, rather than nibbling. If bison have enough room to roam, they don't return to a grazed area until it has rejuvenated, and they don't concentrate on a few plants - they're omnivores."

 

 Cattle or goats can be introduced to the riparian areas for short periods to mimic this behavior.  Cattle have actually been used to flatten out the sharp edges of eroded streambeds in preparation for re-planting. 
   I would think that timing and duration of the livestock is more important in the salmon streambeds than keeping them out completely.   Perhaps it is thought to be an administrative nightmare.   

It seems to me that keeping a hundred feet (or yards) along the waterways clear of domestic livestock would go a long way toward keeping the waterways clean.  The plants growing along rivers act as kind of a filter -- they slow down the movement of debris toward the water, and they help absorb stuff like animal manure and urine, possibly using it before it gets into the water.

The loggers have logged off everything they can touch along the waterways, as it was very easy to move the logs that way, and the silt and forest duff from far uphill washed into the waterways.  The ranchers let their cattle trample and foul the area alongside the waterways, contributing not only waste, but silt to the waterways.

Several of the rivers here in western WA and OR used to be navigable. Then the loggers and the ranchers did their damage and the rivers filled with silt.

How about we set some of our greed aside and use some common sense?  Or is that too much to ask?

You want to buy land with a river running through it, then you have to take care of it.  You can't rip out every tree or have your cattle eat or trample every plant, and expect to have the same numbers salmon you had 50 years ago.  People need to pull their heads out of that warm dark place and face reality.

Sue

well said sue. I think that we as a society must demand that along with the rewards people wish to reap from their land they must accept the responsibility associated with caring for and managing that land appropriatly.

gary - excellent. people often fail to recognize just how disimilar wild and animals are from domestic and try to manage them the same way and expect same results. there is much to be gained by studying wild animals behaviour but if we are to use that information to our advantage we must realize that our lazy domesticated animals must be forced to adopt that behaviour. they will not simply adopt it if provided some magical set of circumstances.  they will eat the plants they like wether it is what is best for the land or not. they won't willingly travel great distances (with the unnatural amount of flesh they carry it seems understandable) etc...

How about we set some of our greed aside and use some common sense?

I want to combine [size=16pt]good[/size] sense ("common" sense, IMOO, is a myth) and an economically viable farm.

Yes, I want to minimize any damage.  But just because a bunch of other people are screwing stuff up doesn't mean that I am.

I can see the problems with clear cutting.  I practice sustainable forestry.  On my land on mount spokane, I planted far more trees than I cut.

If I have land with a river running through it, I want to use that river!

So, my thinking with this thread is:  what are the issues of concern?  With salmon, it seems keeping the water cool is a big concern.  So, lots of trees and shrubs.  But it seems I could run pigs in there ...  I think it would be fair to say that I shouldn't run the same species of animal in more than 20% of my riparian area at one time - thus encouraging a paddock system.

Why would you want to run pigs on the edge of a river???  That puts you right back to the problem of the damage to the land damaging the river, not to mention that they will eat every life form they can find.  Have the rains wash pig manure into the river?

Am I missing something here?

And when you say "If I have land with a river running through it, I want to use that river!", what, specifically, did you have in mind?  Canoeing?  Clearing the entire shoreline of natural growth and planting zoysia grass?

Please elaborate.

Sue

just keep in mind that no one person or farm is responsible for screwing up the rivers. it is a combination of everyone. no one thinks that they are a contributing too much manure. or that their animals created the silt problem. I think the best thing to do is to use those river banks as shelter belts for wild animals and insects that help our land less tangibly.

Yes!  Shelter belts that are allowed to shelter animals and the soil and the plants, without a lot of outside (introduced) interference.

Sue

Pigs do not eliminate fulls size trees and shrtubs. 

Further, they do not utterly destroy a landscape. 

While having them too intensively on land is a problem - as with any animal.  Rotational systems have proven to benefit the land. 

Rather than a treeless space with so many animals on the space year round that the water way is destroyed, I advocate a planting trees and bushes so thick so that few animals make use of the space.  And then run animals in that space in a rotational system:  the animals are in there long enough to consume about half of what they can consume and then they are moved to the next paddock. 

As for rains washing pig manure into the river:  from where? 

And .... now that we have all of these trees over the water ....  please note the pretty birds that are pooping into the water.  And don't forget all of the other wildlife. 

The key is that animals pooping into the water is going to happen with or without the pigs.  Removing the pigs is not a fix - it's a knee jerk reaction.  Things can be done so that animal poop getting into the water is reduced.  And, further, things can be done to clean the water as it passes.

I think the big improvement is adding the trees and bushes.  I think education about good paddock shift systems is of great value to people that use the land - and to the water, especially downstream. 

Unless .... of course .... there is something that I do not yet understand.

There are usually trees and bushes already there, if the area hasn't been decimated already, or has been left to itself for repairing.  But trees and bushes are not the whole story.  Rivers and streams need the whole enchilada for good health: grasses, smaller shrubs, bulbs, rodent tunnels, insects, etc.

As for pigs not utterly destroying a landscape...

I used to drive to work every day past a five-acre place that new owners had bought.  They fenced off an area that was about 80x150' and brought in two small white piglets and a shelter, apparently to clean up the area, as a garden appeared afterward.  It took very little time for those two little pigs to rototill that entire area.  There was nothing left except two large trees at opposite corners of the enclosure.  They wiped out everything else, EVERYTHING.  And these were just little pigs, they disappeared before they got very big.  Can you imagine how much damage a half-ton, always-hungry hog will do?

Pigs are destructive.  That's why they placed a bounty on them in Texas.  Here in WA, it is open season on them all year.

Putting them (or other domestic livestock) in a riparian area would appear to be the height of irresponsibility.  Keep them rotating through pastures away from riparian areas where they belong.  Birds and transient wildlife have always pooped into and near the rivers, and the rivers survived.  The rivers and the salmon didn't start dying until the loggers and farmers came.  It is always Mankind's excesses that cause the problem.

"If I have land with a river running through it, I want to use that river!"

I think that comment gets you a D on your permie scorecard.  If you have land with a river running through it, you have a responsibility to that land and to that river. 

"And, further, things can be done to clean the water as it passes." 

I can't believe you even said that. 

Sue

I have read through threads where people used pigs to take out trees and stumps and even root up rocks for removal. it takes awhile to kill a tree in that the damage is just not evident for years.  trees sometimes die years after damage from ice storms here.

I know you like pigs adn I dont' want to pick on the idea but they are extremly destructive. they are non-native invasive species. if stocking rates were extremely low (lower than feral pigs ) then maybe its a possibility. once again the difference in the poop factor is the quantity. go sit in a tree stand in the woods some day and count how many animals you see pass through and shit. or just take a walk and look for scat.  you will probably see nothing but a few bunnies and birds and squirrels even if you wait for days. is that how low of stocking rates your talking about? will you be able to walk through your pig area and not find any poop? seems too low to make it worth it. IMO  it should be low enough that you can't find your pigs when its time to move them. and then what?

"If I have land with a river running through it, I want to use that river!"

I think that comment gets you a D on your permie scorecard.  If you have land with a river running through it, you have a responsibility to that land and to that river.

"And, further, things can be done to clean the water as it passes."

I can't believe you even said that.

I asked Sepp Holzer about running pigs on riparian areas.  His answer was "of course!"

Getting an "A" from Sepp trumps your "D". 

As so the devestation that you witnessed:  Suppose you ran 10 goats in the same space for the same amount of time.  I suspect the devestation would be about the same. 

Now do the same thing with ten deer.  Or two elk.  Or two moose.  Or five mountain lions. 

Same level of devestation. 

And in all of these cases, I would call that poor animal husbandry and poor land stewardship.

Now if you have much larger paddocks, say, two acres and you move the pigs every time about 30% of the green material has been consumed ...  that would be much better.

Susan, if you are uncomfortable with what I have to say about cleaning water as it passes, i suggest that you take a look at Mollison's big, black book.  Lots of stuff in there about cleaning running water.  You might also try the book Water Storage.

I think well managed pigs would contribute almost no problems to the passing water.  In fact, I would guess that my management of pigs in the area would change the total fecal matter in an area by an amount that is too small to measure.  Without pigs in the area, that same area would be populated by wild animals - animals that have no concern over pooping in the water.  Pigs, which, when given plenty of room, do not poop where they sleep .... I suspect that they would generally not poop in water.  I've kept a lot of pigs and I've never seen them poop in the water.  Of course, that isn't proof, but I suspect that pigs poop in the water less than, say, deer.

On my land at mount spokane, I had a pond and a waterfall as the last things that left my property.  I felt that the pond did a good job of intercepting particulate and the plant/bacterial life in the pond would consume nearly everything that came there.  And the waterfall would seriously aerate the water just before leaving my land.  I felt that this last cleaning step probably made the water that left my land cleaner than when it arrived.

A good thing.

Leah,

It is true that when I have kept pigs in the past that I have had them in a lot of different areas.

In the winter I tend to keep them in a smaller area where it is easier to see them.  But, no running water.  In the summer, I keep them in a much larger, wooded area, often with some patch of water.  And in that much larger area, it is true, I usually don't even see them.  Or their poop.  But i would try to put a little food out for them each day so that they would come out and I could make sure all is well.

with a super low stocking rate no different than wild animals I can see where it would work if you were careful. I know that people have trouble with wild pigs (very sparse in comparison to typical stock keeping situations as far as stocking rate) tearing up their land which is why no one wants them around! . I am going to hold off my assessment on the feasability and projected enviromental impact of running pigs in riparian areas. it could work. but I still wonder why there is such a hubbub over feral pigs if they aren't destructive to the landscape even at low 'wild' stock levels.

Wild animals passing through don't usually do an incredible amount of damage.  Penned animals do.

As far as I'm concerned, Sepp Holzer is not God. 

Also, the attitude that if you own land alongside a river you should be able to use it for your special purposes is simply rationalizing your particular form of destruction. 

Riparian areas are intensely fragile ecosystems.  If you could find any that aren't damaged (HA!), you would probably find that they have been left alone (probably totally inaccessible, about the only way to avoid Man's rampant destruction).  No camping, no boat ramps, no reconstruction, no renovating an area to encourage sport fish, no tilling, no plant harvesting, no logging, no livestock.

Just leave it alone!

(after typing all of this in through the teeny-tiny keyboard on my blackberry, it was accidentally lost forever.  So I'm going to try to re-post from memory ....)

Wild animals passing through don't usually do an incredible amount of damage.  Penned animals do.

Exactly!  I wish to manage animals in riparian areas to be very similar to wild animal impact. 

As far as I'm concerned, Sepp Holzer is not God.

It's funny that you feel the need to say that.  Are you struggling with this issue?

Are you trying to be dismissive of Sepp's techniques?  Is this something where you are not sure what you don't like about Sepp's stuff so this is some way to be dismissive in general?

Also, the attitude that if you own land alongside a river you should be able to use it for your special purposes is simply rationalizing your particular form of destruction.

Susan,

Either you can name my form of destruction, or you owe me an apology. 

Since at this time I am not doing this, then I think you owe me an apology.  There is no destruction here.  there is only an attempt to understand.  Suggesting that I am destroying something when I am not shows that your argument is so weak that you have make stuff up in a feeble attempt to weaken my argument.

You definitely have some crow to eat.

Riparian areas are intensely fragile ecosystems.  If you could find any that aren't damaged (HA!), you would probably find that they have been left alone (probably totally inaccessible, about the only way to avoid Man's rampant destruction).  No camping, no boat ramps, no reconstruction, no renovating an area to encourage sport fish, no tilling, no plant harvesting, no logging, no livestock.

Sepp's land was almost all conifer trees on steep slopes with almost zero flowing water most of the year.  Therefore, less than 1% riparian area.  Through his eforts he now has something like 20% riparian areas.  A wide variety of riaparian wildlife found his property and are flourishing there.  Life that was not there before.  And there are lots of livestock. 

So I think you have to admit that there is at least one case where humans can nurture nature. 

Just leave it alone!

By your own demonstration, do you not live in a house?  Doing so does not appear to be a subscription to your "leave it alone" policy.  And a garden - do you plant seeds?  That doesn't seem to be the same as "leave it alone."  In fact, almost anything you do seems contrary to "leave it alone."

Rather than "leave it alone" I would like to learn how to be a good land steward.  Perhaps improve the land.  Add and improve riparian areas - and benefit from that.  Hence this thread.

I feel like I still don't have a good understanding for this one. 

I know of lots of ways to destroy a creek.  A CAFO comes to mind. 

I guess my mission here is to understand what it is that folks are seeking.  Cooler water?  Fewer water pathogens?  Is there a number somewhere?

It seems to me that if I have a tiny, seasonal creek exposed to the sun (like I used to have) that I could add lots and lots of trees and run too many animals and the creek would still run off my land cooler and cleaner than before all of the trees.  So:  net improvement, right?

But it seems that the thing to do is to start with getting one's head wrapped around the concerns ... the issues ... the metrics and then move forward.

it is such a large combination of factors that determining acceptable changes is hard. I think that is why it is often preferred to just leave it in its natural condition.

"Nature is perfect. There is nothing to improve. If you do attempt it nevertheless, you’re are fooling and defrauding yourself. Nature is also complete in itself; errors are made by us humans."  -Holzer

a naturally silty and nitrogen rich creek hosts its own life and ecosystem. a cool clear river does also.  I think reference to 'improvement' always needs to be made with the understanding of whether that is in the context of improving the natural enviroment (restoring it from previous insult) or improving it for human habitation. for instance, simply increasing riparian areas, although popular because of the positive connotations and eco popularity of the word 'riparian' is not an 'improvement' of an area that was previously hosting an enviroment without it, in my opinion. it is displacing the natural enviroment and all the plants, fungi, bacteria and animals that thrived in that particular delicate ecosystem. you can't add anything without taking something away. if the enviroment is intact in its natural form then i beleive care should be taken to prevent any change that is not absolutley neccesary for human quality of life. then the debate comes to what is "natural form" because nature is changing constantely. flora and fauna are constantly adapting. what is natural and what is not? I think the best way to define that, is what have humans done that have (or have not) done to change it? the only applicable definition of something that is unnatural is 'something that humans have created or altered significantly' as sentient beings we have put ourselves outside of nature to at least some extent. our unique ability to rapidly change an enviroment has such potential to do everlasting harm that we must,  as sentient beings, take responsibility for changing the enviroment as little as possible.

I like Sepp Holzer but i think he keeps lots of things lots of details to himself but i have not really gone into him yet.   
    It seemed he took his pigs where he wanted them, that he was a swine herd to them or the boss on a digging trip. He has a really complicated system, a few pigs to dig for him and a lot of vegetable gardening and a bit fish farming. I think copying him is a bit daunting for a simply man, it is so hard to calculate wheather you are going to get by on lots of bits and pieces and he probably built up this complexity slowly, he had those black potatoes that i have seen in the most expensive vegetable shop in Madrid. what do they cost something like ten euros a kilo i hhink I know i decided to only buy 100 or 200 grams of them. What market does he have for them? How much do special potatoes cost in Austria? I bet he does not let hi  pigs loose on their own to eat them.
  I read a long time ago about the English organic self sufficiency man. John Seymour and it was not just about being healthy it was about growing more.
    He talked of what he said was the Chinese or French old fashioned method, that existed in France  when they had lots of manure in towns because transport was horse drawn. The Chinese use human manure, Sepp gets his from his digging pigs, but where do they stay when he does not have a job for them on the hill?
  John Seymours method is for growing enormous quantities of veggies on very little land. I think it is part of Sepp Holsters system, sepps has parts that aren't included in john seymours books.  It went like this. 
      I  tried to buy his book to cheque everything out and write it correctly but i made a mistake and brought one that did not include a description of raised beds, so from memory.
    You dig a bed the right size to work on without standing on the bed, narrow so that you can work from either side and reach into the centre of the bed easily. In the Sepp Holster version it would include a ditch with logs in it and on top you pile up manure and soil and you plant it up, so that your vegetables make a microclimate, all the plants together working as little vapourisers and shading each other in the Mediterranean you might want some trees to reduce the sun light a bit and you make sure that if you harvest some veggies you replace them with others so that the soil is never bare and left to dry out and there is a continual supply of new roots to better your soil. Keep some weeds to transplant to your veggie beds if you can't organise for a continual supply of horticultural plants. Do a bit of crop rotation from one year to the next so that whichever critters eat, whichever vegetables, have to find out where you've put it before they can attack them.
      The soils in his system are so full of nutrients and as you never step on them, so light that you get enormous quantities of vegetables and earn more than anyone else with your small plot.
      Less watering because the plants shade each other, less leaching of nutrients, more humates and less leaching of nutrients and water as well.
    What about a bit of leonardite the mineral that is a mined ancient build up of humus, to improve the PH of the soil and make it easier for the plants to assimilate the nutrients and some mycorrhizae fungi to help them to absorb even more nutrients because fungi roots are finer and abvsorb more and this type of fungi pass on minerals and food to the palnsa and take sugars and elaborated food of them and how about  inoculating the trees in your garden with truffles and teaching your pigs to find them they would really earn you some money.

    Soils with more organic matter in them have more enzymes, mainly made up of amino acids in them something that they are beging to put in fertilisers for house plants, which also help plants to absorb nutrients.
      Asorbing nutrients is like digesting food you need acids and enzymes to do it and soil in which chemical nutrients have been used lack so many things taht are handy for the absorption of nutrients, that once were not understood to be necessary, that plants grow smaller than they otherwise would in these so modern times.
      People stopped putting organic matter in the soil because with the use of chemical nitrogen ntrogen no longers came from organic matter it came from chemicals the farmer applied to the soil so they thought they did not need organic matter anymore. The farmers stopped thinking of making sure the earth had it, so the soils have been starved of organic materials from the moment chemicals were used. Now we know how many other things in organic matter are important to the soil not putting organic matter into the soil is crazy.

      More crazy is the slowness of the spread of  new scientific knowledge that matters to farmers so that they can make an informed choice about what they do. 
    Soils with organic materials in them have chelating agents in them, I think soap is a chelating agent it mixes oil and water. Chelating agents increase the solubility of metals like iron, copper, zinc and manganese, making them easy for the plant to absorb.
    Lots of types of fungi produce substances that act like chelating agents and chemicals including fertilisers in the soil kill things like fungi, ruining the chances of the soil for building up chelating agents. 
      For better information on all this look up-  TNN - Achieving Excellence in Sustainable and Biological agriculture  - genera ....        WWW.tnn.com. au/_General0/020information.asp.    in google.  This article talks of humus on the third page and talks more about it on the 5 page and on every following page  page till the twelfth i think. I have to read it more thoroughly.
 
        Other books and this site tell you which plants to plant to frighten off plagues and  to encourage beneficial insects, like the small bee like one, that likes a good big munch at pollen before it tucks in to  aphids and Sepp would tell you which ones to plant as medicine.

    The thing is that these people grow more, they are creative,  informed and efficient and their stuff  gets a premium in the market for being healthy. They get paid more for quality goods and gourmet ones. For not having pesticides and herbicides and for having more vitamins and more secondary metabolites in the food they sell and tastier food, garden grown peppers are much tastier than market ones and as there are people around who earn more than they need and can afford to look after their health buying expensive organic products. Producing permiculture food is a way of earning money, not of becoming a, less than million, millionaire as you might with a factory farm, but of earning more than you expected to with your quantity of land.

    Permaculture is a way of growing a greater quantity of hay, rather than just richer hay and so earning more, if soils are enriched, if you have been busting yourself to grow two crops a year so as to increase the organic material, the straw or what ever, you can put into your soil , while others have just not bothered to think of their soils, if you have collected your own seed to serve as a cover crop and so you don't lose soil, because with cover crops you don't have bare earth ever, if you have been  creative and found a way of producing organic matter you will grow more but of course you have to be good at it, adn you might not grow much more at first though you can grow something a t first it take a while to get really good soils.  An inefficient farmer might not succeed and a business is always a risk especially at first.
 
    A great sight for outdoor pig farming is, hog heaven by Brian DeVore-  alternative hog production www.yesmagazine.org/article.ap?ID=339. you should be able to get it with -hog heaven Brian DeVore- in google.  Rose macaskie

Don't people get really worried by animal waste when there is the sort of build up of animal waste that there is in a factory farm? If you have an old fashioned farm, the waste does not exceed the capacity of your farm to absorb it and if it is evenly spread on the land then roots of plants and fungi and microbes will digest it and may be kill the pathogens.

  If the waste exceeds the capacity of your farm to absorb it, then you give it to those farmers Sue Monroe talks of who are growing crops of poor quality hay, which means they sell or their organic matter and have  none for their land and their soil gets poorer and poorer.
    It sounds as if the problem is division of tasks. If the farmer feeds his own animals with hay, he will have the  manure of his live stock to increase the organic material on his land, if he produces hay and others breed animals, he does not have any manure and has to grow the feed on land that is impoverished for lack of manure, organic material treated by an animal and the people who have the animals have too much manure that poisons their districts, the soil, drinking water and the air, by  producing poisonous gases. Again hog heaven by DeVOre  -  alternative hog productions treats this theme. as does-    polish factory farms cause a stink BBC  -you get the article about a Smithfield's factory farm in Poland. in google with these words.

    Paul Stamets has a fungi that eats E. coli  the Brazil mushroom, it send out a secretion that detects e coli and then another that attracts it and stuns it and then eats up this bacteria. So it seems that there is a reason to grow fungi on your land and to learn to grow fungal mats and sell them to other people, an art that you can learn in Paul Stamets book advertised on this blog. Fungi grown for micoremediation aren't as  hard to grow as fungi you grow to eat, from the sound of it, they seem to work better if they have not been grown in a sterile environment.

  I  had a boar moving around in my garden two years ago. It did not do for the trees and i hoped it would make some paths on my precipice, it made a few beds for itself and ate a patch of wild orchids, my son said yum yum.
The pigs in the wild here range around on very big farms or big bits of commun land, eating grass reduces their need for water and so necessity to stay by the river.
      Small holders keep them in a shed and bring them beets as i said before or if they have more pigs in pig stye with a yard, this is without talking of modern pig farming .
read micoremediation or fitoremediation or bioremediation in google.

I feel like we have a lot of interesting stuff to talk about, but we aren't touching the stuff I'm hoping to learn:  there are folks that are making laws saying that land owners are not allowed to use land classified as "riparian".  Why?  What, exactly, do they hope to gain?  So far, I know about the attempt to cool the water.  I suspect that there is also concern about pathogen counts and excess NPK.  But I would like to get more substantial info on this. 

Leah,  good Sepp quote.  I've heard him say that sort of thing many times.  Fukuoka says very similar stuff.  And we can examine their farms to see how they choose to interpret their words.

"if the enviroment is intact in its natural form then i beleive care should be taken to prevent any change that is not absolutley neccesary for human quality of life."

I think it is wise to have a lot of land like that.  I think we should call it "wilderness".

It seems to me that the issue at stake is that folks buy land in an effort to be self sustainable.  So they work long and hard and are then told that they are not allowed to use their land for farming.  I think it is fair to say "no pesticides"  or "no chemical fertilizers" or "you have too much NPK coming out downstream"  or "you are doing something that is making the water funky and you need to stop" but instead, they are saying that they don't get to use portions of their land at all. 

That doesn't seem right. 

On a similar note, I think paddock shift systems may do more to meet the goals of riparian areas.    And a collection of ponds will help riparian areas survive a particularly harsh summer brought on by regional deforestation and chemical monocropping. 

Rose,

I saw Stamets speak recently and he mentioned something where there was some sort of ag toxin problem - i think it was an overgrazing issue - and stamets came up with a fungus that helped fix things up.  In that case, they were measuring downstream gick.

I want to say in defense of Paul Wheaton and Sepp Holster that all the things to be said about permaculture have so many bits and pieces to them that it probably is not possible for Sepp to explain all the ins and outs in a lecture and also it would be fairly normal to say yes you can let the pigs out by your stream, it is normal to imagine the circumstances others are talking about, Sepp could be thinking, Paul is thinking of three pigs or a dozen i suppose and he has a mile of stream. I have invented the length of Paul Wheatons stream and so that would be fine.  Also its normal to let people experiment if you are not over protective, while what they want to do is natural,a permaculturist would no tadvice someone to use walloping of pesticeides i imagine,  they might find out something usefull and they might not, but they need to try and the world needs them to try. Also it can be  difficult to gauge the things the other does not know about and realise how much background information they need . Sepp just would not imagine Paul letting out too many pigs i suppose.  rose macaskie.

paul wheaton wrote:
  there are folks that are making laws saying that land owners are not allowed to use land classified as "riparian".  Why? 

the answer to that question is pretty simple. people in general have not proven to use it responsibly and are screwing up the waterways for everyone. one of those times when someones right to use their land is infringing on others or the world in general. if I wanted to use my land as a toxic waste dump there would probably be a few protesters . although it is my land, that does not give me the right to do something with it that will threaten someone elses (runoff). hence there are laws against it. if you want to do something with your land that will be detrimental to the waterway that also passes through mine I would be pretty ticked off.

the line between our property rights and the need to protect the enviroment and others can get pretty difficult to manage. they can't realistically police everyone. its not like they can say hey billy joe over there is silting the river with his farming practices lets go ask him not to. there are huge legal fees, fights over how much is too much silt, where that silt is really coming from, and on top of that its not just billy joe, its a multitude of other people. our water ways are being terribly polluted with nitrogen. and it is a huge fight over who has to clean it up, whose fault it is and who is going to pay for it, and how it is going to be stopped. additionally by the time a problem is recocknized it is too late. the damage is done.

Leah Sattler the world is full of factory farms backed up by enormous multinationals that really and truly overburden the system with rubbish. Are you one of their followers discrediting a person who tries for cleaner methods?
      You are getting cross with a fervent admirer of permaculture, that is of sustainable farming and one of the tenets of this type of farming is not having more rubbish than you can deal with,  the right amount of manure, it is all about responsable treatment of the land ain't you wasting your energy attacking someone  who was unlikely to have more pigs than the place could sustain cleanly, you did not even ask Paul Wheaton how many pigs he meant to put by his river or at any rate didn ot get a reply before getting on a moral high horse about animals by rivers.
      It is really factory farms that produce more waste in one place than the ground or rivers can deal with.
      It is a government body that comes out and cheques Paul wheatons land for ecoli. You don't have to do it there are people whose job it is to do it , at any rate they checked Paul Stamets land for e coli.
      When i was a child i always heard women talked of in scorn because they took the least indication that their might be soem wrong doing and with no reall evidence went to work destroying whoever they had thought might have done wrong. I now know that ithis is equally a trait of men. I determined i was not going to be like women, i would wait till i had all the facts before i attacked. The result is, I never attacked anyone, in the old days, still, though it can turn you into a bystander, it is as well not to accuse Paul Wheaton of wanting to have a factory farm on the edge of his river before you have found out his plans.
    Fish farms really poison rivers they have many more fish than are allowed by any decent permiculturist for the rivers they are close to to be able to manage the amount of manure pesticides or fish flees that come from fish farms. Attack those who really have plans to have a big scale meat production near rivers. It is not the animal it is the quantity of that animal that you have to consider.
  Would you allow hippopotamuses in the river? rose macaskie.

I have added a bit to what I wrote before I hope you can delete the first version easily so its not repeated.
  Paul Wheaton I did not read your bit about a ag toxin to do with overgrazing,

Paul Stamets special contamination cleaning fungi  would help with one of the problems of having pigs on you landt hat created manure though I thought that problem was dealt with by having the right amount of pigs on your land.
    I also suppose the deep straw bedding of the pigs in the article, -  pig heaven, by Brian DeVore  would resolve the problem, as the bacteria that break down straw are nitrogen guzzlers.
    When i was going through Paul Stamets book, I have just started reading Paul Stamets a short while ago and since then i have been writting here. So I haven’t read all of him I can make big mistakes about him. When I was listening to him an dreading him, I read about him having a e coli problem that inspectors wanted him to clean up on, it seems he brought a piece of land and there, had his own drains and the muck if some live stock draining down his land.
    He did not get round to resolving the e coli problem, this was when he started out and was not controlling everything I suppose but he did get round to planting a outdoor big bed of Brazil mushrooms that he planned to sell. The following year the inspectors came round and found that the e coli problem that affected his neighbors oyster farm had disappeared.
    Paul Stamets being a scientist he took the Brazil mushrooms back to his lab and studied them. He found that they, for one, put out a liquid in front of their growing hypha that disappears if e coli come near, so letting the fungi know there are e coli around, and in second place the brazil mushroom produces another liquid that attracts and stuns e coli, making them easy for the mushroom to gobble up. Of course this helps get rid of the e coli, it is not as if they have to hunt it out which would be really hard work it is that they attract it to them. Rose Macaskie

I would have thought there must be money to be earned growing fungal mats to sell so that people can sow their land with them and so clear up their pollution problems.
    You make them keeping hay or wood chips in water till they are well soaked, wood chips for five weeks and then introducing the foot of the mushroom in to the bag of wood chips and waiting until the fungi roots hypha mycelium shot through the whole. If it works this is the base for fungal mats, you take out the part full of fungi and put it in more wood chips or whatever till you have a lot of fungus growing off lots of bags of wood chips. Paul Stamets calls this mycelium running.

    If you want to sow land with them you lay down a good depth of wood chips, then your fungal mats, then corn cobs and then cardboard to stop the microbes getting in and eating up the fungus before it got a hold. 
    Paul Stamets gives a longer and better explanation.
      I shall make some sooner or later.

    It seems that it is normal to make super sterile food, wood chips,  straw or coffee grounds, for mushrooms that you are going to eat, and that those you grow to clean up the landscape are stronger and better for having a less sterile childhood, so it is not so hard to grow fungal mats for this end than it is to grow fungi to eat. 

    He also grows fungi that clear up different problems that clean up such things as pesticides.  rose macaskie

That makes sense.  There was a toxin and it was tracked down.  And solved.  One farmer needed to clean up a mess.  As opposed to 100 farmers have to stop farming so that one farmer can farm. 

And the problematic toxin was found. 

This makes sense. 

Pesticides are famous for being non bio-degradable which does not mean that some solid object like an amphora or plastic container might be found in your garden a thousand years later it means that the molecular structure of an object or of a liquid like the wrong type of herbicide won’t break down for love or money or will take a long time to do so, that each molecule of the objet keeps its structure, a water molecule is made up of one hydrogen atom and two oxygen ones and it does break down the hydrogen can be separated from the oxygen and so that the hydrogen and oxygen molecules can turn into something else the carbon might get together with carbon and form carbon dioxide and become part of the air instead of part of water.
    Some types of herbicides, the ones that aren’t biodegradable fall on your field and get taken up by your plant, your plant gets eaten by your cattle and  excreted by them and the pesticides molecular nature stays the same waiting to become part of the next blade of grass, the next cow till the cow dies and returns the pesticide to the earth or to us if buried and to us if eaten, etc.

      It seems that pesticides are complex molecules. I knew no chemistry till I read about things like Paul Stamets book mycelium running and that I know no chemistry still goes on being the truth excepting a tiny thing or two. But here goes about mushrooms and the breakup of supposedly no biodegradable chemicals,
     According to Paul Stamets, mushrooms break down a lot of the sort of molecules that are hard to break down and if they don’t he can train them to do so.
       If whatever toxin you want to destroy have in their molecular structure some of the atoms mushrooms need, like carbons and hydrogen’s, or phosphorus that the fungi can, maybe, with a bit of work, separate out the atoms of the molecule and use the atoms he needs to make fungal sugars. Separating the atoms out means making substances that break the bonds that hold one atom to another in a molecule. These bonds are electro-magnetic forces so you need to fabricate a substances that has a stronger pull on the atoms than the one that binds them.   then   fungi can be trained to break down the molecules and zamp the atoms they want, when the pesticide e has lost its molecular structure it ceases existing.  
      Paul Stamets looks for species that already break down molecules that are contained in the poison such as a species that already eats things with phosphorus in them will break down a poison that has phosphorus as one of its components. this is not an fully detailed description of what Paul Stamets says it is a sort of bad introduction but I think it is good enough for everyone to understand the basics of the discoveries of Stamets, to give everyone who has not read his books an idea of what is in them. Or a breath of hope about some of our greatest problems as concerns our world. I am worried that this about phosphorus, is the sort of mushroom he looks for to undo nerve gas molecules, not pesticides but I think it is the same for both. When he has found a fungi that he thinks has characteristics likely to make them suitable for destroying one or other poisonous molecule, Paul Stamets teaches them to break down the new substance.
        First he puts a bit of the toxin in the mixture he has prepared to feed his baby fungi with, so they will get used to the horrible presence from the first days of their lives and then after about two weeks he will start reducing their normal food, week by week, until or they digest toxin or they die of hunger.
       Paul Stamets says that the growing tips of hypha produce lots of chemicals which they try out to see if they will work, to find out what will digest the particular object that is in front of them. That is how they manage to digested chemicals that aren’t their normal food.

       He has lots of romantic ideas like about the intelligence of fungi that have made him really push them and their capacities, his romanticism has served science, it made him more adventurous, it made him try to train fungi to break down things they don’t normally break down.

        I have intelligent plants. One seedling of mine of a ginkgo, after growing straight up a little bit ever year, in the sixth year grew a longish side branch in the direction of the light and a counterweight shorter branch in the other direction. This was a balcony breed tree, without full sunlight.  It was obviously an intelligent response. It made me wonder.
 
        If you wanted to reduce the pesticides on your land with Paul Stamets fungi you might have to buy his specially trained strains. You could not just find an ordinary example of the fungi he has used, but he sells the material to grow his mushrooms.
      Any old oyster mushroom does to eat up e coli according to Paul Stamets, he found this out because he was growing oyster mushrooms in a field that had too much e—coli according to authorities and the growth of the oyster mushroom beds did for the e coli so he studied their behavior with e coli and found that it is not just that they eat e coli it is that they even produce a substance that attracts e coli so as to make it easier to get a good meal of them.  
       On some thread you said that Paul Stamets had found six ways to save the world, i think that is right. His enthusiasm for fungi and creativity has got him finding out lots of ways to save the world.  People say all news is bad, he is a good bit of news. rose macaskie

rose macaskie wrote:
Leah Sattler the world is full of factory farms backed up by enormous multinationals that really and truly overburden the system with rubbish. Are you one of their followers discrediting a person who tries for cleaner methods?
       You are getting cross with a fervent admirer of permaculture, that is of sustainable farming and one of the tenets of this type of farming is not having more rubbish than you can deal with,  the right amount of manure, it is all about responsable treatment of the land ain't you wasting your energy attacking someone  who was unlikely to have more pigs than the place could sustain cleanly, you did not even ask Paul Wheaton how many pigs he meant to put by his river or at any rate didn ot get a reply before getting on a moral high horse about animals by rivers.
       

I'm not cross at all. the question was 'why all the laws'. the laws are there for the reason I stated. I'm not implying the laws are there for the responsible people jsut to make them mad. they are there for the irresponsible people. and the line between the two can be difficult to establish in court. so rightly so I think they are trying to protect the waterways. sure big farms are the problem. but who gets to decide what a big farm is? how many pigs are acceptable? if we say that 5 pigs are acceptable the person with 6 is going to be mad and the guy who is keeping 2 poorly is still going to be a problem.

I'm not sure where you get that I am for big farms??? I am saying that they are the problem......

its one of those issues that doesn't have a real good legislative answer. and so the answer is evolving into simply restricting the use of the riparian areas.

its not that they can't be used responsibly. but that many people dont'. and have messed it up for everyone. although I am not big government I do believe in legislation that will protect the enviroment even though some of the little guys are going to get caught up in it.

I know that there is currently some sort of "salmon safe" program.  Maybe that has something to do with farmers not using riparian areas at all.  Maybe not.

One possible route:  Suppose there is a program where a farmer could become a "certified riparian area steward" which involves class time and an exam.  These folks can then use riparian areas as much as they want because they now know "the good way".

Leah Sattler, I have started putting a list of the trees whose leaves Juan Oria de la Rueda  says can be used for feeding live stock and in some cases which live stock they feed them to, in the forum with the  strange heading, “i gave the name of an author who wrote a book on trees and i gave it wrong.”

  Sue Munroe says wild animals don’t hurt the land, wild animals can do an incredible amount of damage. In Scotland they cull the deer and elephants get culled too or they would cause desertification. It is a bit complicated isn't it, I suppose that if elephants, in a setting without humans, killed every plant, hunger would then reduce their population and the vegetation would get reestablished.
    The truth is, Africa has a good soil or did in many places in spite of having a dry season and supporting large herds of wildebeest and such.
      That dry parts of Africa have good soils is a good argument for saying, “how the devil did your soil get so poor,” to the countries from Spain to China who have dry seasons, where soils lack all top soil is the rule and desertification is rife.
    On the other hand there must be places where wild animals do for the vegetation.

  My observation with humans is not so much overgrazing because they have too many animals. It is that humans lead their flocks over the same terrain again and again till they have killed the plants and then move on to the next to reduce fire risk. It is also that they use herbicides to reduce the vegetation.
    I will post a photo of the enormous amount of terrain a shepherd or two wander over in the mountains here. You can see two villages in the photograph and they are very empty villages, so you can see why the destruction of the vegetation seems to them to be the only way to keep the vegetation down in time for the summer dry season. rose macaskie.

The hills in the above photo look green but the ground at their feet is often bare. I post another photo  in which you can see how bare the ground is below the encinas on the slope. The trees on the slope  include a patch of sabina albares, the trees that are pyramidal, so you can see how many trees sprout if this land is left to itself, a bit of plough and a pollarded snap willow, probably pollarded for sheep and goats to eat the leaf. Here the live stock is goats and sheep often in mixed herds. This detail is part of thephoto i  posted just befoe or part of the landscap that you see in it. The land is part of the village of Almiruete in Guadalajara. rose macaskie.

The truth is when I accuse them in Spain of overgrazing they say but there isn’t much live stock whererever it is. True but the vegetation has been so reduced that even a few animals are too many.

WSU had some sort of riparian open house farm walk thing today at one of their test campuses.  They had about eight people that worked for different branches of government tied to riparian stuff. 

I managed to get four of them in a group and asked about running pigs in riparian areas as part of a paddock shift system.  This sparked a lot of discussion between these folks.  In the end it seems that the consensus was that what I propose would be a good idea.  One of them brought me to another guy and I ran it by him.  That guy recognized me from one of the Sepp Holzer workshops and showed interest in doing a study - although a volunteer farmer would be needed. 

Anybody in washington state have some land they would like to have Sepp-ified?

More on this:

Concerns are mostly about NPK in the water.  There are also some concerns about pathogens and turbidity. 

Turbidity is an interesting one.  If mud and dirt get in the water, little fish might not be able to breathe.  Since most creeks get pretty muddy at high water, it does seem that this is something the fish should be able to deal with.  Interesting.

Something that is not a concern is having the water be very brown, yet very clear.  Milky brown (like mud) is bad.  Clearish brown (like lots of peat-ish stuff in the water) is fine! 

Another interesting point is that a cedar, loaded to the gills with allelopathic gick, in the water, does not hurt fish!  (as a side note, I gathered some excellent info on the different allelopathic agents in conifers and in cedars in particular)

I visited with some of these folks at great length about the goals (reduce NPK, pathogens and turbidity) and some sentiment against farmers may be ill placed.  There are problems and the knee jerk reaction has been that since the problems are caused by farmers to simply try to force farming away from riparian areas.  But since the farmers that were doing a good job did not cause the problems, then they were not noticed.  And the good farmers would end up getting punished along with the bad farmers. 

My impression is that there are techniques that offer big improvements for the fish and for the farmer. 

We received a substantial grant to fence all the riparian zones on our 1000 acre farm here in the mountains of NSW Australia. One of the conditions was that we were only allowed to "crash graze" the areas for a maximum of 6 days per year.

Stocking densities weren't defined, but at least that branch of government has some idea.

that seems like a reasonably safe and sensible solution...especially considering it was spawned from a government entity! I am impressed!