http://74.125.45.104/search?q=cache:CRinfpr9X3sJ:www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-te.havana15jun15,0,7343562.story+farm+cuba+photo&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us&client=firefox-a
You can use the anti-Cuban, anti-communists pants as fertilizer when they overreact to this...
Comments ... #
I'll think about ripping out the grass in the front yard (only full sun spot I've got) and putting in a vegetable garden next spring, especially if this bailout thing goes the way I expect it to. Might even ask the local governmental powers to allow a chickn coop.
Yeah, perhaps that's the great next campaign promise..."a chicken coupe' in every yard". Don't they eat dogs in Cuba?
posted by justareviewer on Sep 27, 2008 at 10:26:19 pm #
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Farming not a slaughterhouse.Yeah, they eat dogs. Find the citations. Don't people pass judgments without solid info?
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It's a handout. Bailout is so 0 days ago.
Uh, chickens are good for the garden. They eat all the bugs and supply eggs and poultry manure for fertilizer. If your gonna self sustain on a garden you'd better have some chickens.
Just because chickens are good for the garden, does that mean they're necessary?
Gardeners are good for the garden, sometimes, doesn't mean they is necessary.
Dirt, sun, water.... necessities.
Relatively obscure animal....
Real gardeners know that it isnt "dirt". It is "soil". Healthy, productive soil is alive with microorganisms. If you want to keep the soil healthy and the garden producing you use organic fertilizers and integrated pest management. That's IPM to you. Hence - chickens supply organic fertilizer and control insect pests, naturally. That obscure animal could save your ass if you have to survive out of your garden.
Whoa Nelly....
Gardeners keeping it "real" is lulzy.
My aunt who is a genuinely decent person and easy going (probably not a real gardener per se) never had a chicken nor soil nor any outside products added. Experiment and make adjustments was her philosophy.
I've never met any gardener with chickens. But I don't get out much and I like to half-ass my garden for amusement and eats. And it works all the same. My niece planted a pretty kick ass garden all by herself.
I'm thinking of doing a hydroponic garden this winter. Where should I leave the chickens at? Should I leave the healthy soil in a bag?
Don't you like me questioning your alleged expertise?
Here's a family of urban "gardeners" in Pasadena, CA. that may offer a few ideas for local urbanites. Obviously, Pasadena's weather is a little nicer than Toledo's.
- http://pathtofreedom.com/ - "Since 2001, documenting one family's journey of a self sufficient urban life."
- NY Times coverage of the family :
Jules Dervaes and three of his adult children live on one-fifth of an acre in Pasadena, Calif., a block away from a multilane highway. On this tiny sliver of land, they manage to be mostly self-sufficient.The family harvests 6,000 pounds and more than 350 separate varieties of fruits, vegetables and edible flowers annually. They brew the biodiesel fuel that powers the family car. Solar panels on their roof reduce energy bills to as little as $12 a month. Goats, chickens, ducks and two rescued cats are in residence. Red wiggler worms turn the kitchen and garden waste into compost, which is then recycled back into the garden.
The family generates cash for their limited expenses by selling produce to local restaurants. Though Dervaes and his children are accustomed to the neighbors' strange looks at their crowded lot, the local chefs don't seem to share the skepticism.
- Five-minute NY Times video about the family called Life (Mostly) Off the Grid
No problem charlatan. My expertise isn't alleged.
Expertise and pedantic sophistry are pretty much on in the same.
There's multiple ways to accomplish anything. There are good ways and better ways.
Some people are just snobby and/or elitist about it.
© 2003-2008 Toledo Talk
current date: 22-Nov-2008 6:33 A.M.
A copypasta=yum.
HAVANA - For Miladis Bouza, the global food crisis arrived two decades ago. Now, her efforts to climb out of it could serve as a model for people around the world struggling to feed their families.
Bouza was a research biologist, living a solidly middle-class existence, when the collapse of the Soviet Union - and the halt of its subsidized food shipments to Cuba - effectively cut her government salary to $3 a month. Suddenly, a trip to the grocery store was out of reach.
So she quit her job, and under a program championed by then-Defense Minister Raul Castro, asked the government for the right to farm an overgrown, half-acre lot near her Havana home. Now, her husband tends rows of tomatoes, sweet potatoes and spinach, while Bouza, 48, sells the produce at a stall on a busy street.
Neighbors are happy with cheap vegetables fresh from the field. Bouza never lacks for fresh produce, and she pulls in $100 to $250 a month - many times the average government salary of $19.
"All that money is mine," she said. "The only thing I have to buy is protein" - meat.
Cuba's urban farming program has been a stunning, and surprising, success. The farms, many of them on tiny plots like Bouza's, now supply much of Cuba's vegetables. They also provide 350,000 jobs nationwide with relatively high pay and have transformed eating habits in a nation accustomed to a less-than-ideal diet of rice and beans and canned goods from Eastern Europe.
From 1989 to 1993, Cubans went from eating an average of 3,004 calories a day to only 2,323, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, as shelves emptied of the Soviet goods that made up two-thirds of Cuba's food. Today, they eat 3,547 calories a day - more than what the U.S. government recommends for Americans.
"It's a really interesting model looking at what's possible in a nation that's 80 percent urban," said Catherine Murphy, a California sociologist who spent a decade studying farms in Havana. "It shows that cities can produce huge amounts of their own food, and you get all kinds of social and ecological benefits."
Of course, urban farms might not be such a success in a healthy, competitive economy.
As it is, productivity is low at Cuba's large, state-run farms where workers lack incentives. Government-supplied rations - mostly imported from the United States - provide such staples as rice, beans and cooking oil, but not fresh produce. Importers bring in only what central planners want, so the market doesn't correct for gaps. And since most land is owned by the state, developers are not competing for the vacant lots that can become plots for vegetables.
Still, experts say the basic idea behind urban farming has a lot of promise.
"It's land that otherwise would be sitting idle. It requires little or no transportation to get [produce] to market," said Bill Messina, an agricultural economist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "It's good any way you look at it."
And with fuel prices and food shortages causing unrest and hunger around the world, many say that the Cuban model should spread.
"There are certain issues where we think Cuba has a lot to teach the world. Urban agriculture is one of them," said Beat Schmid, coordinator of Cuba programs for the charity Oxfam International.
Other countries have experimented with urban farming - Cuba's initial steps were modeled after a green belt surrounding Shanghai, China. But nowhere has urban farming been used so widely to transform the way a country feeds itself.
"As the global food crisis receives attention, this is something that we need to be looking at," Murphy said. "Havana is an unlikely, really successful model where no one would expect one to come from."
Now that Raul Castro is president, many expect him to expand the program that he began as an experiment in the early 1990s.
One of the first plots he opened was the organoponico on Fifth Avenue and 44th Street in the ritzy Havana neighborhood of Miramar. The half-block farm - owned by a government agency - is surrounded by apartment buildings and houses, but also offices of foreign companies, a Spanish bank and the South African Embassy.
Long troughs brim with arugula, spinach, radishes and basil, and few of the 20,000 square feet are wasted.
One technician tends compost that serves as natural fertilizer, while another handles natural protection from pests, surrounding delicate spinach shoots with strong-smelling celery to ward off insects. Such measures have ecological benefits but were born of necessity: Neither commercial fertilizer nor herbicide is reliably available.
Three workers tend the crops and three others sell them from a brightly painted stall.
Key to the operation is something once unheard of in Cuba: 80percent of the profits go into the workers' pockets, providing them an average of $71 a month.
"Those salaries are higher than doctors, than lawyers," said Roberto Perez, the 58-year-old agronomist who runs the farm. "The more they produce, the more they make. That's fundamental to get high productivity."
Customers say the farm has given them not only access to affordable food, but also a radical change in their cuisine.
"Nobody used to eat vegetables," said David Leon, 50, buying 2 pounds of Swiss chard. "People's nutrition has improved a lot. It's a lot healthier. And it tastes good."
posted by charlatan on Sep 27, 2008 at 12:16:46 pm #