Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Are American's Lazy

Are Americans lazy?

I heard a speaker pose this question a while back. His assertion was that as a society we were not as productive as other cultures around the world and it was because we had become lazy.

Well maybe his definition was different than mine, but I don't think we are lazy and here is why.


I think many of us are working hard and are very busy, but we are just doing the wrong things.

In agriculture we have the most amazing technology like the ability to build soils with cattle using electric fences and a grass fed beef model that mimics nature. But instead we maintain the industrial feedlot and grain fed beef model. This takes more equipment, diesel fuel, water, infrastructure, and concentrates manure that pollutes ground water. We need to rethink this and we won't unless the customer votes with their fork. You can change agriculture right in your own kitchen. Because if you don't buy industrial food, it will have to change.

Builders can put a solarium and living roofs on our homes and industrial buildings. We can grow much of our food right where we live in an integrated approach.

We can have several chickens in the back yard to eat our table scraps and give us eggs. The typical approach is a segregated approach where we grow our food miles away from where we live and have to transport it to our homes.

We have to think differently to implement these ideas, we have to be a bit of a contrarian and we have to be willing to buck the system and in some cases go 180 degrees from the direction we are currently going.

The answers to our problems in agriculture are there but we have to be willing to embrace them. Did you know that if we put all the cattle that are currently in confinement feedlots eating corn, back out on grass we could sequester all the CO2 released from the last 150 years of the industrial age in 10 years. Think about that. We wring our hands over global warming and we could fix it in 10 years. But government and industry won't do it.

It is not up to the government, it is not up to agricultural corporations and it is not up to our universities and scientists.

It is up to us.  Vote with your fork.







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