Cost of living

[spacesailor]

Horse meat is ' grey ' .

Seagull is unedible! .

 The northen English staved while London partyed, excess food in the south.

POBS

Up north. 

spacesailor

[facthunter]

Cheval in France looks very red.  Most birds taste like what they eat. That may apply to more than birds.  Nev

[old man emu]

3 hours ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

We have a plague of white cockys around here right now. I wonder if they are edible.

 

Didn't know you were of the One Nations background.

 

Cocky: Farmer

[facthunter]

They are Blocky's in some places. Soldier settlers little blocks. Nev

[Marty_d]

Does that make them Blockatoos?

 

When I was 17, my mate and I used to do a block'a'two in his TE Cortina Ghia.

[facthunter]

These are "fit for Returning heroes" Too small to make a living from. BIG enough to break your heart. (snakes and weeds).  and remote from the market. Nev

[old man emu]

This statue commemorates the soldier settlers of WWI. It is located at the G K Rohr Warrumbungle Viewing Platform at Tooraweenah.

   

 

The story that the statue tells is the returning soldier putting aside his Lee-Enfield, taking off his shirt to start getting back to farming. Roughly a reference 

to the biblical image of God's peaceful rule: ‘they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks’ (Isaiah 2:4).

[willedoo]

3 hours ago, facthunter said:

These are "fit for Returning heroes" Too small to make a living from. BIG enough to break your heart. (snakes and weeds).  and remote from the market. Nev

I grew up on a soldier settler farm. Almost every adult male and quite a lot of the adult women in the district were returned soldiers. Growing up that way, that's how I thought life was, that everyone was an ex digger.

 

The blocks were all too small in my opinion. Some were in poor country, but even those with good soil were still a bit of a battle. Most were 640 acres, or one square mile. If it was good country, in those days you could get by and make a humble living. As time went by, rising input costs made a lot of these small farms not viable. A lot have had to be amalgamated with other blocks to make a living from them now.

 

The one my dad drew in the ballot was undeveloped brigalow country (with a lot of prickly pear and death adders) and had to be cleared from scratch. One good thing about brigalow is that it usually grows in rich black soil. The block was flood prone which was a real pain. One of the neighbours had an ex army tank sans cannon to plough in the prickly pear with disc ploughs. Back then, they were still to learn that doing that was just creating much more pear, like planting cuttings. My dad grew up farming so it was natural for him and others of a rural background. It must have been a shock for some of the town and city returning diggers to try their hand at farming those battler blocks.

[red750]

[red750]

With the cost of petrol, I'm doing it in one trip.

 

 

[old man emu]

If you enjoy a bit of a loaf each day, drop your gym subscription and buy a few bags of flour before the price of it mimics that of fuel.

 

https://www.oversixty.com.au/finance/retirement-income/why-the-cost-of-bread-is-set-to-rise

[willedoo]

A lot of things are going up in price.  A farmer on the radio this morning was saying a bag of NPK fertiliser has doubled from $60 to $120.

[Yenn]

I grew up in the years before NPK became so common. I worked on farms where we didn't use any fertilizer. We did grow grain crops with long straw, which became a problem for the harvesters. The long straw was used to bed down cattle and became "Farmyard manure" which was our fertilizer.

The long straw was bred out of the grain crops, to make harvesting easier and consequently no more FYM. But we then had the problem of cattle dung being a waste product which polluted the waterways.

Agriculture nowadays consists of planting a crop, with fertilizer, harvesting, getting rid of any waste product and doing it all again next year. Meanwhile the soil is degrading and is only the structure to hold the crop upright.

[old man emu]

I recently got the impression that the next generation of farmers is very involved with land management by using methods that don't degrade the soil and which retain rainfall in crop/pasture land instead of having it run off, carrying the top soil with it.

[Jerry_Atrick]

It's moving that way, but there is still a way to go, and with the increased cost of living, I am thinking there may be pressure to go to the cheaper/faster way of food production where it can be.

[old man emu]

Hydroponics can produce a lot of vegetable matter, just ask a Cannabis grower, but grains and oil seeds are our major plant-sourced food. For them you need large areas for total production and best profit. To match that with soil quality management you have to change the rotational farming system to something that allows farmed areas to have time to renovate between crops. There's an answer to the "problem", but I can't propose one right now.

[Old Koreelah]

18 hours ago, Yenn said:

I grew up in the years before NPK became so common. I worked on farms where we didn't use any fertilizer. We did grow grain crops with long straw, which became a problem for the harvesters. The long straw was used to bed down cattle and became "Farmyard manure" which was our fertilizer…

Keep an eye on China’s food industry; their farmers traditionally built up their soil fertlIty with “night soil”, creating a pretty sustainable agricultural system that served them well for thousands of years.
Recently, they moved most of the population into massive cities which now flush human waste out to sea.

[old man emu]

In the 80's experiments were carried out at Goulburn on the use of decontaminated sewage as fertilizer for pasture. Looks like it worked.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-09/farmers-using-human-poo-to-improve-their-production/8887512

 

I remember when I was living in Dubbo that you could get really strong tomato seedlings from the blokes who worked at the sewer farm. Seems tomato seeds are indigestible.

[facthunter]

Blackberries are spread by Birds crapping usually near a tree trunk. . Foxes spread plums. Nev

[pmccarthy]

The grass is always greener over the septic tank.

[old man emu]

5 hours ago, facthunter said:

Foxes spread plums

Around Camden there are large stand of the African Olive. These trees were brought in by John  Macarthur to make hedgerows for dividing up his paddocks. They don't produce the size of fruit that Mediterranean olives do. However, it seems foxes like them as I've often seen fox scat with olive seeds in it. They must be OK to eat. My old dog used to like to eat a handful when I was out walking her. Nowadays, the African olive is being cleared away due to housing construction, but there are a few farmers growing proper olives on the Razorback.

[Yenn]

Sewerage sludge was used as fertilizer in England during the war. We used to get it by the truckload and used it for market garden crops. No bad affects as far as I know. Any sewerage works with sludge drying beds will produce a really good crop of tomatoes and they taste good.

[spacesailor]

Europe dries it,s sewerage mud & packs it into bags for the home gardener. 

spacesailor

[onetrack]

Pig manure is an excellent fertiliser. America produces so much pig manure, overflows from manure lagoons and rainfall washing the manure from fields, has polluted vast areas of the waterways of the Southern States. It is a huge problem for them.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/27/it-smells-like-a-decomposing-body-north-carolinas-polluting-pig-farms

[old man emu]

.Big business has the right to make a profit, and dealing with animal waste is just money down the toilet.