Global Warming and increasing desert

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That is a very wise way to invest time!
Sounds very interesting .
Thank you for sharing .
I ll be reading your link after dinner. The page is taking time to load.
I ll be back( but not as Terminator!)šŸ™‚

Done: It is admirable what these engineers and students have done. The purpose, the hard work, the going through obstacles, the team work, their careā€¦
And you say they are being commercialized as well.
So you want to combine it with organics, sounds a great challenge and a good one.
What vegetables are most likely to grow in your area? And what sort of fish do they use? Or does it depend also on variables?
 
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They use mostly tilapia and catfish for fertilizing the water. Some farmers are considering crayfish.
The farm we visited had everything you can use in a salad, including strawberries, tomatoes, green beans, carrots, and various types of lettuce. Onions and potatoes grow in Florida but I havenā€™t studied how they grow them with hydroponics.
Hydroponics can be more complicated than growing on flat farm land. However, some crops grow three times as much in a year over a smaller area of ground. If you do it right the water is recycled and there is no runoff and pollution of the wetlands.
 
Very interesting. I googled images about it to have an idea of different sizes. And here again. One adapts it.
Excuse my ignorance, do you end up eating fish as well in the end?
That would be more than a bonus!
Tilapia is what I bought most frequently. Fleshy and not full of spines for the kidsā€¦
 
They are doing it the US. They spread compost and the land regenerates and becomes lush.
 
That is fantastic. Outside Florida as well?
Is it being used in harsher climate places?
I have some sort of mesh, square shaped mesh container.( which I have to reinstal now). It has like a breathing mesh tube in the middle.
There you may put the leaves in autumn and I guess other matter to make compost.
But I ā€˜d dare not leave food scraps there because it would attract roedents. So it is for leaves only. We will see how it works in its new place outside
Any ideas, welcome
 
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I have heard of using earthworms to make compost.

I know we have farm raised fish on the market here. Iā€™m not sure where it comes from or if they are used in hydroponics.
 
Earthworms sound reasonable.
I may have to do some research.
Thank you for the idea.
Yours is a beautiful project. A challenge but you seem to be enjoying this stage of drawing and sketching and that is admirable as well.
I am very grateful that you shared it. I had never heard of that before and it adds, it is helpful and healthy!
 
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You are welcome.
Working with the technology is fun and it creates a healthy lifestyle. I have tested some of the components. Working with it on a large scale might be difficult but it is possible.
Hydroponics could change the world in the next 20 years.
 
I think it is going to be very difficult to reverse desertification in China. For one thing, knowledgeable farmers are not going to make decisions on a broad scale. Decisionmaking is centralized and controlled by people who do care about production but not about the environment particularly.
Proper grassland management requires not only knowledge but the freedom to act according to conditions. This year it might be a good idea to allow seed heads to mature and re-seed. Next year it might be a terrible idea. This year it might take a month to fully regenerate deep grass. Next year or in a drier place, it might take half a year. You have to be able to react knowledgeably.
buffalo said:
They are doing it the US. They spread compost and the land regenerates and becomes lush.
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Thatā€™s difficult and expensive to do on any kind of scale. What is much easier is to concentrate grazing and to do it at a time when seed stems are brittle. Cattle return 80% of the nutrients they eat to the soil in the form of manure and urine. You can see the effect clearly by simply looking at a pasture where cattle have grazed a few months ago. It also helps if cattle trample seed stems into the ground. They then break down biologically instead of chemically which theyā€™ll do standing in the air. Photosynthesis, as I said above, is the big ally. Sunlight and CO2 make sugars and roots. Soil is nothing but ā€œrock dustā€ and carbon compounds generated by photosynthesis, combined. A good soil contains far more carbon than it contains ā€œrock dustā€.
 
San Antonio is Irish green compared to my area. I live 150 miles south of there.

The National Park Service DVD states that most of TX was grassland before the massive herds of the Wild Western period reduced it to semi-desert. Now, of course, it is far too hot to recover without human intervention.

ICXC NIKA
 
I would agree with your analysis entirely. One thing, though. Land becomes overheated when the vegetation isnā€™t right. If your area was grassland right now, the earth would be much cooler there due to greater water retention and suspiration. Because it would be cooler, so would the atmosphere be.

Desertification through poor management is one kind of MMGW I believe in.

As I believe I mentioned before, the Comanche used to ride through that country down into Mexico and their horses didnā€™t starve on the way. They sure would now. Buffalo herds also roamed down into that country in the wintertime, meandering north all the way to Canada in the spring and summer. It couldnā€™t happen now.
 
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Which is why most of the buffalo are gone. Iā€™d imagine they are only to be found far to the north.

I agree with you about human-caused desertification; Iā€™ve seen its results in 3 continents. Iā€™ve also seen, however, that when water is restored to such an area, the minerals allow all kinds of stuff to grow. Kinda like the ā€œdesert bloomingā€ references in Scripture (the Israelis seem to be starting that process in our time.)

The difficulty is that it costs money.

ICXC NIKA
 
given the OP one thing people interested might want to look into is permaculture, and one of the best known practitioners is Joel Salatin
Why is Polyface Farm so successful? How Joel Salatin creates self-generating, profitable enterprises

Recently I reported on how Polyface Farm uses techniques such as mob grazing and mobile farm infrastructure to lock up carbon, build soil and create a diverse set of yields. I also explained how Joel Salatin, his family and his associates market and sell their products to create a $2,000,000 turnover on what is in reality a relatively small acreageā€¦

permaculture[dot]co[dot]uk/articles/why-polyface-farm-so-successful-how-joel-salatin-creates-self-generating-profitable-enterpr
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Joel Salatin, 61, calls himself a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer. Others who like him call him the most famous farmer in the world, the high priest of the pasture, and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson.

polyfacefarms[dot]com/joels-bio/
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FYI Iā€™m a Salatin permaculture fan,ā€¦ BUT having said that Iā€™m 99.9% certain Salatin does not grasp the hard science needed to understand ā€œclimate changeā€ risks

TinyURL[dot]com/HowBigIsTheEarth
ā€¦Salatin appeared at a ā€œRed Pill Expoā€ in Montana alongside some characters with what you might politely call unconventional views (the twin towers in the 9/11 attacks came down because of a controlled explosion, climate change is a hoax, and other such conspiratorial rubbish)ā€¦

ā€¦In short, Salatin told me he thought scientists might be wrong that humans are causing climate change ā€“ a position that puts him at odds with pretty much every major scientific institution in the world,ā€¦

desmogblog[dot]com/2017/07/30/response-lunatic-farmer-joel-salatin-his-climate-science-denial
Click to expand...
 
Thanks for the information on permaculture. Several years ago I heard of this technique for gardening and farming but, I did not know it was as developed as it is today. I am very interested in looking at some of the design models and sharing it with friends and relatives. We will be doing some experimenting.
 
permaculture originated in australia (where water is a scarce resource) so that is what got me interested in the permaculture school of though

I live in SoCal where long droughts are not uncommon (in the past 1200 years there have been two droughts that lasted more than a century),ā€¦ so have been learning about the permaculture, and eventually want to buy acreage to build my own version of the

"Biggest Little Farm"
twitter[dot]com/BiggestLilFarm
 
Permaculture has some interesting designs that see out of zone crops grown due to the creation of micro climates.
 
I recall long ago being on a French island in the Caribbean. It was mostly desertified; rocks and cactus. Locals explained to me that years ago there were trees up on the mountain tops and it would rain just a little in the mornings, which kept the other vegetation green. Evidently the trees would capture a bit of cloud or atmospheric moisture, which would condense on the trees then fall.

But no more. They cut the trees down to use them for various things. The moisture collection stopped and it all turned to desert.
 
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