Blue Peter wrote:
I didn't know that they used borage for oil production. What sort of oil does it produce?
Borage Oil.
(thought to be good for you due to a high gamma linoleic acid content. Availble in capsules in small expensive bottles from places like Holland and Barrett)
Is there any advantage to using an ox rather than a horse? I vaguely remember hearing that they can eat a wider range of food, is that true?
Oxen are much stronger than a horse and more steady. Cattle generally are less fussy eaters than horses but if worked hard they would require some grain in their diet to boost energy levels. The Weald & Downland Museum near Chichester have a working team.
Cattle can be eaten now over thirty months but the brain has to be tested for BSE (not a problem much now, it was generally dairy cattle that got BSE anyway) and they have to go to Licenced abattoirs (would this happen after PO).
The blue stuff in fields is more likely to be linseed than borage but borage is grown.
Coming in late to the thread after being too busy to catch up, my comments consist mainly of "Oooooh! Horses!" and "Oooooh! Jethro Tull" and that'll be me singing 'Heavy Horses' as quoted by Andy for the rest of the day.
Hm. I think I now have a good PO reason to justify spending some time with horses...
Green, political and narrative songs - contemporary folk from an award-winning songwriter and performer. Now booking 2011. Talis Kimberley ~ www.talis.net ~ also Bandcamp, FB etc...
60 million people in the country, as the economy splutters to a halt, its fair to assume many thousands will leave the UK in search of work. Also most of the rural population left the countryside for the towns and cities at the outset of the industrial revolution and as yet this trend has continued. Our countryside is largely empty, the majority of the population is in the major cities. There are thousands of acres of unused forgotten land and long abandoned farms the UK is one of the richest in terms of potential reclaimable agricultural land. Globalization has ment that over recent decades we have systematically year on year moved to getting virtually everything from everywhere but right here. We are a nation of consumers, but we have a huge potential to produce, even in the cities when you add up all the gardens and parks etc you are looking at a huge potential for veg growing. There is hope. In real terms our society has only straid down the path of intensive globalization for a handful of decades. If you scratch the surface there are museums full of old farm equipment that our engineers could replicate, lots of archives exist containing film records of our forbears making brushes baskets barrels etc shoeing horses laying hedges copiceing woodlands, making corn or flour in wind and water mills, tons of stuff. Im 43 I grew up in the Suffolk countryside when I was 10 we had no central heating, we had chickens for eggs and to eat, we snared rabbits we even ate road kill pheasant, we grew our own veg, made beer wine and bread, we sore no need for more than one bath a week, we didn't have a car a tumble dryer or a dishwasher, we cycled everywhere, we went shopping once a week to the local market. I wore my brothers and cousins clothes, if things broke they where fixed, we made our own compost and saved rainwater. That was how many people still lived then and that was only 30 years ago. The demographic of our population is largely people of my generation and older, and many of us remember the old ways.
The local economy will return and the old knowledge will be relearned, their have been riots and painful recessions to get us where we are today and the way back will clearly be painful, particularly for our youth.
Local and national farming and manufacturing have gradually been eroded in the name of progress and profit over the last few decades, this has been painful, yet here we are in the modern world, well it was a mistake, but the relearning reversal and rebuilding of older and more sustainable ways of life, also have the potential to provide investment opportunity and are of economic value. If we can escape the paradigm of expected economic growth and think locally but still trade nationally (probably most efficiently by the oceans) we have potential, but we all have to lower our expectations, thats the problem
Last edited by Silas on 05 Jul 2011, 10:01, edited 1 time in total.
I enjoyed the serious well grounded insight of your post.
The old skills do indeed endure, and are still being transmitted to some extent -
Just this morning we had the best of the local farriers here to shoe two (rather green) cob mares -
and with him came a young apprentice who made a tidy job of some of the more straightforward tasks.
Such is the demand that I've waited a week to get the farrier here, and he can charge ?95 for shoeing the pair, taking about 80 minutes to do so.
Given a popular aspiration to a "simpler" way of life, and Climate permitting,
no doubt we could quite rapidly turn things round, though probably with a greater average weight-loss than occurred in Cuba.
Yet peoples' (propaganda-driven) expectations obstruct this outcome directly.
I think it was JK Galbraith who remarked that the capitalist system "is essentially about generating wants . . . ."
Billhook wrote:I think it was JK Galbraith who remarked that the capitalist system "is essentially about generating wants . . . ."
I prefer to think of it as about turning oil into landfill as quickly as possible, though generating wants is certainly the 'how' of the matter, if not the 'what'.
