Mh... I want some more!

Anyways, what I'm getting at is that if you're buying organic, ethically and locally grown produce from the farmer's market... you still rely on products from animal farming.

Only vaguely related but this reminded me. I had a small garden back in Indiana. One yr I fertilized with some compost and a couple soil amendments. The next yr I only used HUGE quantities of aged sheep manure. That time around it was nearly twice as productive. If you garden and don't have access to like, obscene amounts of compost, you should really consider the various animal product options

In basically any other ecosystem, nutrients would be returned to the soil by animal poop and decaying bodies, as well as leaf litter and woody matter being broken down. If you remove all the leaf litter and wild animals from your farm ecosystem, you have to add those nutrient sources back in! Vegetative matter from compost and cover crop is all well and good, but it doesn’t have the nutrient availability of animal byproducts. Because... once again... that is the natural role of animals in the nutrient cycle....

It’s also worth noting here that farms tend to need a much higher volume of animal-derived nutrients added in than your average ecosystem would, because harvesting food from them removes a massive amount of nutrients from their natural cycle. In effect, all humans eating the produce of a farm are part of the animal load of the farm ecosystem, but none of us are giving our nutrients back to it!

Livestock manure is a great option, and so are by-products of the meat processing industry (like the feather meal, bone meal, and blood meal mentioned above). Those are all things that can be brought in and used on a farm whether or not the farm actually has livestock.

Farms that have both livestock and produce (or pasture) also have some neat direct options! There’s been some super interesting research recently on intensive grazing - rather than having a big old area of pasture and letting grazing animals wander and disperse, you pen them in a relatively small part of the pasture at a time, so they all eat and poop in that area, intensively stimulating the growth of the forage plants. (Grass and other foraging- adapted plants respond to being physically tugged on by grazing animals with increased growth!) Then you move the pen on to the next area of the pasture. I know this is an increasingly popular strategy with cows, but not a great idea with goats - they eat plants all the way to the ground, while cows just eat the tops off. I’m not sure where sheep fall on that scale. But I recently visited a vegetable farm where the farmer has a small herd of cows *just* so he can rotate them through his fields and improve the soil with them! He plants a cover-crop mix that’s good for cows to eat, then moves them through it over the winter, before planting vegetables in spring.

Any farm that isn’t using animal-derived fertilizer is using synthetic fertilizer, which is ecologically worse in pretty much every way. It requires higher energy inputs to produce and distribute, it does *not* reclaim farm waste into usable fertilizer (which livestock does), it comes in a concentrated chemical form that can be dangerous to the humans who handle it during production and application, and its chemical purity and solubility with water means a large percent of it is washed out of soil by rain, causing massive nutrient pollution issues. In manure, or animal byproduct meal, the nutrients are bound up in a matrix of large organic molecules which helps them integrate into the soil without washing away.

You know what ACTUALLY helped?

More than every passive aggressive shit for brains on this website telling me I deserve to me racially harassed for not giving Democrats my soul?

A fucking email from a fucking HERBS AND SPICES STORE that unlike you wretched cunts ACTUALLY HAD VOTER REGISTRATION HELPLINES IN IT.

Every time one of you godforsaken freaks tells me to 'get out and vote' like its cutely trivial and didn't take months of desperate phone calls just to register (IF my registration even WORKED THIS TIME).

If you, like me, are struggling with registration or poll access, try contacting your STATE board of elections.

Request that they send you TWO copies of their registration guidelines. Collect any documents listed in them.

Then, contact your LOCAL board. Tell them you would like to register IN PERSON IF POSSIBLE.

Bring your documents and the two copies of the guideline AND a working cell phone.

If you get ANY trouble AT ALL tell the local person you will call the state board to confirm their registration requirements. Be polite, but do not leave. Put the phone on speaker.

Most of the time, the local person who is doing Actual Serious Federal And State Crimes will give up at that point. If not, the person at the state board will generally outrank and overrule the local one.

Make a note of the names of both the local and state official.

Then, and this is the most important part:

CONFIRM YOUR REGISTRATION WAS FILED.

It may take a day or two for your registration to appear.

Unfortunately, if it's been a week, you're going to have to repeat the process.

Take the names you noted previously, and contact the state board again. Report that these people denied you registration on this day, in spite of you providing these documents, then list all the required papers you collected.

The person at the state SHOULD be able to direct you from there, but the process varies hugely by state.

When we’re still in the midst of crisis, we’re often too overloaded and physically/emotionally unsafe to really feel or process anything. So for most of us, everything gets pushed down/repressed/dissociated until later, when we’re safe and supported. The threshold of safety at which processing begins to occur varies from person to person. And the mental calculations used to determine “safety” usually happen on an unconscious level. Very few of us have the conscious thought “I’m safe now, so I can process what happened to me.” Instead, the subconscious realizes some level of safety has been achieved, and so it just dumps a load of suppressed stuff.