Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Drone footage follows 10,000 ducks “cleaning” rice paddies in Thailand" video.

  1.  John Clemens P. Rubi  I think they had the cameras out for the duck drive parts. But in the translation, it said that they leave the ducks on the land for some months, from 20 days old. Until they're ready to start laying. It sounds like they don't have to feed the ducks, at all, while they're spread out on the rice paddies, and they live more or less normal duck lives, except they can't fly, and there appears to be little or no problem with predators. They really didn't show us very much of the day-to-day of the ducks on the paddies. And we don't know if they cage 'em up for the 3 years of egg-laying. He didn't say "no pesticide." He said "less pesticide." I wonder how much pesticide that means. Somewhere between "zero" and "a lot." Beekeepers ship their bees across the American continent to fertilize almonds in California, every year. Goat herds are used to keep the weeds down on public and private lands, and are also used in land restoration. In Idaho, people kill thistles with chemicals, blow torches, ANYthing to eliminate invasive Canadian Star Thistle and other nasty and tenacious species. But a smart person with goats could keep her herd fed for the cost of transporting them to fresh weed-infested pasture. Thistle has the virtue of bringing up nutrients and trace minerals from deep underground. A season or two fallow, where you let the thistle take over is a first step in land restoration. Goats love thistle, and their digestive system kills the seed (unlike birds). But the nutrients are returned to the top of the soil by their poop. Move some pigs on the ground for a short time, move them to the next space, and they'll soften up the soil and uproot everything in their enclosure. Move them after they've rooted it all up, and you're dang near ready for planting.
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  2.  @pauls4742  I disagree. The things I described are being done right now, for profit. And the monocrop-for-profit-with-chemicals is proving to not be good for the long-term. I can grow corn on the same land for generations, with chemical fertilizers, but those fertilizers are the basic nitrogen and phosphorous, sufficient for big yields, but the soil becomes depleted in trace minerals. And small-plot farming for profit is a growth industry. You don't have to pay all the middlemen and transportation costs. Like the guy growing oranges in his greenhouse in Nebraska. He competes very well with Florida citrus growers, because they only get about 10% of the $$$ from their crop. The rest goes to shipping and trucking companies. Then there's the Cultural piece of it. People would PREFER to eat food that is grown locally, if they had a choice, and most of us would pay a little extra, just to have a local source we can trust and even go visit! As far as "bringing in the goats" is concerned, there are more and more such herds every year. The people with weeds love that it's organic, and the goat herders get free, highly nutritious forage! Win-win! The problem with chemical farming is that the beautiful big tomatoes and broccoli you see on grocery-store shelves doesn't taste as good and isn't as nutritious as it was 50 or 100 years ago, because they just keep injecting the standard fertilizers to make them grow, but they don't have the same level of trace metals that they once had.
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