Insect farming is also one of the easiest ways- particularly for urbanites and/or those worried about food safety- to actively get in touch with your protein. Bugs require very little space to live and not a lot of care. Martinez, who is also an artist dedicated to micro architectural structures (i.e. small farms), created a home mealworm farm called Wurmhaus.

Mealworms are very low-maintenance livestock: they eat simply oats (or other grains) and for water, they need just pieces of vegetable or fruit (Martinez uses carrots). Though it does take a year to complete their lifecycle stages between egg, larva, pupa and adult beetle and since only the larvae are eaten, this involves some moving of eggs/beetles between homes.

Sujit Kumar is nearly 40. He is unable to comprehend language and interact with humans. He cannot use the toilet unassisted and until recently scavenged in the dirt for cigarette butts and cockroaches to eat.

Kumar comes from a background of horrific neglect, abandonment and abuse. Born in Fiji, he was caged with chickens under the house before the age of two. With no human interaction and only chickens for company, he learnt chicken behaviours. He was feral and would scratch and bite if humans came close.

At the age of eight, he was moved to an aged-“care” facility by welfare authorities. He spent the next 22 years tethered to a wall near a mattress covered in his own faeces. He was hosed down from a distance and was beaten. He pecked food from the ground and slept crouched in a roosting position with arms folded into wings.

His parents are dead and his siblings refuse to talk about what they know. No paperwork existed for him and his life was virtually untraceable.

source: http://baileybear.hubpages.com/hub/The-Boy-Who-Lived-as-a-Chicken

Organic farming according to EU 2092/91 aims at closed nutrient cycles, which means that external nutrient inputs are kept to a minimum. By comparison, conventional farming is input orientated, focusing on high crop productivity. Soil analytical methods for organic farming comprise physical, biological, chemical, and energetic soil tests. The spade diagnosis is an old field test to obtain “in situ” information about soil fertility, which has experienced a renaissance in organic farming. At the laboratory level, organic farming uses the standard chemical analytical methods used in conventional agriculture comprising the determination of organic matter, humus dynamics, pH, soluble plant nutrients and reserve fractions. Special attention is paid to phosphorus, which is determined in three different extracts (acetic, lactic, and citric acid) to assess phosphorus dynamics, which is an indicator of the turnover of organic matter. Compared with conventional agriculture, biological methods are of particular interest in organic farming. Soil biological methods, such as the release of CO₂, nitrification, dehydrogenase, amylase and protease activities, reflect the biological activity of soils. Problems of biological methods are the high spatiotemporal variability in dependence on biotic, pedogenetic, and climatic conditions and the lack of interpretation schemes for a transformation into practical recommendations. The soil chroma test is a method that aims to analyze energetic processes in soils. It is a so-called “picture forming” method and characteristic for the biodynamic school of organic farming.

(Communications in Soil Science and Plant Analysis, 36: 65–79, 2005)