Distribution

My brother explained to me a long time ago how he was slowly bringing a neighbor’s farm to his own farm.  It took a while but he ultimately made me see how when he bought hay from a neighbor and fed it to his own cattle he became the beneficiary of the nutrients from the neighbor’s farm as the manure was spread on my brother’s farm as fertilizer.  Ever so slowly those nutrients were being transferred from the neighbor’s farm to his own.

I know of a man in Colorado that raises hay for a living and trucks the product to New Mexico.  He is doing the same thing my brother explained to me, but a longer distance is involved.  Colorado nutrients are being hauled ever so slowly to New Mexico.

Out of nowhere tonight it dawned on me that some migratory birds support this same nutrient distribution system.  Ducks and Geese are prime examples of this phenomenon.  They live in the more northern areas all summer where they raise young.  The entire family of waterfowl live and eat where they nest in summer.  When it comes time to migrate the flying creatures remove some of the nutrients they have been eating to places in between their summer homes and their winter abode.  Here and there they defecate leaving some deposits of northern nutrients.  Once they have reached their destination a portion of them are slain and devoured by residents of the southern states.  In this case the waterfowl itself becomes the nutrients transported to a new place.

As I mused on this it struck me that an even larger transportation of nutrient moving is taking place on a continuous basis.  Oranges go from Florida to Maine.  Potatoes travel from Maine to California and strawberries are returned from there to New York.  There is really no end to this distribution as bananas move from South America to the United States and Spanish olives also travel in the same manner.

When one really thinks about it, humans are like a vast ant colony in the way they ever so slowly move things around on this planet.