[Homestead] Back in contact
Don Bowen
don.bowen at earthlink.net
Sun Mar 30 18:01:43 EDT 2008
I have spent the last month or so (really from the first of January) helping out on an organic vegetable farm in the Central Coast of California near Hollister. I did a little tractor work but mostly worked on tractors. You can look on my I was out of email contact most of the time so had little time to join in the discussion but I learned a lot. While there I spent time reading some of the magazines he gets and that was an education, mostly about what is not reported on the celebrity obsessed news.
Do you think that by buying organic food you are avoiding GMOs? Think again, genetic drift and the inability to keep GMO and non GMO separated combined with no testing have allowed significant GMOs into your diet even if you grow most of your own.
All farmers are suffering from very high fuel prices. I filled one tractor with over $150 worth of Diesel fuel. Delivery trucks to go to the several bay area farmers markets are consuming several hundred dollars a week while delivery to the farm is costing more every day.
Not having a computer and the Internet to distract me allowed me to finish several books on my very long list, unfortunately the list grew as fast as it shrank.
The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream by H.W. Brands was a very good book on the growth of California after the gold discovery of 1848. Several first person accounts livened up the book.
Building Green: A complete How-To of Alternative Building Methods by Clarke Snell & Tim Calahan was a much better description of various building methods than his earlier book. He built a small guest cottage using cob, cordwood, strawbale, and stick frame with a living roof.
World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler was a piece of modern apoplectic fiction. What happens when the oil runs out? His vision of the future is a little darker than mine but he presents it in a very readable fashion.
Peak Everything" Waking up to the Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg is another of his Peak Oil books. In it he tries to show that we are in a cheap oil derived economy and culture that the reduction of oil is also a reduction of many things including social progress and innovation.
I also added a couple of books to the list. One in particular is Glacial Lake Missoula and its Humongus Floods by David Alt. I will get to it next after I complete Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow by J.K. Rowling. There was a recent comment on the list about 70,000 years of glacial coverage in the upper Midwest. I have not replied because the Lake Missoula book is about a lake formed several times when glaciers dammed the Clark Fork in Northern Idaho. This book should tell me about the extent and time of glacial activity.
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