Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

Lynda (comments not in original order):

>Plus, you reframed the discussion.  Individuals can make a 
>difference which is precisely what you do with your own little corner of the 
>world.  The advice was sound for the purpose proposed. 

Not in this case.  The advice (to use fryer oil as diesel fuel to make 
farmstead produce delivery financially feasible) does serve to point out the 
greater 
problem.  Does my food production using essentially no motor fuel make a 
difference in the world food supply?  No.  In this the situation is exactly 
like 
the notion that a five gallon fryer full of peanut oil makes a difference in 
the world fuel supply.  But there is one very important difference in the two 
(food vs fuel).  

While our food production makes no difference in the world food supply, how 
many people could, if they were minded, do what we are doing?  I have said in 
the past - everyone.  But on another list someone challanged that with the 
same 
sort of numbers I use in reference to fuel and showed that the biomass, 
carbon, phosphorus, etc. doesn't exist in the world for all six billion 
people to 
grow food in the manner we do.  OK.  But at least a billion and probably two 
or 
three billion.

On the other hand, how many people can supply themselves with motor fuel from 
fryer oil?  Or algae, yeast, cellulose, sugar cane?  The potential for those 
resources are so hugely limited by the physics of it that unlike food, which 
could be produced sustainably at 25% to 75% of its currentl level, all our 
combined efforts at producing motor fuel can never amount to more than a tiny 
fraction of the current rate of fuel use.

It should be of interest that the suggestion that we get a diesel truck and 
use fryer oil to continue the produce delivery gig won't work.  All the fryer 
oil here abouts is spoken for well in advance.  And thus:

(Lynda)>Nor were we worrying about providing the whole world with fuel.

But we are.  We can't help but talk about it.  The world has all its fuel 
hoses in a common tank to a much, much larger extent than is the case with 
food.  
As petro diesel gets more and more expensive, the demand placed on fryer oil  
rose in response to it.  It's gone.  And for what?  Here people are using it 
to power pleasure boats just for the one-ups-manship of it.  They don't care 
if in the end getting it and fetching it and filtering it costs them $5 a 
gallon.

The result has been that in this microcosm, availability of real sustainable 
foodstuffs (that from my farmstead) is no longer available because of motor 
fuel costs.  Ironic, that, because there is not motor fuel involved in 
producing 
any of it, yet the cost of fuel has made it unavailable.  

I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more press, but in six of the past seven 
years, the world has eaten more food than it has produced.  Refer to:

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=33268

One the reasons is that in many areas of the world agribusiness just isn't as 
profitable as it once was and investors get out of it.  The main reason cited 
now of days is fuel costs.


(Lynda)>And, we were talking diesel of which we use 6 billion gallons a year.

This is why it's so important to emphasize the math aspect of the discussion. 
 We use 60 billion gallons of diesel a year, not 6.  120 billion gallons of 
gasoline and a total of 600 billion gallons of oil for all purposes 
(fertilizer, plastic, lubricants, aviation fuel, heating oil, electric 
generation, etc.)  
 [the source of this is the US Dept of Energy],  30 million gallons is so 
insignificant in comparison that:

(Lynda)>ANY reduction is a good thing.

If you were on a large ship that was sinking because of a massive hole in the 
hull, would you stay there bailing out the ship with a Dixie cup because "ANY 
reduction is a good thing"??   That's precisely the situation.  We are in 
desperate need (individually and collectively) of grasping onto a lifestyle 
that 
does not depend for its existence on massive quantities of motor fuel.  Oils 
produced from yeast and the leavings of French fryers is a dangerous 
distraction.  It leads people to think they can go on status quo (like 
delivering 
vegetables by using fryer oil).

(Lynda) >     Could you perhaps explain why others are so vigorously 
dissauded by you from doing anything each time anything pro-active is brought 
up on 
the list.

What you call 'dissuade' is simply letting the math point out the level of 
fantasy involved in so  many such proposals.  People who live in fantasies 
don't 
like math, it's like waking them rudely from a pleasant dream.  People who 
live the paradigm, rather than muse about it, breathe and sleep the math, 
logistics, physics, and reality of it.

As I have pointed out before, most homestead enterprises as they are 
discussed here depend just as much on the Oil Culture as does the rest of our 
modern 
experience.   We see so many people equating the homestead experience with 
"getting off the grid".  Fine.  But getting off the grid is insignificant 
compared 
with getting off the pump.  As motor fuel gets more and more costly, so will 
feed-stuffs, machinery, building materials, etc.  But just with animal feed 
alone, what will happen to most homesteads when the cost of motor fuel makes 
feed and hay nearly impossible to be had?    I hear very few homesteads being 
described as being other than what I call the mini-agribusiness model, 
dependent 
on outside input of material (and therefore energy) to operate.  That is, 
what 
good will having a diesel truck and two 55 gallon drums of salad oil be when 
you drive that truck to the feed store and chicken feed is $45 as bag?



---------------------------------

> As to Brazil, the point wasn't comparing the size or use in Brazil, the 
> point was they don't use virgin/first source anything. 


I'm not sure I follow this.  Are you saying Brazil doesn't use virgin/first 
source anything?  If so, that's not even close to true.  Almost all ethanol 
in 
Brazil is from first pressing sugar cane with the partially spent cane being 
used to fire the distillery boilers.


 In this country 

> alone we landfill enough wood and wood scrape from mills to create enough 
> ethenol to fuel several fleets for a year.  One more waste product that can 
> be used.
> 

In Stevenson's Treasure Island, when Long John berates the pirates for 
squandering their ill gotten loot, he says:  "'Tain't the getting of it, it's 
the 
saving of it..."

Getting a few more Dixie cups full of motor fuel is neither here nor there.  
The real issue is how do we use less .... a lot less.


James