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  • From: Don Bowen <don.bowen AT earthlink.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Technology
  • Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2006 14:41:17 -0800

At 11/15/2006, you wrote:
Example: the Irish potato
famine, once the variety that grew so well, stopped
growing so well, there was starvation.

Take another step or two back and see what was going on. At the time Ireland was producing a surplus of wheat. England had stiff import duties on wheat called the "Corn laws" (wheat is called corn). Farmers still held political power and stiff import duties meant that wheat was very high priced. Irish farmers produced wheat for the English market while the peasants had only the potato. Millions either starved or migrated while land owners became wealthy.

In England the industrialists were starting to gain political power and the wittings of the economist Ricardo (if I remember correctly) were becoming popular. One of his points was that the cost of labor was based on the cost of food for the laborer. The industrialists were pushing for the repeal of the corn laws while the politically powerful land owners resisted. The repeal of the corn laws signaled a change in the power structure that took to the end of the century to complete.



Don Bowen Awl Knotted Up KI6DIU
http://www.braingarage.com
My travel journal
http://www.braingarage.com/Dons/Travels/journal/Journal.html

I am omnivagant.
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Lisa K.V. Perry wrote:
He always thought soup
in a can--and being able to buy ice cream!--was the neatest thing.
LOL My grandmother too was very impressed with cans in a store. She and her friends were my son's homeschool history. He learned to write and interview and wrote up their memoirs for their children. Almost each one started speaking to him with, "Now I know this will be hard for you to imagine because life is so different for you."
Grandma was 2 weeks shy of 100 when she decided she'd had enough, in November 1998. Cresting 2 millenia was more than she wanted. I would have loved to met her father. With no sons he invented ways to manage a farm without heavy lifting and only help w digging 2 times a year. All without power engines. One article she kept was a newspaper interviewing him about his farm's success without chemical pesticides. He attributed it to the fact he hadn't fallen for that newfangled idea of fences. Continuing to use hedgerows allowed a healthy flock of prairie chickens who darted out and ate the bugs off his crops. She often described how he had a windmill pump water thru the kitchen, then the barn, then the fields for irrigation, so they didn't have to draw water. I hope I have some of those genes.

Kathyann





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