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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Livingontheland Digest, Vol 139, Issue 4

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: Michael Kaer <michaelkaer@yahoo.ca>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Livingontheland Digest, Vol 139, Issue 4
  • Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:53:21 -0400 (EDT)

I have several comments and will try to keep them short. The Die off described by one writer is far too low in my opinion. Assuming we will be getting along on a lifestyle like there was before oil was found, it would support about 1 billion people, because we are smart critters we may be able to get that up to 2 or 3, but I doubt it. Due to the bee situation the die off will go deeper than  expected.  The person saying stock up now is only repeating what I have been saying for years. Over a longer time period you can stock up more and be better prepped and save more in the long run. I grow herbs and veggies in my back yard. I am very lucky to have the space to do that. I can not produce enough food to be fully self sustaining on my little plot, but it will keep me from starving. My long term goal is to sell my place and move to a small farm of about 10 acres or so.

 With 10 acres I could easily be self sustaining if half of that is bush. I grow very good organic food with worm compost. No pesticides,herbicides or fertilizers come on my food other than stuff that may be blown on the wind and in the rain. There is not much I can do about that. I only need the worm compost and mulch.
 That is about all for now. Good luck to you and stay safe.
Michael J. Kaer - owner of mikesworms.com

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: Load Up the Pantry (Aliza)
2. Easy Being Green? (Tradingpost)
3. The Biofuels Scam, Food Shortages and the Coming Collapse of
the Human Population (Tradingpost)
4. What is Local and Regional Food (Tradingpost)
5. Re: Load Up the Pantry (Liz)
6. Re: Aussie Hybrid Willow tree (Liz)


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

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:20:44 -0700
From: "Aliza"
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Load Up the Pantry
To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing"

Message-ID: <000601c8a555$9a1e9d80$4400a8c0@1ECA66A679AB494>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
reply-type=original

This type of thinking only exacerbates the problem. The focus needs to be -
load up your pantry from your little garden. Oh and pass laws in your town
that lets you have a few hens and a couple mini goats so you dont need to go
to the store for your eggs, milk and cheese. Just a thought.

Aliza

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tradingpost"
To:
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 6:48 AM
Subject: [Livingontheland] Load Up the Pantry


>
> Load Up the Pantry
> April 21, 2008 6:47 p.m.
>
> I don't want to alarm anybody, but maybe it's time for Americans to start
> stockpiling food. No, this is not a drill.
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120881517227532621.html
>
> You've seen the TV footage of food riots in parts of the developing world.
> Yes, they're a long way away from the U.S. But most foodstuffs operate in
> a global market. When the cost of wheat soars in Asia, it will do the same
> here.
>
> Reality: Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns
> you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market
> fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are
> about to start rising a lot faster.
>
> "Load up the pantry," says Manu Daftary, one of Wall Street's top
> investors and the manager of the Quaker Strategic Growth mutual fund. "I
> think prices are going higher. People are too complacent. They think it
> isn't going to happen here. But I don't know how the food companies can
> absorb higher costs." (Full disclosure: I am an investor in Quaker
> Strategic)
>
> Stocking up on food may not replace your long-term investments, but it may
> make a sensible home for some of your shorter-term cash. Do the math. If
> you keep your standby cash in a money-market fund you'll be lucky to get a
> 2.5% interest rate. Even the best one-year certificate of deposit you can
> find is only going to pay you about 4.1%, according to Bankrate.com. And
> those yields are before tax.
>
> Meanwhile the most recent government data shows food inflation for the
> average American household is now running at 4.5% a year.
>
> And some prices are rising even more quickly. The latest data show cereal
> prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than
> 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They're all up by more
> than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up
> 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.
>
> These are trends that have been in place for some time.
>
> And if you are hoping they will pass, here's the bad news: They may
> actually accelerate.
>
> The reason? The prices of many underlying raw materials have risen much
> more quickly still. Wheat prices, for example, have roughly tripled in the
> past three years.
>
> Sooner or later, the food companies are going to have to pass those costs
> on. Kraft saw its raw material costs soar by about $1.25 billion last
> year, squeezing profit margins. The company recently warned that higher
> prices are here to stay. Last month the chief executive of General Mills,
> Kendall Powell, made a similar point.
>
> The main reason for rising prices, of course, is the surge in demand from
> China and India. Hundreds of millions of people are joining the middle
> class each year, and that means they want to eat more and better food.
>
> A secondary reason has been the growing demand for ethanol as a fuel
> additive. That's soaking up some of the corn supply.
>
> You can't easily stock up on perishables like eggs or milk. But other
> products will keep. Among them: Dried pasta, rice, cereals, and cans of
> everything from tuna fish to fruit and vegetables. The kicker: You should
> also save money by buying them in bulk.
>
> If this seems a stretch, ponder this: The emerging bull market in
> agricultural products is following in the footsteps of oil. A few years
> ago, many Americans hoped $2 gas was a temporary spike. Now it's the rosy
> memory of a bygone age.
>
> The good news is that it's easier to store Cap'n Crunch or cans of
> Starkist in your home than it is to store lots of gasoline. Safer, too.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Livingontheland mailing list
> Livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/livingontheland
>
>



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

Message: 2
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:12:04 -0600
From: "Tradingpost"
Subject: [Livingontheland] Easy Being Green?
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Message-ID: <200804232112040546.1300A7DE@mail.lobo.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"


It's Easy Being Green, celebrities interviewed on the Fine Living Channel, first aired Mar 30,31.
http://www.fineliving.com/fine/our_specials/episode/0,1663,FINE_5916_50485,00.html
They included RFK Jr., Paul Newman, Darrel Hannah, Helen Hunt, Willie Nelson, Alice Cooper.

They featured Newman's organic restaurant including a weekly farmers market on the property.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/dining/27newm.html

It's also easy to dismiss them for being shallow, like Cooper's recycled golf balls with 300 golf courses in Arizona hogging scarce water resources. And lowering our consumption to sustainable levels is going to be anything but easy. But IMHO they're also beginning to make "green" things trendy. So it becomes uncool to waste energy and to eat supermarket garbage and so forth. One can hope.


paul tradingpost@lobo.net




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

Message: 3
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:12:28 -0600
From: "Tradingpost"
Subject: [Livingontheland] The Biofuels Scam, Food Shortages and the
Coming Collapse of the Human Population
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Message-ID: <200804232112280999.13010763@mail.lobo.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"


The Biofuels Scam, Food Shortages and the Coming Collapse of the Human Population
Wednesday, April 23, 2008 by: Mike Adams
http://www.naturalnews.com/023091.html

(NaturalNews) It was one of the dumbest "green" ideas ever proposed: Convert millions of acres of cropland into fields for growing ethanol from corn, then burn fossil fuels to harvest the ethanol, expending more energy to extract the fuel than you get from the fuel itself! Meanwhile, sit back and proclaim you've achieved a monumental green victory (President Bush, anyone?) all while unleashing a dangerous spike in global food prices that's causing a ripple effect of food shortages and rationing around the world.

I think politicians need to spend less time bragging about their latest greenwashing schemes and more time studying The Law of Unintended Consequences. Because while growing fuel on cropland initially sounds like a great idea, any honest assessment of the total impact leads you to the inescapable conclusion that biofuels are largely a government-sponsored scam. With a few exceptions (see below), biofuels produce no net increase in energy output, and they cause food shortages while creating strong economic incentives for the destruction of the very rainforests we desperately need to stabilize the climate!

And now we're just starting to see the early signs of the economic and social insanity that has been unleashed by this foolish pursuit of biofuels around the world: Food rationing in Sam's Club stores in the U.S., rapidly-rising prices on bread, rice and corn, and price spikes at cafeterias and restaurants that depend on these staple ingredients. The price of rice has tripled globally, unleashing riots in Haiti and Bangladesh, and the United Nations has issued warnings that millions of people around the world now face starvation because they can't afford to buy food. Americans are even starting to hoard food once again, after years of avoiding basic preparedness measures. (One benefit to all this, however, is that farmers are actually getting paid decent prices for their crops now, after years of operating on the verge of bankruptcy...)

Most biofuel efforts are a sham
Not all of these price spikes are due to the conversion of croplands to biofuel fields, but much of it is. As a result, it's suddenly becoming obvious to nearly everyone that the pursuit of biofuels, as currently structured, is a grand greenwashing hoax. It doesn't produce more fuel than it consumes, and it drives up food prices to boot!

Now, there are biofuels programs that really do work. The growing and harvesting of sugar cane in Brazil, for example, provides an 8-to-1 return on energy investment. But even that pursuit is tarnished by claims of unsafe work environments and massive environmental pollution (the sugar cane fields are burned before being harvested, a process that releases massive amounts of CO2 into the environment).

The only truly promising biofuels technology available today is based on microalgae. Feed CO2 to a vat of algae, and you can produce biofuels cheaply and responsibly, without destroying the environment. But these programs are only in experimental phases. Nobody is producing biofuels on a large scale from algae farms (not yet, anyway).

And that leaves the great American breadbasket: The corn and wheat fields. It is here that food is now being displaced by crops grown for biofuel processing. So where a farmer used to grow corn as a food source, he's now growing it to sell to a biofuel processing facility which turns the corn into ethanol. Obviously, the laws of economics come into play here, meaning that every bushel of corn used for biofuels production means one less bushel of corn available for food. Factor in the laws of supply and demand, and you can see that the more crops we use for biofuels, the higher the prices will rise for food.

Politicians, it seems, have no understanding of economics. They need to study the basics as they are presented in Henry Hazlitt's Book, Economics in One Lesson, which is a Libertarian-oriented guide that explains basic economics to anyone willing to learn. Economics is focused on the study of human behavior, or more precisely, consumer choice. Now, it seems, consumers are about to be faced with a choice they never wanted to have to make: Should I buy fuel, or food?

In other words: Do I want to drive my car, or do I want to eat?

You can have fuel or food, but not both
Under a biofuels-focused agricultural policy, the same limited resources (soil, sunlight and water, essentially) can be used for only one thing at a time. You can't use the corn twice, obviously (you can't eat the corn and process it for biofuels at the same time), so you've got to make a choice: Will you grow the corn for fuel, or for food?

The more you grow for fuel, of course, the less food you have, and that drives up food prices. But if you swing back the other way and grow more corn for food to ease food prices, the fuel prices go up. Trying to solve both problems at once is a bit like trying to pick up a wet watermelon seed with your fingers: It keeps slipping to the side.

One thing that has become abundantly clear in all this is that the era of cheap food and cheap fuel is over. I've written about this on NaturalNews, where I use the term "food bubble" to describe the most recent era of cheap food. As it turns out, cheap food is only made possible by cheap oil, and with oil now approaching $120 a barrel (a price that virtually no one thought possible just two years ago), food prices are simultaneously skyrocketing. (Modern farming practices use a lot of fossil fuel. So does transporting food across the country or around the world. Eat local, folks!)

Add to this the fact that global climate change is already underway, altering weather patterns and creating floods, droughts and other agricultural calamities, and you start to get the picture of just how bad things might get. That's not even to mention the very serious problem of collapsing honeybee populations due to a mysterious condition called colony collapse disorder that's devastating honeybee populations across North America right this minute. Honeybees, in case you didn't know, pollinate plants that represent about 30% of all the calories consumed by Americans. That's about one out of every three bites of your dinner, and it all depends on the "free" work performed by honeybees -- bees who are apparently going on strike by refusing to keep working for us.

Prepare for mass global starvation
So, to repeat, the food bubble is now starting to implode. What does it all mean? It means that as these economic and climate realities unfold, our world is facing massive starvation and food shortages. The first place this will be felt is in poor developing nations. It is there that people live on the edge of economic livelihood, where even a 20% rise in the price of basic food staples can put desperately-needed calories out of reach of tens of millions of families. If something is not done to rescue these people from their plight, they will starve to death.

Wealthy nations like America, Canada, the U.K., and others will be able to absorb the price increases, so you won't see mass starvation in North America any time soon (unless, of course, all the honeybees die, in which case prepare to start chewing your shoelaces...), but it will lead to significant increases in the cost of living, annoying consumers and reducing the amount of money available for other purchases (like vacations, cars, fuel, etc.). That, of course, will put downward pressure on the national economy.

But what we're seeing right now, folks, is just a small foreshadowing of events to come in the next couple of decades. Think about it: If these minor climate changes and foolish biofuels policies are already unleashing alarming rises in food prices, just imagine what we'll see when Peak Oil kicks in and global oil supplies really start to dwindle. When gasoline is $10 a gallon in the U.S., how expensive will food be around the world? The answer, of course, is that it will be triple or quadruple the current price. And that means many more people will starve.

Fossil fuels, of course, aren't the only limiting factor threatening future food supplies on our planet: There's also fossil water. That's water from underground aquifers that's being pumped up to the surface to water crops, then it's lost to evaporation. Countries like India and China are depending heavily on fossil water to irrigate their crops, and not surprisingly, the water levels in those aquifers is dropping steadily. In a few more years (as little as five years in some cases), that water will simply run dry, and the crops that were once irrigated to feed a nation will dry up and turn to dust. Mass starvation will only take a few months to kick in. Think North Korea after a season of floods. Perhaps 95% of humanity is just one crop season away from mass starvation.

The carrying capacity of planet Earth has reached its apex
The truth about all this, folks, is that the resources on our planet can only support a limited population, and I think we've over-populated the planet to a point where we're wiping out non-renewable resources at an alarming rate. This means a population correction is due. When there are too many people consuming too much food, using up too much water and burning too much oil, you can get away with a rapid expansion for a little while (a few decades, perhaps), but eventually reality kicks in and there's a global population correction that brings the population size back down to levels that can be sustained on the planet.

It's not a pretty picture. We're talking about the loss of a billion human lives, perhaps more. This is what's coming. It's as predictable as the laws of gravity. When you over-populate a planet and use up all the resources, the population eventually finds itself in a resource panic, and mass death ensues. You can observe the same thing with colonies of bacteria on a nutrient-rich petri dish: They will expand at an accelerating rate, multiplying their numbers until there's no more food left in the petri dish, and then they will experience a massive die-off. You might say that human beings are smarter than bacteria, and that's true, but as current events are clearly demonstrating, they're not much wiser! They still doom themselves to the same stupid fate by refusing to look at the long-term implications of their actions.

Humans are really good at making babies and eating food, but they're terrible at thinking even ten years ahead about the implications of their present-day decisions. That's why the global population control masterminds call people "feeders and breeders," by the way. Those are the two things human beings do extremely well: Fornicate and clean their plate. (Not necessarily in that order, though...)

The economies of our world have, sadly, been based on economic models that strongly encourage this kind of consumption and growth. We live in a "throwaway economy," where people are encouraged to consume and expend as much as possible. No corporation makes money teaching people how to use less. And so we've pushed for aggressive expansion since about the 1950's: Build more, eat more, consume more. We've turned farm lands into housing tracts, and rainforests into biofuel fields. We've over-fished the oceans, over-farmed the soils and over-extended ourselves to the point where a population correction is inevitable. We, the human race, have painted ourselves into a desperate corner, and the simple fact of the matter is that unless we quickly discover some new energy technology that provides the world with cheap, plentiful energy, we are headed straight towards a global population implosion that will leave a billion or more people dead.

And biofuels, of course, are no answer for this problem. You cannot grow enough corn to solve the problems of an expansionist, imperialistic race of beings (that's us humans) who have taken over the planet like a cancer tumor, wiped out countless species, destroyed huge swaths of natural rainforests, poisoned the oceans and rivers, polluted the skies and, at every opportunity, betrayed the very Earth that has given us a home in the first place. Humans can betray Mother Nature for a while, but in the end, we will pay a dear price for our own arrogance, greed and lack of vision. The human race is being sent back to kindergarten, where it needs to learn some basic lessons about living in harmony with the planet. Lessons like: Don't use up all the resources in a few generations. Don't think you're smarter than nature. And never forget how much Mother Nature does for us all for free! (Like pollinating the crops, producing oxygen, cleaning the air, water, etc. Read the book Myceliu

=== message truncated ===


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  • Re: [Livingontheland] Livingontheland Digest, Vol 139, Issue 4, Michael Kaer, 04/24/2008

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