F.A. Farm

The Independent (Britain's best newspaper) had an article today (March 26th) on the rat problem in Flamborough, Yorkshire. Here's a quote from the article.

• The main cause, argues the National Pest Technicians Association (NPTA), is the decision of local authorities to start charging up to £100 a time to deal with rat problems within their borders. Fortnightly bin collections and the decomposing mountains of discarded takeaway food that litter our streets are also to blame. But the well-intentioned householder must also shoulder some responsibility. Inadequately covered compost bins, the allotment boom and over-stocked bird feeders are fuelling the problem. In Flamborough, it's the weather that's to blame. Waterlogged and snow-covered fields over winter meant local farmers were unable to plough in the rotting stubble, unwittingly providing an unlimited food source for this ever-opportunistic and resourceful rodent.

One householder also blamed the practice of shooting hawks, which I didn't know was a problem in Britain. On our farm, we have a plethora of sky-born predators and they are constantly patrolling the fields. We also have cats who bring in a big fat vole every so often, as well as the occasional unwary robin.

The problem of rubble and the use of cover crops that provide cover and food for rodents is an aspect that postmodern farmers might want to consider futher. I do some fall tilling as it disturbs the slug eggs and allows me to get into the fields a few days earlier in the spring. This is a tradeoff as there is a question of erosion, even with my flat ground. There is also the question of disturbing the biotic community underground. I am not totally committed to fall tilling, however. I am pointing this out as an example of the multiple variables inherent in every farming decision. Growing up on a farm in Minnesota, it was more of a time question than an erosion question. If you are still picking corn in November, there is no time to plow. Nowadays, I do some fall tilling and some fall cover crops. I also left some grain in the field last year and this attracted a lot of birds, including a brace of pheasants, which now worry me because of their scratching in the dirt.

Let's try a voluntary paradigm shift. Instead of assuming that the food we buy is safe, let's assume it is not 100% safe. In other words there is no certainty. [This is my old stat tutor persona coming to the fore, by the way.] Now, since we cannot say something is 100% - i.e. not certain - we can assign a probability value to the issue of food safety. Then it is a short leap to the idea of managing food safety risk. For example, if you grow your own food, you cannot be 100% certain that your food is safe. For example, your dog may be out in the garden chasing rabbits at night and then leave a little deposit on your salad greens. In the morning you may munch these same salad greens without even thinking about it. Admittedly, this kind of scenario has a low probability, say 1%, but I am sure you follow my line of reasoning.

Okay, if we are assigning probabilities, we don't even have to measure them; all we have to do is be in the ballpark or even just rank them. For example, if you grow your own vegetables, you have a greater probability of safety than if you buy them at the store or a farmers market. You even have a greater probability than if you buy from a certified organic grower. (Remember - the E. coli outbreak in 2006 was spread by certified organic spinach.) So now we are actively managing our risk by growing our own produce - even though it is not 100% safe. We can rank them in the following scale.
1) Grow your own - Best
2) Buy from a grower you trust - Better
3) Buy certified organic - Usually okay
4) Buy from a supermarket you trust - Usually okay
Notice how I rank certified organic in the same category as from a supermarket you trust. The third-party certification people will surely object to this assumption on my part, but I back it up with experiential evidence. I look at the nature of the corporation that sells food and this is a proxy for knowing the origin of the food. In other words, I would rather buy from a supermarket that is honest than from a crooked organically-certified grower. Business ethics are the operative deciding point in this case. Notice also that I don't use the category "farmers market." A farmers market is just a venue, not a supplier per se.

The bottom line is to reject certainty as a chimera. Then we can focus on managing risk. Effectively managing risk means making decisions about what we buy. The more active we are the better.

When I was a ski bum in Vail in 1980, I could go out and buy dinner for two, with a nice bottle of French wine and pay $100, including tip. Last night, Toni and I had a wonderful dinner, with a 2005 French Bordeaux, for $100, including tip. The featured entree was a 14-oz. ribeye, which we split. The included side dish was garlic mashed potatoes and we ordered French Onion soup, braised mushrooms and a special house salad as extra sides. For dessert, we had one of my favorites from my ski-bum days, vanilla ice cream with a shot of Grand Marnier on top.

I am sure you can see the theme here - a momentary return to the good old days when we were in our thirties, young and strong. I was also a waiter back then and quite involved in restaurants. What I found interesting last night is how good the steak tasted (medium-rare by the way), even though we routinely eat grass-fed beef from the quarter we bought last year. We also don't eat much meat, about once or twice a week for an entree and mostly for flavoring our vegetable dishes or pasta. Also, I first tasted grass-fed beef around 1981 when one of my high-school buddies started raising it and I happened to be back in my home town. Grass-fed beef is certainly the preferred red meat in our house, but it did not make us feel like traitors to have a nicely-grilled, aged, corn-fed steak. For those of you Ferndalians and Bellinghamsters who want to know the name of the restaurant, send me an email. Otherwise, I will just say it is on the Res and you have to walk past the slot machines to get there. Bon appetit!

We don't use tractors for tilling, planting or cultivation. If I need some field mowing done, I hire the neighbor and I spend about $100 per year. My gas costs last year for my tillers was less than $100 and my estimate of actual gallons used was 27.5 gallons. A gallon of gas contains approximately 31,000 calories. [By the way, these are kilocalories, but calories is the usual shorthand used. Some scientists prefer joules, but since calories are understood by nearly everyone as a valid unit of energy produced and consumed, I still use calories. This is science adapting to cultural usage.] Therefore, my tiller gas last year amounted to 852,500 calories (31,000 X 27.5). As a contrast, I estimate I put in 1000 calories per day into the farm out of a total calorie usage of 2500 per day. In other words, I put in 365,000 calories to grow food in 2008. These are gross estimates of course, but I only have this one job and it is my main focus. I do participate in other activities and I do drop 10-15 pounds in the summer each year, so after subtracting 1250 calories for the daily maintenace of my body from my calorie count per day and 250 calories for non-work activities, I feel 1000 calories per day for farm work is a good conservative number. It might be less but probably not more.

I cultivated 2.5 acres last year by hand and with my tillers, so if I contributed 365,000 calories and the tiller gas I used contributed 852,500 calories, the total of just these two energy sources was 1,217,500 calories, or 487,000 calories per acre. Now, based on last year's potato production of 1,998.6# for 1785 row feet, or 4,462.5 sq. ft. (rows are on 2.5 foot centers), I produced the equivalent of .448# of potatoes per square foot, or 19,500# of potatoes per acre. Potatoes are about 350 calories per pound (some say 385 but I will use the lower figure), so that is 6,825,000 calories per acre. If I had produced potatoes, at this rate, on 2.5 acres, I would have had over 17 million calories produced, for a calorie cost of 1.2 million calories. In realistic terms, potatoes form the upper limit on calories produced per acre as they easily produce twice as many calories per wheat per acre. [The usual metric is 6-8 million calories per acre for potatoes and 3-4 million calories per acre for wheat. Diversified vegetable production is always going to be lower than just potatoes, hence potato production as defining the upper limit.]

Here's the bottom line. Potatoes produced at a rate (remember this is a relative rate, not an absolute quantity) of 17 million calories and human+gas inputs at 1.2 million calories equals a 14-to-1 ratio. This is a very nice metric and reinforces my claim that I produce over 10 calories of food for every calorie I put into producing the food. What is new about this analysis is the role of tiller gas. It would be an affront to mathematics to try and isolate the role of the tiller gas vs. human labor, because there is also an interaction between the two variables. In other words, I get a lot of work done because I use a combination of tiller gas and human sweat to drive both engines (the tiller and my body), which are combined into a practical meta-engine of the human behind the tiller. However, I can say this: The most practical alternative right now, at this time in history, is a human using a walk-behind tiller. The gas costs in dollars and calories are low and the human sweat provides an added dimension to the calories produced by the fossil fuels. In the brave new world after petroleum is no longer feasible, it is likely farmers will actually make a fair return on their labor, so I might be able to make a living on only half an acre that I till, plant and cultivate entirely by hand.

Raj Patel, in his book Stuffed and Starved (2007:308), compares a multiplier rate of 1.4 for supermarkets in Britain and a CSA multiplier rate of 2.59. For those who haven't run into this term before, a multiplier rate (or effect) is simply a rate of increase for dollars or pounds or euros recycled in the community. If a farmer gets $500 for a CSA share and the rate is 2.59, the $500 gets recycled into the community and those dollars are spent 2 1/2 times before the money dribbles out into the larger economy and spreads beyond the community. The supermarket, on the other hand, sends most of its profits to corporate headquarters. To my mind, even the supermarket rate of 1.4 is simply a function of paychecks cashed in the local economy. [As a sidebear, what made slavery so financially rewarding in the "bad old days" was that there were no paychecks. Spanish conquistadors landed in big ships, lived off the Indians' food and labor and sailed back to Spain with boatloads of concentrated wealth with which to enrich themselves and the king. We could even postulate that supermarkets are on the same continuum of extraction as the old conquistadors - simply on a smaller scale. And for those who have ever worked in a supermarket, the correlation between supermarkets and slavery is apt.]

However, back to my main point. Patel only mentions Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs as a vehicle for getting the community involved. As with many writers, his focus is to get the community to be virtuous. In other words, he trumpets the same call to arms which so many CSA farms use in their marketing. The usual advertising I see is an appeal to support the farmer, to share the risk and feel all "warm and fuzzy inside." I feel this is a mistake because it is dependent on disposable income, rather than efficiences in householder economics. Other marketers emphasize the weekly farm visit as a learning experience and this is somewhat better, until the CSA farm gets big enough to warrant multiple dropoff points. I suggest that a better marketing strategy is to emphasize enlightened self-interest. For example, I use a multi-tiered pricing system and people can easily see that paying $400 in January for $500 of food starting in June is a good deal. The problem then becomes one of cashflow for the shareholder and the cashflow "burden" is shifted from the farmer to the shareholder. For most mainstream farmers the cashflow burden is shifted onto the banks, but the farmer pays for this shift. In my program, giving the shareholder a 25% increase in their food for a 4-month loan is not onerous AT THIS TIME because I simply cannot sell all the food I can grow. Plus, I cannot get bank loans for production. In the future, if I can sell all I can grow, I might have to rethink this marketing tactic.

Another aspect to enlightened self-interest is the nutrient density and taste of sustainably-grown food. My salad mix regularly receives rave reviews, even compared to other organic farmers' salad mix, and I feel this is because of the quality of my soil. I put a lot of effort into building up my soil and this seems to be paying dividends after only four years on this farm. If a pound of my potatoes at $1.50 has twice the nutrient density (not just vitamins and minerals but other unmeasurable "intangibles") of a pound of supermarket potatoes at $.79 a pound, then they are a good deal for the shareholder. If they also taste better, it is a no-brainer. There is a concentrated effort by agribusiness to select nutrition studies that show no difference between food grown by sustainable/organic producers and that grown by mainstream/chemical agriculture. Yet people can taste the difference and even feel the difference in their own bodies. To my mind, agribusiness is just shooting themselves in the foot (to mangle my metaphor) when they try to select the studies that support their position.

So, the bottom line is to emphasize enlightened self-interest rather than trying to convince your shareholders to be virtuous.

In the March 13, 2009 issue of the Western Front (Western Washington University's student newspaper), the lead article was about Sodexo (the company that provides meals to Western) spraying trans fat oil on steamed vegetables. The reason seems to be that they sit on the steam table so long that they get dehydrated and the taste deteriorates. Not very much is sprayed, only one-fourth cup per 20 vegetable servings. Some of the oil sits on the bottom of the pan after it drips off the vegetables, and the estimate is that one-tenth tablespoon per cup of vegetables remains on the vegetables. This amounts to 12 calories, but it is 12 calories of trans fat, since the oil used, under the brand name Phase, contains hydrogenated oil. This may not seem like very much, this type of oil has been used for this purpose since 1976, and the trans fats are not listed because the hydrogenated oil is in the "recipe." As another fact, the student manager was critical of the whistle-blower who only went public because she did not get any response from Sodexo. His comment was, "Recipes don't belong to the employees. [The whistle-blower's name] shouldn't have said anything."

Let's parse this problem and see if it really is the usual corporate nonsense or a tempest in a teapot.
1) Trans fat on steamed vegetables - Yuck. Why would I want trans fat on my steamed broccoli? In most restaurants, if the vegetables on the steam table dry out or taste bad, you replace them. Why should students, who are really a captive audience, be treated worse than normal restaurant patrons? Is it because they are "just" college students?
2) Not very much is sprayed - This is true, but even a little bit of trans fat seems to have a major effect on human health and it certainly degrades the taste.
3) This has been going on since 1976 - Yes, and the Iraq War has been going on for 6 years. That doesn't mean a bad practice should be continued.
4) Ingredients in the recipe don't have to be listed - This is just "let the buyer beware" and is really unconscionable. This is the same kind of argument that China used in accepting melamine in animal feed until the international community held them accountable.
5) "Recipes don't belong to the employees." - This is just nonsense and an attempt to broaden the scope of intellectual property and copyright law.

So . . . corporate nonsense or a tempest in a teapot? I would say this particular issue rises to the level of corporate malfeasance. I suggest Sodexo stop this practice, issue a public apology to the brave student who had the nerve to go public, and open their "recipes" to an independent panel of student auditors. Who knows? There may be other egregious practices that need the light of day.

Last night I sat in on a book reading and discussion by Woody Tasch, author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (2008). Of course, this is not a new topic, but some of Tasch's ideas may be doable now that the economy has plunged so far that people are questioning the whole basis of modern economies. Evidently, it is a revolutionary idea that foundations would invest their money in businesses that actually relate to their mission. As an example, a foundation may invest in Monsanto so that the return on their investment can be used to support sustainable agriculture. The 8% or so that the investment returns every year goes to a worthy cause, but 100% of the principal goes to support biological engineering. This is the dirty little secret behind philanthropy. Tasch's suggestion is to work within the grant/philanthropy/foundation system to get small amounts of principal that would actually be used to invest in sustainable businesses. If I read his argument right (which is difficult because he is a terrible public speaker), this is "slow" money, rather than "fast" money that only concerns itself with rapid rates of return.

As usual, Tasch represents yet another scheme that must be marketed and publicized, sending him on jaunts across the country and providing the rationale for organizations that brand themselves as "sustainable" to exist. This strikes me as more of a jobs program for sharp business people who are still trying to surf the crest of the old business model. I did not hear anyone last night propose anything radical - for instance, that 10 people write a check for 10% of their income and give it to a sustainable farmer. I didn't hear any mention of how to get more money for CSA subscription farms. I didn't hear any discussion of how the CSA model stands the current payment model on its head. I didn't hear any discussion on pricing at all. The whole focus of discussion was on how to get more money from foundations by convincing them of the justice of the sustainable "cause." There was a somewhat liberal question on how to stay small, but the usual throwaway answer of looking at successful business models in the marketplace.

The bottom line is that once again, solutions that have to be marketed and discussed endlessly and depend on grant money are really no solutions at all. Individuals and families have to act in their own best interests and go out and support farmers and other local businesses. I can grow more food than I can sell. Until that turns around, all the fancy-dancy authors and marketers are just making money for themselves by giving people false hope.

Last night Toni and I tried out a new French restaurant in Bellingham. We gave it a B on food and a C on service. First the waitress. Aside from being slow and with traces of that Bellingham "edge" that so infuriates us (sort of like the irritable Portland types transplanted into a cowtown), she was trying hard to be pleasant. Thus a middling grade on service. As for the food, we opted for the specials. Toni had the duck lasagna and the flavors were married quite well, but the duck seemed a little old to me, but not to Toni. I had the cassoulet with pork tenderloin. The flavor was complex but tilted a little too much on the bacon side. The pork tenderloins were added on top of the beans, in the haute cuisine style, but I could have used less pork and more beans. This is, after all, a peasant dish. We had a yam and garlic terrine for an appetizer. Again, the flavors were married quite well in the terrine, but the dish was a bit greasy. I could envision this particular dish with Buttercup squash in place of the yams, as the Buttercup flavor is often referred to as a "sweet potato" taste. We tried two robust red wines by the glass. The cheap Spanish wine was quite good, but I was disappointed in the cheap Washington wine from the Horse Heaven Hills, as it seemed a bit syrupy. This was unusual, as I am usually quite pleased with Washington wine - even the cheaper bottles. Also, I am quite interested in how the Horse Heaven Hills are making their presence known as a distinct wine region. The dinner was pleasant overall, but mostly because of the company, rather than the restaurant.

As I ate, I started thinking about beans and how we grow and cook our own beans. I have several varieties in the cupboard and usually cook them simply. Each kind of bean has a distinct taste of its own and is quite good with a minimum of spice. I usually just add cumin. There is also a complexity in taste that comes from the quality of our soil. Most people can taste this in our salad mix - even compared to other organic salad mixes - but I can taste it in the beans too. Each vegetable, fruit, grain and legume has a distinct complex of flavors that is already "mixed" or "married" inside its cell walls and these flavors are available and waiting to be released under varying conditions of heat, pressure, chemical combination with other flavonoids, etc. Taking this complex of variables and mixing them with another complex of variables, such as the complex of flavors in duck, raises the complexity up another level - complexity squared, as it were. With a good cook or a bulletproof recipe, this "complexity squared" can become quite exquisite, but can also produce utter failures for no apparent reason, Everyone has had this happen to them in the kitchen - all of a sudden, your signature dish flops spectacularly.

Our approach here at F.A. Farm is to put a lot of attention into the food before it is harvested. Then we cook it simply. This works with evolution, as the differing environmental stresses cause the plant to adapt in multiple ways that we can only vaguely imagine. Then we just let the intrinsic flavors out and train our palates to pick up the differences. Most people can taste multiple flavors in a glass of wine. The same training and attention paid to basic foodstuffs, like beans, can pick up many new tastes.

I am currently finishing up The Long Descent (2008) by John Michael Greer. The basic premise of this book is that there are two responses to peak oil that are both wrong in their extremism. One of these is progressive and is premised on humans coming up with some miraculous solution to fossil fuel dependency that will allow us to continue our present lifestyles. The other is apocalyptic and is based on a precipitous decline once we reach a tipping point in our fossil fuel depletion. Greer's idea is that both of these represent two ends of the spectrum and both are false. His likely outcome is somewhere in the middle where we will just have to get used to a long degradation in our lifestyles. This will be like falling down a mountain rather than falling off a cliff.

This particular book is closer to my vision of the future than many others, but what I like most about Greer's writing is that he comes out of nowhere, has no "mainstream" credibility, and is obviously a post-baby boomer. Even so, he seems to start from an anthropological perspective and makes cogent analyses of peak oil problems, correctly parses other problems in terms of narrative, and still comes up with realistic scenarios which are neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Indeed, some of his quasi-optimistic scenarios may actually be ironic and exist specifically to cast doubt on any sort of optimism. Irony is often thought of as the province of the young, but there are some of us old farts who seem to get it once in awhile.

One of the more interesting points in Greer's book is that the technical fixes for our current state of fossil fuel extravagance are relatively easy, but the social and cultural problems will be hard. I share this view. For example, I see it as technically feasible and doable to grow all the food we need by sustainable agriculture. It just takes 20% of the population growing food. Likewise, we can also get around quite easily by bicycle and foot for most of our local journeys. Trains and semi-trucks can still transport goods if we just reduce the nonsense journeys by 80%. Buses and informal taxi transport in cities is certainly doable on existing roads and us fat, lazy Americans could easily exist on one-third the electricity, natural gas and petroleum we now use. The problem is the political will to advocate for unpopular changes in consumption patterns. Since government has encouraged excessive consumption for so long, it is unlikely government can solve the problem. Once again it is up to us. This is where both the social and cultural context will determine if we can turn the crises to our advantage.

Society is different from culture. Society is just a set of cooperating individuals. Ants and bees have societies and their cooperation is genetic. Wolves have societies and their cooperation is both genetic and behavioral. That is, wolf pups not only are hard-wired to act in a pack, but their hard-wiring is reinforced by the pack's behavior - they learn. This is a higher order of complexity and also represents a higher order of flexibility than ants display. What makes human society even more flexible is culture. Humans not only have sets of behavior transmitted between generations, but they also have a holistic sense of the behavior that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. One aspect of culture is that it effectively "stores" knowledge and patterns in the culture itself so it doesn't have to be limited by the size of the brain. One of the problems of anthropology that has been around for over a hundred years is this idea of culture as "superorganic," to use Kroeber's term. This is Culture, with a capital C, instead of culture. I don't buy it, but many anthropologists do. To be blunt and simplistic, if the last member of a tribe dies in the forest, does the culture exist? I say no - it needs carriers.

So the problem is that the rate of decline in our overheated fossil fuel-based economy will be exacerbated by social and cultural turmoil. As I said, the technical fixes are relatively easy, but the social and cultural fixes may be difficult. If we have overextended our cultural interactions into a hyper-individualistic psychology that has replaced culture with consumption, it is possible we will decline precipitously. In other words, post-peak oil, we will not be able to rely on accepted notions of supermarket and mall shopping, nor centralized workspaces accessible only by automobile. Will we then hasten our descent because we will not have a cultural organizing principle available - only a societal organizing principle? I think this is likely.

One of my anthropology textbooks emphasizes that one can have a society (but not a human society) without a culture, but not a culture without a society. In humans the two are inextricably linked. BUT . . . what if that changes in the brave new world of the future? We have been cultural animals for 2 million years. Does our projected future contain a change of such magnitude? Will our descent to a post-peak oil world be a long descent? I think so, but not only in the speed of descent (faster than Greer's model but not as fast as the apocalyptic model), but in how far we will fall. I see a return to tribalism.

I grew up on a farm and was in the garden early in life. I was always fascinated by squash and we only had one type of squash - Buttercup. It was a big deal for me to cut open the squash, scoop out the seed, add a little brown sugar on the top (I don't bother with this anymore) and bake in the wood stove (which we later converted to fuel oil so it was always on in the winter). This was the same stove and the same oven I would stick my feet into when I came home from sledding. We also put weak lambs in a cardboard box and set them on the open lid so they would have a heated environment. Some made it, some didn't. I once had a lamb that was started this way and I bottle fed him. I named him Roqueforte, or Roki for short.

Anyways, this morning I got up early and made squash bread with some frozen Buttercup squash from 2005. Still delicious after more than 4 years. I use a basic Joy of Cooking recipe, but I don't put clove in anymore because of an allergy I seem to have picked up. I also like to put in chopped pecans and walnuts, as well as raisins. I reduce the sugar by more than half and this bread approaches a full meal quality. It is amazing how well we can eat if we take a hint from the Native Americans - potatoes, corn, tomatoes, squash, beans, amaranth. My current Buttercup variety is one I have been working on for over ten years and resulted from an accidental cross between Kabocha and Buttercup in my little garden in Vancouver when we lived there. It actually came up as volunteers from the compost and I let the seedlings live. Now they have a blocky Buttercup shape and a dark green background with orange "flames" coming up the sides. There is also no button on the bottom. I still get a wide range of genetic variation in the fruits that come up each year, even though I only save seed from the sought-after phenotype. Per a seed-saving workshop I went to a couple of years ago, I save seed from several fruits and mix them up, so as to counter the inherent inbreeding depression in vigor. It seems to work, as I got over 1,000 pounds of Flame Buttercup from 1,125 square feet of space in 2008. At $1.25 per pound, this works out to over $49,000 per acre. Of course, this is just a metric, as I cannot sell all I can grow. (This may change in 2009 as the economy tanks more and more.) However, my squash bread tastes great, I have a wonderful high-yielding variety that is aesthetically pleasing, and my customers and family eat large amounts of quality squash all winter. Squash really is great stuff. I grow plenty of summer squash each year also, but I have a fondness for winter squash, and specifically Buttercup, that stretches over more than half a century.

Toni and I just finished watching an old NOVA program on the Lake Missoula floods. These were glacial floods that carved out the channeled scablands of central Washington, the Columbia Gorge and petered out in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. As some of you may know, Missoula, Montana is at the center of five valleys - one of the reasons it has a smog problem in the winter. During the last Ice Age, a great ice dam would form periodically and block up the water from what is now known as the Clark Fork River. At the base of the ice dam, the water molecules could not expand and so did not become solid - in effect, supercooled water under intense pressure. This water looked for points of release and expanded any and all cracks until the ice dam cracked from the inside out. When it finally gave way, trillions of gallons of water were released and flowed west through Washington, the Gorge and down into the Willamette Valley, as well as to the sea. It only took a few hours and was truly a spectacular cataclysmic event. It is also likely that there were several such events and some Paleo-Indians may have been witness to some of the events, as they happened between 20,000 - 15,000 years ago. However, there are no stories in the myths of the indigenous tribes of the Pacific Northwest that I know about.

One of the interesting features of these Lake Missoula floods is the presence of glacial erratics scattered about the landscape. Glacial erratics are huge boulders strewn about the landscape in odd places. You can see them in Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon, as well as in the channeled scablands of central Washington. They come about as glaciers move across a landscape and sheer off hunks of rock and assimilate them into the moving ice sheet. They then are deposited as the glaciers melt. In the Lake Missoula floods, the glacial erratics were probably carried in the chunks of ice that broke off the huge pieces of the ice dam as it moved through the landscape and then settled out as the ice chunks melted.

Toni and I are sort of like glacial erratics. We were assimilated into the great Movement of the 60's, as so many of our comrades were, and carried along in the tide of social unrest. When the flood settled out and the protective shell melted, we ended up scattered about the landscape. It is quite amusing that we ended up as glacial erratics (and yes, we are often erratic!) in Vancouver on the same ground as the glacial erratics of the great Lake Missoula floods. Then we sort of rolled up the coast to Ferndale. So here we are and we are still erratic. There are many of us scattered about the landscape and sometimes we recognize each other.

Today I spent some time watching futbol - specifically the Champions League between Chelsea and Juventus (Chelsea 1-0). Imagine my surprise to see the name New Holland emblazoned on the Juventus uniforms. I say the world must be changing for the better when a manufacturer of farm tractors is sponsoring a premier Italian team. O-lay, O-lay, O-lay, O-lay!!!

On February 20th, Toni and I went to a discussion of the New Recovery Plan by a local US Congressman. During the question period, I asked him about the effect of frozen credit on spring planting. My point was that mainstream US agriculture depends on credit to plant and grow the crops. If there is no credit from the banks, there will be reduced acreage planted and consumers will wake up in July and August and wonder where the wheat and corn is. The Congressman acknowledged my worry and said that many national leaders see this also. However, there was no mention of what is being done to unfreeze credit and there was NO URGENCY expressed. I suddenly realized why some of the more perspicacious of the local Dems don't like this person. I don't see anything being done in the short time frame we have left, so is there some government intervention behind the scenes to actually fix this problem in the 2-3 months we have left before planting? Since the government colluded with corporations and banks to get us into this mess, it doesn't seem likely they are working to fix it and that the impasse we see in front of us is all there is.

Let's assume for a moment that a significant decrease in spring planting is inevitable this spring. By significant, I mean a greater than 5% decrease in acres planted. Some might say this is not a significant percentage, but I suggest a simple thought exercise in demographics - imagine a 5% increase in unemployment in the next 2 months. As for a 5% significance level, that is just a common metric from statistics and I am using it as a threshold of significance. (In other words, let's start with a small effect that would impact our lives in a significant manner.)

So, with a significant decrease in corn, soy, and wheat acreage planted in the Midwest, prices for livestock feed rise, simply because most grain in this country is fed to cattle, hogs and poultry. The rise in feed prices causes a rise in the price of meat, which in turn causes meat consumption to decrease. An oversupplied market will then find a level at which consumers can afford to buy meat, but this will not likely be cost effective for the farmers. Then farmers will cull their herds and flocks. This then causes an oversupply of meat, which depresses prices. By now, it is Christmas 2009 and there is a plentiful amount of meat on store shelves. It is even within the realm of possibility to buy beef for Christmas this year for 50 cents a pound (!). Good times will be back for the consumer - but only for a few months. Once the relative supply of beef (ongoing production and an infinite resource) becomes the absolute supply of beef (culling herds - a finite resource), there will be very little calving, farrowing and hatching to make up the lost reserves. Then there will be a shortage of meat on top of the shortage of grain. If the credit freeze of spring 2009 is still on and becomes the credit freeze of spring 2010, there will be even less planting than the previous year. The shortage of grain in the summer/fall of 2010 then becomes a serious matter.

An alternative hypothesis is that there is no significant shortfall in credit available to farmers to plant. Then we are simply faced with "business as usual," which is still problematic. Prices for wheat continue to fall below the cost of production, so it may be prudent for farmers to plant less anyway. So there will be stresses and strains and the inflationary pressures in the current economy may push food prices up anyway. If the meat producers do not cull their herds in a significant manner, there will be plenty of backup in the system to adapt quickly to a fair price for the farmer. However, this still means prices for meat will probably rise this year. I also see prices for vegetables and fruit rising as well, but that is because of a rise in transport costs.

Which hypothesis will play out depends on the credit market. Thus, modern US agriculture is dependent on bankers at the tiller, bankers who are besieged from all sides and flailing around on a ship in a governmentally-produced fog of regulations and policies, balancing on a rolling deck while cannons broken from their moorings are rolling back and forth and even firing on a randomly selected time-delay. It is not a pretty sight.

The bottom line is that agriculture is subject to a time lag in supply and demand. Without thinking ahead to next year, we lose out. You cannot just go to the marketplace and buy more steel to make a widget. You have to get the seeds in the ground at a certain time of the year. Also note that the US is still a net exporter of food, so if we screw up in the next 2-3 months, the whole world will suffer.

Yesterday I got some high profile pork sausage at the local co-op. The pork came with its own brochure, which I read to my wife this morning over coffee. We had such a good time yukking it up, I thought I would share it with you. DISCLAIMER: I raised purebred Hampshire hogs back in 1965, so I know about pork. I am also quite peeved about the rise of branding. Anyways, here are some of the brochure claims with my translations.

[Their pork has a brand name] "Our pork is given that name because every pig on our farms is free to go outside to enjoy the fresh air and sunshine!" TRANSLATION: Our pigs live in sheds and they root around outside in their pen.

"[The brand name] houses are specifically designed to provide comfort and pleasure for our pigs. TRANSLATION: They have dirt floors.

"All pigs have free access to food and water courts, are free to lounge in the spacious deep-bedded areas, or bask in the sunshine at their leisure." TRANSLATION: The pigs are fed with self-feeders so we don't have to slop them twice a day. The pig sheds have straw bedding. I used to do the same.

"[The brand name] houses are also designed to 'breathe' freely and naturally with open sides." TRANSLATION: Our hog sheds have had the windows knocked out. As my ag instructor used to say, "You can throw a cat through."

"Translucent curtains provide protection from harsh weather while still allowing fresh air and sunlight in at all times." TRANSLATION: We have plastic up over the windows, but it has torn off in places.

Well, after my little exercise in marketing translation, I just want to wish these people well. The pork was actually okay and I will probably buy more. We don't eat much pork anymore, but I do like sausage once a month or two. What Toni and I found hilarious was the gentrification of pig farming. I am surprised they didn't mention their "pig spa." TRANSLATION: We run a hose out into the dirt and turn it on once in awhile so the pigs can lay in the mud.

The US has quite a bit of arable land still available. Estimates on the Web range from 302 million to 470 million acres. Since I am a sustainable farmer, I know how much food I can grow, how many potential calories are available through human labor, and other parameters for how many people we can actually feed with only minimal use of petroleum products. Let's take the low figure of 302 million acres of arable land. Certainly this includes land which must be irrigated, but there were several traditional cultures that managed to grow food in extremely arid environments and did quite well. One example was the Hohokam in the area now known as Phoenix, Arizona. They had an extensive network of irrigation canals that could conceivably serve as models. There are ways to do irrigation that are relatively low impact and many farmers and environmentalists are advancing this approach. In other words, irrigation should not be a limiting factor in how much arable land can be used for production.

What about labor then? What intensive petroleum use does is allow many more acres to be farmed by fewer people. Yet we have a lot of people that will soon be out of work, if they are not already. One of the "untouchable" subjects in most discussions of transitioning to a saner society is the idea that we will have to dramatically increase the number of people doing manual labor. My estimate is that we will need 10-20% of the population actively working full-time as farmers. So . . . as a farmer, I will have to feed myself and either 4 other people, or feed myself and 9 other people. This is certainly doable as I now produce enough calories on 2 acres to feed approximately 10 people with a daily calorie requirement of 2500 calories.

Is land use and ownership a problem? Yes it is. However, since we are talking inevitability of dieoff unless we act like an aggregate of local communities, I don't see land use as continuing to be as narrowly strait-jacketed as it currently is. In other words, people with land will be forced to realize the benefits of growing food and will have people ready to work the land in labor-intensive, small-scale agriculture. A land of small farmers growing food on postage stamp-size lots is not just a fantasy, but rather the likeliest way that the future will develop, given the lack of leadership from government, coupled with the intransigence of public employees (elected or not) to do anything without extreme prodding.

To sum up, how much food can we grow on 300 million acres of arable land? I suggest we can feed 1.5 billion (300 million acres X 5 people per acre). Many of you old fogey types (and even some of you "new" fogey types) will scoff, but I suggest we can actually feed the world via small-scale intensive agriculture. When oil was cheap, millions were starving because of inadequate world-wide distribution and corporate greed. I suggest that the future starving millions will still be the result of inadequate world-wide distribution and corporate greed, NOT because we cannot raise the food without cheap oil.