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A slice of life on the farm
Nicole Brodeur, Seattle Times
The farmer’s daughter has spiky black hair, 4-inch heels and rock-star dreams.
But under all of that, she knows apples. How to grow them, how to pick them, how to operate the machines. (How to wreck them, too.) Best, Jenny Madden, 20, knows how to sell apples: slice by slice in front of her family’s Earth Conscious Organics bin at Whole Foods. You can find her most afternoons, brandishing her Global knife (“The best, man”) and an innate sense of the power of produce.
I joined her at the Bellevue store recently, glad to shake the hand that knows the fruit that rolls around in my fridge.
Of course, that’s hardly a rare occurrence around here. Anyone who looks up from the table at area farmers markets will come face to face with the grower. That dirt under their nails is the same stuff you’ll be washing off the potatoes later.
But there is an urgency to farming; a willingness to do what it takes to keep the crop in people’s kitchens and your name on their tongues. And if that means Madden rushing from her voice lessons to the produce aisle, so be it.
(23 October 2007)
Urban Foraging and Guerrilla Gardening
Erica Barnett, World Changing
One trend that has really caught my interest lately (to the chagrin of certain hygiene-obsessed boyfriends) is urban foraging. No, I’m not talking about the Freegans. (Call me elitist, but-although I love the idea of reducing waste-I hate the idea of Dumpster-diving; if you’re not similarly inclined, you can find out more about that movement here). I’m talking about foraging for free fruits, vegetables, and other “wild food” around the city.
A whole bunch of web guides to these free food locations have sprung up in cities around the US-particularly in Portland, Ore., where the Urban Edibles web site (“A community database of wild food sources in Portland, OR”) includes a frequently updated Google map with dozens of detailed location descriptions (for example: “Pear Tree @ N Albina and Failing: Good sized, yellow pear tree on the NW corner. Small italian plum is next to it.”) Among Urban Edibles’ ethical guidelines…
(19 October 2007)
The Connection Between Food Supply and Energy: What Is the Role of Oil Price?
Glenn Morton, The Oil Drum
I became fascinated with the connection between our food supply and energy when I first learned of the problems that North Korea was having feeding itself. (see here). This data showed me something amazing about modern society, we don’t live in the information age, we don’t live in the industrial age, we live in the agricultural age. Without food, we have no industry or information. Unfortunately many don’t understand this. Nor do they understand that today the modern farming system is merely a means to turn petroleum into food, via mechanized planting and harvesting, and the use of petroleum based insecticides and fertilizers which consume huge amounts of energy in their manufacture. According to Wikipedia, who gets it from Science, 1% of the world’s energy goes into the manufacture of chemical fertilizer (here).
There has recently been a claim that in the post-peak oil world, life will go on pretty much as normal. For a while, as the world squeezes inefficiencies out of the economic system and fuel switching occurs, this is true. But one can not seriously believe that the world economy is infinitely elastic with regards to energy. With regard to the agricultural system, there is data which shows the limits to this inelasticity and these limits are due to the laws of physics.
The USDA provides information on the economics of farming. The data comes in the form of dollars spent on various items. I will focus on the dollars spent for fuel, chemical sprays and fertilizer. These three items are directly related to petroleum, and using the cost of the day and the price of oil of the day, one can convert these numbers into barrels of oil spent.
Author Glenn Morton is a geophysicist in the oil industry. For Kerr-McGee Oil and Gas Corp., Glenn served as Geophysical Mgr Gulf of Mexico, Geophysical Mgr for the North Sea, Dir. of Technology and as Exploration Director of China. Currently he is an independent consulting geophysicist, and you might know him as seismobob.
(23 October 2007)
