ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

With the greenhouse project done, it’s time to put it to use. We’re going to try growing tender herbs (chervil, parsley, cilantro, even basil) over winter, and experiment with tomatoes.

In the past, I’ve been using our own compost for planting seeds. Everything goes into the compost pile: food scraps, garden waste, grape stems and pomace. Turn it over once, and a year later it’s transformed itself into beautiful rich, black, and crumbly soil. Our compost bin is to the right in this photo.

That’s composted bedding straw from the sheep barn on the left, under cover to keep it from getting saturated over winter.  It will go into the garden and vineyard next spring.

I got some used seedling trays, cheap, from the Red Barn Nursery in Stayton. Perfect for starting seedlings for transplant into larger containers as they grow. But the compost as it comes out of the bin is a little too coarse than it ought to be for starting seeds. I tried putting it in a blender, but that didn’t work. The solution: a big blender, in the form of a Steinmax 1800 electric chipper/shredder.

The Steinmax 1800 sold in 1986 for $230. I found one on Craigslist for $75. It needed a bit of refurbishing – welding, hammering, patching, rewiring, lubricating, painting. The results?

Beautiful stuff, the texture and color of coffee grounds.

We used to have a big, gas-powered chipper/shredder, thinking that we’d shred plant material before it went into the compost bin. But that didn’t work well, it was too much work, and the machine was hard to start and noisy to run. We soon sold it. But after a year of composting, the course compost (fine for amending soil in the garden as is) slides readily into the maws of the shredder. Letting all the heavy lifting happen by itself in the compost bin is definitely the way to go. Do seeds like it? See for yourself.

We’re still getting fresh peas out of the garden, despite repeated frosts and rains. Here’s how.

A similar cold frame will enable us to harvest lettuces all winter – as long as the gophers don’t move in.

Almost a month ago I wrote about building a passive solar greenhouse at the farm. It’s now complete and in use.

Here’s the view of the south side. From a heating and cooling efficiency standpoint, it may have been better to limit the glass solely to the south side – but aesthetically, I couldn’t resist a window on the east side and a glass door.

Here’s a shot showing the back interior wall, painted black to absorb heat, with a work bench/plant shelf over the water-filled barrels that serve as a heat sink.

And this photo shows the plant shelves along the south-facing windows. More water-filled containers support the lower shelf and provide additional heat storage.

So far, the greenhouse has not dropped below 60 degrees at night and has maintained a comfy mid- 60s during the day, with a plant-friendly humidity. We’ll see how it performs in the depths of winter – and later next year, during the long hot days of summer.

We’ve moved the herbs – basil, parsley, chives – into the greenhouse, hoping to grow them all winter. The seedling tray has been planted with more basil, cilantro, and chervil.

Outside, the tomatoes have been draped with plastic to husband the last vestiges of summer heat (and protect them from hungry deer). The lettuces will get their cold frame at the first hint of frost. The fall sugar and snow peas are coming on, as is the second raspberry crop. Winter squash is just waiting on the vine. The sauerkraut should be ready to sample in another week. The sheep are taking care of themselves. Hopefully our new ram has done his work freshening the ewes and we’ll see new lambs come late December, early January.

The grapes are approaching 20° brix – another week or so of sun and they’ll be ready. Harvest is tentatively set for Saturday October 10.

An article in the UK Timesonline reports that cod are doomed to disappear from the North Sea:

Cod are doomed to disappear from the North Sea because of climate change and not just as a result of over-fishing, researchers have discovered.

In the past 40 years the average temperature of the North Sea has increased by 1C with catastrophic effects on its delicate eco-systems.

Species of plankton, on which cod larvae feed, have moved away in search of cooler waters. The decline in cod stocks has led to an explosion in the populations of crabs and jellyfish, on which the adult fish feed. The shortage of predators at the top of the food chain has had a knock-on effect on flat fish, such as plaice and sole, whose offspring are eaten by crabs.

I just finished reading Song for the Blue Ocean. Back in 1997, Carl Safina chronicled the horrifying demise of the world’s fisheries. How much worse have things gotten since then? How much worse will they get?

John Michael Greer urges us to face the truth – the future won’t be better than the present:

We are not going to have a future better than the present: not in our lifetimes, and not in those of our grandchildren’s grandchildren. We collectively closed the door on that possibility decades ago, and none of the rapidly narrowing range of choices still open to us now offers any way of changing that.

Greer advises embracing ambivalence and accepting “both the wonder and the immense tragedy of our time.” But life is yin yang, both wonder and tragedy. Always has been, always will be.  It’s not just now.

Guy McPherson takes issue with the notion that our way of life is as great as we think.  He writes at The Energy Bulletin about his trip to a family wedding. He observes that the “living arrangements” we’ve made are far from ideal:

Within the span of a couple generations, we abandoned a durable, finely textured, life-affirming set of living arrangements characterized by self-sufficient family farms intermixed with small towns that provided commerce, services, and culture. Worse yet, we traded that model for a coarse-scaled arrangement wholly dependent on ready access to cheap fossil fuels.

Yes, we’ve done that – and far worse, thoughtlessly exploiting Earth’s resources and despoiling Earth’s ecosystems to the brink of collapse and beyond.

And now we’re reaping what we have sown, in the collapse of fisheries and a looming collapse in agriculture. We eat oil – but Hubbert’s peak is now in our rear-view mirror. Shed no tears for the demise of industrial agriculture. McPherson describes what he saw throughout the Midwest:

The entire region, formerly abundant with a multitude of edible crops, currently is brimming with a single commodity: #2 corn. It’s Roundup-ready, at that, just to throw a bucket of insulting acid into the face of reason. Roundup-resistant weeds are popping up throughout the region as we bring Farmageddon to the heartland and eventually to the world. Most of the corn, which is essentially inedible until it is processed (i.e., pummeled with inordinate quantities of fossil fuels), is watered with the last remaining drops of the Ogallala aquifer, brought to the surface with the same finite fluid used to power our trucks and cars. Verdant fields of ethanol dreams are interrupted occasionally by a field of soybeans; without rotations of legumes, the soil would be so depleted of nitrogen by king corn, it wouldn’t support even the great corn desert. The corn fills our bellies with death-inducing faux sugar. But we willingly trade some of that “food” for fuel because the associated dependence on automobiles allows us to burn off the final inches of life-giving topsoil to promote our culture of death in rapid-transit, individualized death-traps. Who could pass up a deal like that?

Contra Greer, McPherson thinks better days lie ahead.

How could they not? In the near future, we’ll return to a durable set of living arrangements.

Greer points out that McPherson’s dreams of “better days” imply a human population as low as 500 million. That’s quite a crash from today’s population of almost 7 billion.  We can’t control how that crash work itself out. Suffering will not be denied. Still, life is durable.

McPherson’s “better days” are seen in some imagined “future.” Better days are here already, all around us, no matter what the political, economic, or ecological crisis of the moment. They’re here in the chipping of a squirrel, in the deep dark of a new moon, in the mist of a September morning. They’re here in a meal of local free-run turkey, fresh garden tomatoes, and copious quantities of home-grown Pinot Noir shared with dear friends. As long as there are creatures on Earth, life will be wondrous – and tragic.

Our farmer neighbors don’t seem to be interested in the debates about whether we expect the future to be better or worse, whether industrial imperialism can be saved or is worth saving. They simply get about the work of raising the best food they can while struggling to make ends meet and doing as little harm as possible. That’s true revolution.

And everybody can participate. As Wendell Berry says, eating is an agricultural act.

Agricultural acts can be revolutionary.

It’s been an unusually long time since my last post. But I’ve been busy at work on a passive solar greenhouse. The basic structure is now up.

That’s double-pane glass on the south side (and one panel on the west), gleaned from the Lebanon Re-Store run by Habitat for Humanity. Total price for four 4 x 5 double-glazed windows and a 36? glass door: $175.

Roof and walls will be well insulated (roof R-29, walls R-19). Building materials – lumber and metal roofing – are recycled, saved from earlier remodeling projects around the house. Except for the purchased pressure-treated, the lumber is full-dimension Douglas fir harvested from the property and milled at the old Gaines Mill on Fish Hatchery Road, just a few miles away. Water-filled barrels will provide thermal mass. The biggest expenses were for insulation, a few pieces of metal trim for the roof, and screws and nails, which came to a bit over $300. The gravel for the pad was extra from the road-building project (to the left in the photo, going out to the barn).

We intend to use the greenhouse beginning in late winter as a place to start seeds and grow seedlings for transplanting into the garden, and then throughout the growing season for starting crops such as lettuces which need to be constantly replanted to maintain production. We’ve found that lettuces do great even in the midsummer heat, if they’re grown under a shade cloth.

That’s our apple orchard and sheep barn in the background.

The greenhouse is another piece of our personal program to become less reliant on an increasingly unstable economic system. I’ve been thinking about how to do it for years. Solving the thermal mass problem was the key to actually getting started. We’ve got four plastic barrels used to transport apple cider concentrate from South America that we got for free from Oregon Freeze Dry years ago, just sitting in the barn (they served as emergency fermentation tanks last year when we had a bumper grape crop). Why did it take so long to see the obvious?

The American Midwest will suffer the most from climate change, according to a new analysis of U.S. climate projections from The Nature Conservancy.

Temperatures in the worst-hit U.S. states could be up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than present-day levels by the year 2100. Kansas, Nebraska and other Great Plains states would be the hardest-hit by climbing temperatures. But temperatures everywhere in the U.S. could rise by 3 degrees Fahrenheit or more.

In the agricultural states of the Great Plains, rising temperatures will cause shifts in the optimal zones for growing certain crops; milder winters and earlier springs will exacerbate outbreaks of insect pests; and water sources will become taxed as aquifers are depleted and soil moisture declines.

Another study by North Carolina State University agricultural and resource economists Dr. Michael Roberts and Dr. Wolfram Schlenker, published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, predicts that U.S. crop yields could decrease by 30 to 46 percent over the next century under the most benign global warming scenarios and by a devastating 63 to 82 percent under the most rapid global warming scenarios.

The study shows that when temperature levels go over 29 degrees Celsius (84.2 degrees Fahrenheit) for corn, 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) for soybeans and 32 degrees Celsius (89.6 degrees Fahrenheit) for cotton, yields fall steeply.

Co-author Roberts says:

While crop yields depend on a variety of factors, extreme heat is the best predictor of yields . . . this study shows that temperature extremes are not good.

While the study examined only U.S. crop yields under warming scenarios, the implications are ominous for the entire world.

Here’s the abstract:

The United States produces 41% of the world’s corn and 38% of the world’s soybeans. These crops comprise two of the four largest sources of caloric energy produced and are thus critical for world food supply. We pair a panel of county-level yields for these two crops, plus cotton (a warmer-weather crop), with a new fine-scale weather dataset that incorporates the whole distribution of temperatures within each day and across all days in the growing season. We find that yields increase with temperature up to 29° C for corn, 30° C for soybeans, and 32° C for cotton but that temperatures above these thresholds are very harmful. The slope of the decline above the optimum is significantly steeper than the incline below it. The same nonlinear and asymmetric relationship is found when we isolate either time-series or cross-sectional variations in temperatures and yields. This suggests limited historical adaptation of seed varieties or management practices to warmer temperatures because the cross-section includes farmers’ adaptations to warmer climates and the time-series does not. Holding current growing regions fixed, area-weighted average yields are predicted to decrease by 30-46% before the end of the century under the slowest (B1) warming scenario and decrease by 63-82% under the most rapid warming scenario (A1FI) under the Hadley III model.

Sharon Astyk at Causabon’s Book explains why the future of farming in this country rests on reform of our health care system.

Simply put, young people can’t afford to go into farming because of the unavailability of health care.

If we want people to commit to growing our food, we’re going to have to figure out a way to provide decent health care to everybody. Instead of wasting trillions bailing out bankers, we should be investing in the future of our food production system.

The New York Times reports that in Franklin County in arid eastern Washington, Easterday Ranches Inc. is proposing to build a feedlot for 30,000 head of cattle that would withdraw about 1 million gallons a day from the ancient Grande Ronde Aquifer. The region is among the driest in the country, averaging only about 7 inches of rainfall a year. The proposal has touched off a wave of concern among local farmers, who worry that their wells could dry up.

The groundwater problems in eastern Washington are among the most serious in the country. In Franklin County, the aquifer is receding about a foot a year, while groundwater levels in neighboring Whitman County are declining at an even faster rate of 1.5 feet per year. A state-funded study released in January found that the deep aquifer in eastern Washington – especially in Franklin, Adams, Grant and Lincoln counties – is in serious trouble because a significant percentage of the area’s wells are tapping into the deepest part of the aquifer, where the water is 10,000 years old and is not recharged by surface water. The study found that some deep wells could recede so much that landowners would not be able to access groundwater.

A 1945 state law exempts withdrawals to 5,000 gallons a day from permit requirements. A 2005 interpretation of the law by the state’s attorney general concluded that groundwater withdrawals for “stock watering purposes” were not subject to any restrictions. Among those entitled to virtually unlimited water supplies, according to the interpretation, were large-scale concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, like the proposed Easterday Ranches feedlot. Several bills in the Washington Legislature this year would have capped livestock water-use to 5,000 gallons a day, but all died under intense lobbying from dairy and agricultural interests.

Reporter Scott Streater says local and state leaders appear ready to approve the Easterday feedlot. The Franklin County Water Conservancy Board has approved a water-rights transfer between Easterday and a nearby farmer – a critical component of the project. The Department of Ecology has final decision making authority over the project, and officials have indicated they plan to approve the feedlot water withdrawals. Many local leaders also support the Easterday development, touting the 40 jobs it will provide, the projected $60 million a year in tax revenue, and the $20 million a year in corn alfalfa and other feed that will be purchased from local farmers.

It’s a sad story, one that we’ve seen before in many permutations. The greedy rush in and are encouraged and enabled to exploit a common resource for their own and their enablers’ short-term benefit – leaving those who are content with enough, the innocent but unlucky, future generations, and Earth herself to bear the costs.

The city of Belo, Brazil eliminated hunger while at the same time reinvigorating the local farm economy.

Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, writes at Yes! Magazine that Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11% of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20% of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship and created a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives, to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system.

The city offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell their produce. Local farmers’ profits grew, while at the same time farm income in the country as a whole was dropping by almost half – and poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.

In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city offers people the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets (from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices”). 34 ABC markets now offer customers the opportunity to buy about twenty core, healthy items at a price set by the city, about two-thirds of the market price. Everything else the market owners can sell at the market price.

Another innovation involves three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal.

Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.

Hello, local progressive city mayors and city council people? How about something similar here?

A little home-town farm news from the Albany DH:

A cougar blamed for killing four sheep belonging to two Lacomb farmers will eat no more.

“I’m not having a lamb crop this year, for the first time ever,” said Irina Just of Lacomb. “He ate all of our lambs.”

Here are the little darlings:

The gluttonous young male proved able to easily leap a 4 foot high pasture fence in a single bound – with a lamb in his mouth. Neighbor Dan Thackaberry lost at least two adult sheep but said there’s no way to be sure whether any lambs were disappeared too, or how many.

USDA Trapper Jim Schacht, wildlife specialist for Linn County, called in the dogs, treed the 90-pound cat, and plugged him from below with a pistol. The cat fell wounded out of the tree, pissed at being shot, but was then brought down in a flurry of small-arms fire.

Now you ask, what’s a cougar eating a couple of lambs got to do with land use, climate change, the big picture stuff we talk about on this blog? Wendell Berry (and Wes Jackson) do the explaining:

We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities. . .

Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and grazing animals.

See, we’re not just screwing around with our few sheep, we’re doing restoration. A cougar is just a little hiccup in a grand scheme. He was just young and stupid enough to hang out in the same place long enough to get himself shot. A little smarter and less greedy, he would have gotten away with his larceny.

The DH printed just one photo of the big cat’s head – but I’ve got an in with the photographer.

Half of the world’s population could face severe food shortages by the end of the century as global warming take its toll on agriculture. A new study finds that the stress on global food production from temperatures alone is going to be huge – without taking into account water supplies stressed by higher temperatures.

The study, titled Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat,  was co-authored by UW atmospheric-sciences professor David Battisti and Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford’s Program on Food Security and the Environment. Starting with IPCC climate models, Battisti and Naylor used IPCC climate models looked at historical examples of the impact of heat waves on agriculture and concluded that severe food shortages were likely to become more common as temperatures rise.

The worst of the food shortages are expected to hit the poor, densely inhabited regions of the  tropics. Not only are the crops grown there are less resilient to changes in climate – a combination of poor farming practices and deforestation exacerbated by climate change may steadily degrade soil fertility, leaving vast areas unsuitable for crops or grazing.

High temperatures cause plants like rice, corn and wheat to grow faster but reduce plant fertility and grain production. With average growing-season temperatures expected to rise more than 6 degrees F in many places, crop yields will fall 20 to 40 percent, the report estimates. The effects will be aggravated by increased evaporation and loss of soil moisture.

But countries in temperate zones won’t escape damage. High temperatures cause plants like rice, corn and wheat to grow faster but reduce plant fertility and grain production. When heat waves hit Western Europe in 2003, more than 50,000 people died and harvests of corn, wheat and fruit fell by up to a third. A 1972 drought in the former Soviet Union disrupted worldwide grain supplies. Those temperatures are slated to become the norm over much of the world, making it less likely that there will be enough unaffected regions able to pick up the slack when crop failures hit.

Here’s the abstract (the full article is behind a pay wall):

Higher growing season temperatures can have dramatic impacts on agricultural productivity, farm incomes, and food security. We used observational data and output from 23 global climate models to show a high probability (>90%) that growing season temperatures in the tropics and subtropics by the end of the 21st century will exceed the most extreme seasonal temperatures recorded from 1900 to 2006. In temperate regions, the hottest seasons on record will represent the future norm in many locations. We used historical examples to illustrate the magnitude of damage to food systems caused by extreme seasonal heat and show that these short-run events could become long-term trends without sufficient investments in adaptation.

I’ve just found a good review of the study at Climate Feedback.