So shortly after my first post, I went to visit Imladris Farm. I had a tough time getting there and probably drove 70 miles that day (it's supposed to be a 20-30 mile trip). Walter was kind enough to walk me through his set up--but not before we both got a big glass of ice water. Outside his house is a kind of apple tree that is more tart and smaller than a Granny Smith--I forget if he told me what kind it was. I got to see his 100 year-old rabbit barn and shiitake growing operation. He also showed me the land that he had been clearing for the last 2-3 years, with the help of the goats who eat a majority of the weeds there. He seems to be doing very well for himself, and offered a lot of advice on managing soil organically.
One thing that had never occurred to me before that we talked about concerned the collapsing colonies of honeybees across America. What he told me was that the honeybee is not a native insect--that it was imported from Europe not only for the honey but to assist in crop pollination. Now, at this point in agriculture (or agribusiness), we have become as dependent on the honeybee for our food as we have become dependent on the fossil fuels we need to ship it. Instead of relying on the native pollinators (of which there are hundreds, if not thousands, including birds, native bees and wasps, even flies), we spray our crops to kill with insecticides that kill every other living thing except the honeybee. But nature has its way, if not always swiftly, of correcting our blunders. Walter used to keep bees to pollinate his raspberry, blackberry, and blueberry bushes, but they only did so when everything else in the area had already been pollinated. Honeybees don't prefer them, so what he had to do was literally flood the entire area with them. Yet one time, after releasing his bees that were not more than 10 feet away from his patches, the bees flew straight up about 30 feet then took off in a completely different direction, to pollinate something far away. After that, he decided that it wasn't necessary, cost-effective, or just plain sensible to keep them.
So what do these rising instances of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) mean to our food source? It means we'll have to either A) push forward, keep breeding honeybees, flood our farmlands with them, possibly genetically alter them or B) use more sustainable farm practices.
While that one sinks in, here's another thought that raised my eyebrows: it's from The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. He says in the beginning of the book that, before synthetic fertilizer (read: ammonium nitrate + hydrogen extracted from natural gas, or less commonly, coal), the human race was, at the brink of the new century, running into a problem of mass starvation. The problem is that, though nitrogen is one of the most abundant elements in the atmosphere, you need either lightning or legumes to "fix" it into the soil, that is, break their tight bonds with one another and become bio-available. Before synthetic fertilizers, no one in their right mind would plant corn year after year on the same plot of land--it just wouldn't be possible. Thus, there was a theoretical limit of how much food could be grown for the number of people alive, and the human population would have leveled off, through starvation, resource wars, etc. A large part of why China opened its doors to America in the 1970s was so they could have access to more ammonium nitrate--their people would have starved without it.
Here's the frightening thing that I don't hear many people in the news talking about: the fertilizers that feed the world at its current capacity are manufactured with natural gas. Natural gas is a finite resource, and as with all fossil fuels, many project that within our lifetimes, the EROEI (Energy Return Over Energy Invested) will plummet to the point where it won't make sense to get it out of harder, and harder to reach places, especially because natural gas is more difficult to transport. This means that even before oil runs out we could be facing a massive, world-wide starvation. "More than half of the world's supply of usable nitrogen is now man-made....Vaclav Smil, a geographer...estimates that two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention." (Omnivore's Dilemma--note: Fritz Haber was the scientist who discovered the process of making synthetic fertilizer. He was also the scientist who created chlorine gas and Zyklon B.)
I won't beleaguer that point, and I think you guys can fill in the rest.
Anywho, on the bright (and more local, practical side), Amanthus, Zac, and I cleaned out the greenhouse attached to their new house, got some soil mix, and planted 264 plants last night around midnight. The list is:
Russian Red Kale
True Siberian Kale
Butternut Winter Squash
Royal Blue Beans
Dill
Parsley
Chia
Chives
Nigella (flower)
...and maybe a few more I'm forgetting--I know I'm forgetting one kind of flower, but yeah, anyway above are the pictures.
Signing off, with mush love,
markus
