Chemical Agriculture 114 - Sugar

There is whole agricultural industry built around the production of sugar.  If you are trying to avoid sugar it is important to understand what sugar is called in all of its forms.

Chemical Agriculture 113 - Eat More Chicken

Chickens are highly efficient at converting plant, bugs and grain into a high quality human friendly protein. Chick-fil-a has a lock on the "Eat More Chicken" slogan. But they are right, you should eat more chicken. But what chicken should you eat?

Chemical Agriculture 112 - Adhesive

Erosion is the ticking time bomb of the modern agriculture world. We have lost soil that took thousands of years to develop in just a few short generations due to mistaken agricultural practices. We may only have a few generations left.

Let me tell you about my "X"

When I started my first job out of college 30 years ago this month I got a shiny new IBM PC XT. This new PC was the first with a hard drive, 128 kB of RAM (Woo Hoo), Intel 8088 4.77 MHz processor, and Lotus I23 spreadsheet. It was a beauty and state of the art. We were still using punch card for FORTRAN programs and terminals hooked to a Digital PDP 11 in college. Even digital calculators were only a few years on the market and slide rules had been the rule up until the early 1980's. But I digress... I used a PC both at home and at work for over 25 years. I still use a Windows laptop at work and I'm writing this on a windows lap top at home.

About 3 years ago I got fed up with the extreme vulnerability of the Windows operating system to viruses and getting hung up. We were constantly having to do "maintenance".

So we jumped ship

Happy Birthday Mac

The Macintosh computer celebrated its 30th Anniversary on Friday, January 24. It was a revolution in software technology at the time. It was the first time that people could navigate with a graphical user interface, menus and icons. The real breakthrough was the low $2,500 price as opposed to the original Apple list price of $10,000.

The Mac also introduced the WYSIWYG formatting for the first time. Success was limited until Adobe PageMaker a year later. It also didn't have a hard drive. For Apple, this was mostly a niche product for graphic artist, publishers and the academic world.

Despite its most recent success Apple nearly failed in the early 1990's

Chemical Agriculture 111 - Euphoria

The meaning of euphoria has the connotation of elation, filled with joy, tremendous satisfaction, fulfillment, happiness, and well-being. Many words in our lexicon originate in our agricultural roots. In the ancient Greek world the word euphoreo meant "to yield a good crop". Not just a good crop, mind you, but one that is over the top, unbelievable, amazing, and once in a life time.

Market Menu for January 25, 2014

We will have the following items at the market for Saturday, January 25, 2014. We are at the fair ground for winter market this week.  (New items are in Bold Print)

Salsa - Brandywine, Cherry Tomatoe, Roasted Roma, Hot'n'Sweet, Jalapeno Jelly (yum)

Red Onions
Garlic (We ran out of garlic last week, but shallots are a good substitute, see "shallot week posts")
SHALLOTS
Leeks
Sweet Spanish Onions - these babies are very sweet.
Chipolini Onions - limited supply
Dried egg plant (see recent blog posts)
Cipotle Smoked Peppers
Smoked Sun Dried Tomatoes
Sun Dried Tomatoes
Lisa's Soap

Chemical Agriculture 110 - Corn Fed Beef

One of the artifacts of chemical agriculture is cheap grain. Historically grain has been an expensive and precious resource. Ancient literature including the Bible talked about the relative value of grain and it was very expensive. It is only recently in the 20th and 21st century that inexpensive petroleum based fertilizer, high yield hybrids and exceptional mechanization has allowed grain to be grown and harvested with extreme efficiencies. Today grain is a high energy and inexpensive feedstock used pervasively in agriculture.

Corn is king, due to the higher solar and fertilizer conversion efficiency, and is used in modern animal husbandry in ways never dreamed of only 100 years ago.  My father was very proud of his small herd of Iowa Corn Fed Beef. Those last 90 days before his steers and heifers went to market, they were on 100% corn and a little hay to keep the rumen going. Love it they did, but we fed that prime beef until they were morbidly obese. We didn't have some of the issues with feedlot runoff and ground water contamination that large lots have as we worked real hard to re-cycle nutrients.

So why did my father feed his steers this way?

Chemical Agriculture 109 - Financing and Facilities

The family farm can be a great way of life. But the capital costs in agriculture can be very high. The barriers to entry can also be very high. For young people to get started can be difficult without financial help from their families. But part of the problem is the model that is used in the typical agriculture paradigm. Current agriculture spends a lot of money on large single use buildings and implements.

Large confinement buildings for chickens, pigs and cattle have but one use for those purposes. The investment is high and the returns relatively low. These large single use buildings handcuff these farm families to an agricultural model that rust, rot and depreciation will eventually destroy. This model is not sustainable.

Most of agricultural equipment is the same way. Limited use tillage, planting and harvesting equipment costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and is used for only a few months each season.

Land becomes increasingly more expensive with prime farm land pushing $12,000 per acre. Making purchase difficult for the young farmer.

So what is the bottom line?

Chemical Agriculture 108 - Promiscuous Pollen

Pollen is by nature promiscuous. Corn disperses pollen prolifically so we should believe that GMO pollen carried by the jet stream has invaded and mated with local corn varieties in much of the world. A paper published in Nature showed how genes from GMO corn entered local varieties of corn in Mexico, where GM crops are banded. The corroborated results show 1 percent contamination by GM varieties.

Promiscuous GMO Pollen is already far and wide in our world. But is this an issue?