I think it has started. Wal-Mart here in Ponca City is gearing up the garden center for the spring rush. And there are a few empty shelves, products that were projected but not available. Products that should be in stock, but aren’t here.

Play sand. The bags of natural sand used for sand boxes, mixing with potting soil, making a foundation for laying stepping stones and pavers, or for leveling under a planter or water tank. None. Or the companion Red, Blue, or Purple Crayola sands (at nearly double the price for a slightly smaller bag) — except the red ran out and hasn’t yet been replaced. In a month.

Potting soil? Some is plentiful. But there are a couple of gaps. A couple of gaps in mulches, too. Not many — but it didn’t happen that way last year.

The intermittent outages, I think, are starting to show up at Wal-Mart. The other day they were down to three boxes of Great Value Fudge Brownies. I bought two of them. Where will it end?

I respect the argument that modern wealth is generated initially by applying cheap energy to transform resources into expensive resources. With the rising cost of energy, due to rising oil prices and manipulations by B. Hussein Obama (President of the United States this year), I think the fundamental economic collapse currently under way might be called the “Energy Depression”.

The “leverage” multiplying the dollar values assigned to intangibles today that look somewhat similar, if less tangible, to the root causes of the 1929 stock market crash. All the government tactics and strategies that blew that crash into the Great Depression, and prolonged it a decade longer than necessary, are all very much alive and striving to repeat their historic achievements once again. In some ways, this time around the oncoming debacle could rightly be called the government’s Next Great Depression.

But this time around it is engineered. President Obama is aggressively demolishing the engines of wealth in America. He is undermining the production and value of oil and gas, while colluding with speculators to funnel “green energy” money to friends and allies. He is actively denigrating the US Government, both Congress and the US Supreme Court. This is an intentional disruption of democracy in America, and intended to wrest control away from the nation and into his and his cronies’ hands.

President Obama calls it a “Buffet Rule”, assuring that the wealthy pay high taxes. When Congress has determined, over the years, that certain investments and incomes are worth more to the nation than the tax revenue they would generate — President Obama calls Congress “Stupid” with a capital S, when he instead insists that “they have to pay their fair share”.

Who is next? Will President Obama decide that churches, other religious organization, the Red Cross, are “hoarding” tax dollars? What about corporations that oppose unfair labor practices (by labor unions)? Who would be willing to stand up and shout, “Hey, if the guy ain’t working, his wages shouldn’t make my car more expensive!” At least, no one does today about sweetheart labor deals that idle 4-10% of employees at full (union) pay.

Think of it this way. President Obama does *not* want the truck that brings bread, frozen food, potato chips, and shampoo to your grocery store, to Target or Wal-Mart — he doesn’t want them to be able to run every day.

What will you do, when you need a new laundry basket, and it has been a month since any store in town has had one available?

What will you do, when your grocer gets ice cream enough for a couple of days — once a month?

What will you do, when none of the stores in your town have shoes in your size, for a couple of months at a time?

What will you do, when the gas station doesn’t have enough gas for all customers, most of the time?

I foresee this all coming, the intermittent deflation interruptions made worse by increasingly erratic weather and increasingly erratic regulations and arrogant government.

This coming Energy Depression.

—

Mr. Kristof,

I read your article on egg laying operations in today’s “modern agribusiness” economy.

On the one hand, I think you left out some of the ways that the US Dept of Agriculture has created and pushed the “productive” nature of what used to be called farming. Current and past farm programs, as well as banker-initiated agendas, have stressed production over ethics, over concerns about chemical use, and about concerns for the neighbors and environment.

On the other hand, Americans have had and do have the alternative of searching out the local folk that raise chickens in a more traditional manner — with the more traditional rates of loss to predators from foxes and opossums and skunks and from feral and unfettered neighbor dogs and cats. Consumers still have and have long had the option to buy the locally raised eggs, produce, and meats. But they have to afford them, and discern who they buy from.

Modern advertising implies that any store that sells Oreo cookies means you get the one and only Oreo cookie wherever you buy it. Ads that Eggs are the “perfect” food imply the same.

I do warn you, that history shows prohibiting various practices and products, from drugs to dog fights, shows that it merely increases supply and profits, and creates criminal enterprises to exploit them.

Regulation of the milk industry has assured that factory milk farms meet Federal standards. Which means that the number of people actually milking cows for sale of milk and milk products has been reduced heroically — if one of them falls on hard times, or the wrong family member or worker is incapacitated, a significant source of milk will be threatened.

You might ask why the massive egg farms. You might also look into existing Federal regulations that force the small producer to get big or quit.

As economic troubles, from the national debt to lingering toxic assets bolstering the financial foundations of some American banks, to constraints on world production of oil and corrupt Federal promotion of “green” energy — expect shortages. Shortages of credit to businesses and to consumers has been downplayed, and so far has been quite local. I expect that to spread.

The big egg producers don’t have a large enough profit margin to tolerate a doubling of electricity costs, or a doubling of the cost to transport birds and eggs to and fro. Yet our President has set the wheels in motion to multiply electricity costs to bring the average cost up to the cost of (expensive) wind and solar power. The cost of oil since 2005 has been a function of speculation, not production, when production stopped increasing to moderate or take advantage of changes in price.

We need the local producers that are less reliant on intercontinental systems of operation and supply. The big egg producers, the national level producers of most products, but especially food, are facing, potentially, circumstances that will end their operations. Factors such as intermittent outages (i.e. the “smart grid”, where Washington, D.C. turns off one state or region to supply another, except for those “exempt” — campaign contributors, those “too big to turn off”, perhaps) and the rising costs of energy and intercontinentally sourced products and also the rising costs of meeting various Federal regulations (remember the Food Safety Administration starting to come online? ) will be threatening the business sector as well as communities and cities. And threaten people used to reliably available food at moderate cost.

It has been said that the wealthy can afford ethics. It might be observed that the “war on poverty” has manufactured the illusion that all Americans are wealthy, that all are entitled to the housing, the clean-hands work (or indolence) of the wealthy. How many Americans have “cleaned” the fish they caught, then prepared and shared the meal with family or friends? How many have butchered their own chicken, or hog? (My parents cleaned our chickens, we took the cows and calves to a local butcher). Most Americans have never grown a potato, and eaten the result (one of the easiest foods). How many Americans, today, have canned peaches and pork, so that it would be available months in the future?

I don’t recommend poverty as a life style. I do think that WWII put a lot of farm boys, and men that worked hard in cities, in factories, and in transportation, on the front lines against some powerful enemies. It might be that the very illusion of affluence is a serious threat to national security — and a threat to our national economy. The average age of today’s farmers is 55-60 years old. Since we don’t have a next-generation farmer waiting to continue producing food, it might well be that concern over the egg mills of today is misplaced. Wait ten years, there may not be many still producing eggs.

I don’t eat a lot of eggs. I have three hens in the back yard, two of them Bantams, that keep way ahead of my egg use. It is fairly easy to keep chickens — but takes years to learn to do it reliably. And it means finding someone to do the chores if I am away for 12 hours or more. It takes good fencing to keep predators, including the neighbor dogs, from killing the livestock that deserves my protection.

My neighbor bought a cow — that jumps fences. That loves to munch on my garden. More fencing. Which makes me wonder about all the scrap metal my neighbors are selling for export to China. I doubt America has budgeted the energy that was so cheap when that metal was first produced — to replace the metal to build fences. And cars. And bridge and building supports that need replacing.

When you advocate federal regulations to “solve” a problem, you actually mean to create an industry to exploit those regulations, to build the new barns at increased cost to “meet new regulations”, to build new equipment to meet changing requirements. To increase costs to continue to operate, and increase the benefits to those that operate outside the law. To expend more energy that is now less cheap, to continue to do what we do today.

I can think of many reasons for consumers to choose locally produced produce, food, furniture, building materials and practices, etc. Bringing Federal regulations into the argument hasn’t been notoriously successful in the past.

I figured, hey, I can flip a bundle, er, bale, over the fence to the pony every day or two, and we can eak out the winter that way.

The last month when the first frost was due, I looked behind the barn and there was all this half-grown Johnson grass just waiting to lose most of it’s nutrients when the frost hit. So the day before the frost I scythed a bunch. I am not getting younger, I don’t do physical stuff all that often, and I get tired, so a “bunch” isn’t like taking down a 20 acre hay meadow. More like about 20 or 25 minutes of huffing and puffing.

I had read about hay stacks, and you you need to do them correctly to keep the hay from spoiling before you can use it. And I looked. A neighbor claimed he played in haystacks a lot as a boy, but never learned to build one. I found an online story where a guy build a frame using four “uprights” leaning to the center where they were bolted together, a frame build about the ground and bolted to the uprights, and used a plastic tarp over the hay instead of doing the traditional haystack building. This story intended to add to the stack over the season, which you don’t do with a traditional hay stack.

I have a hay ring. This is a round steel ring a couple of feet high with eight loops that make eight openings for horses to get to the hay. You roll the thing on edge up to a round hay bale (5×6 foot, nominal), cut the strings/net from the bale, and drop the ring around the bale. The point is to keep the horses from pulling the bale apart and trampling much of the bale instead of eating it.

I have a hay ring, and some used boards. I set two 2×6 boards, on edge, between feeding spots, so the boards are parallel and maybe 5 feet apart. I laid four 2×4 boards crosswise on the 2×6′s to nearly touch the edges of the ring. And I forked that downed, dried Johnson grass onto my new “hay stack”. It turns out that “a bunch” of Johnson grass, when I am scything, doesn’t make that much of a stack on an 8′ diameter. Maybe 6′ high in the middle of the mound (remember, the bottom is already 2′ up off the ground). I tied a plastic tarp over it, using cotton sash cord to tie to the hoops of the hay ring.

The tarp fell.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the cords, which had been at the top of the hoops, were now near the bottom (nearly level with the bottom boards). The mound looked a little flatter, and was definitely shorter. And the pony? Showed a bit less rib than before The Great Haystack Improvisation.

Last weekend I untied part of the tarp, and plumped down three of the bundles, er, bales, from the barn in the middle of the stack. Well, middle, right. Johnson grass gets to be six to eight foot tall, and in casually stacked, ragged bundles I gathered, they stick out both ends. So the bundles were plumper in the middle of the stack/hay ring, but were right there at the edges. Anyway, I cut the baling twine, er, garden twine, retied the tarp, and the pony has been munching right along. It was empty today, and I put out two more bales. Er, bundles.

I put up hay a bunch at a time, and the grass is usually growing by late February/into March, so I don’t need *all* that much more hay. But the five-ten bundles I gathered each haying exercise makes big stacks in the barn. And the bales I have fed so far make a noticeable dent.

Small square grass hay bales are going for $8.50 each, now, if you can find any. There isn’t much here, and most of the time the price is much higher. The round grass hay bales that sold for $25-40 last year have sold for $135-150, and can be tough to find.

So I am glad the pony is doing OK with the Johnson grass, I am pleased that the tarp hasn’t blown to pieces in the wind, and seems to adjust it’s tie-downs as the pile gets smaller, and I am surprised that the Hackney pony doesn’t mind munching hay from under the flappy blue tarp.

I would have fretted myself a treat if I had planned this to come together this well.

But she does outline some important lessons for living a frugal and sustainable life. “Little House on the Prairie” stories nicely illustrate the 10 lessons she found.

Sod.

So I got to thinking. How much sod does it take to make a sod house or sod hut? If you life in a sod house, do you bite your tongue instead of observing, “Dear, there seems to be something growing on the wall.”??

Can you use straw bales for insulation and structure with a sod house? If you drop a bit of sod, and it breaks, does that make you a sodbuster?

Should the roof on a sod house be sod, thatch, or should it be rock (slate)?

Do you paint a sod house, or water it?

Yes, I am being facetious. Well, mostly. The questions might sound silly, but I do kinda want to know. And I figure the amount of sod needed “depends”. Like, how thick the sod is where you dig it up. Like how wide you make your walls. Like how big you want the structure, and how many rooms, I guess.

And is building sod houses where the phrase comes from, “Oh, sod it all!”??

Enjoy!

A few years back I welded up a hay storage bin. About 5 feet square, and a bit over six feet high, whatever would fit out the shop door. I used 3/4 inch square tubing for the frame, and 2×4 welded wire for three sides, with the front open above a ‘keeper’ bar about 1 foot up. This worked pretty well with loose hay.

Where I live is old-growth pasture. The local story goes that it was virgin prairie, and has never been plowed. After 70 years of grazing pasture use, I doubt that there is much original prairie grass left, and Johnson Grass has moved in around the buildings and in the pony’s pasture. Johnson grass was introduced to Oklahoma for hay and pasture, and does well at both. The problem with Johnson Grass is that it is very persistent if you want something else to grow there, and it tends to spread. Widely.

So what I have around the buildings to harvest is a mix of short grasses including cheat, and Johnson Grass, mostly, and a few patches of bermuda grass, sometimes occupying the same space. Next to the driveway is a solid stand of Johnson Grass. When I cut it early, it comes in solid bermuda. Cut that, and it is Johnson Grass again. But it mostly stays green. . .

I have a book on ‘farm implements you can make’, from the 1800s, that shows a wood frame for baling hay. This spring I got to thinking, and got out the two-hand scythe a friend cobbled up out of stainless tubing and regular handles and a brush blade.

The first part of making hay, after the planning and hoping, and watching the grass grow, is cutting. I am still learning to use the scythe, but I did manage to put down some short and tall grasses.

Next is curing. Curing is when sufficient moisture leaves the hay leaves and stalks, so that the hay is dry enough to store well, keep it’s nutrition value and not decompose. Hay put up too damp can rot, and at times generates enough heat to catch fire.

The sun and open are do the curing. I leave the hay a day or so, depending on the condition of the hay and weather, then get out the hay fork (four tines, wider than a three tine or manure fork) and turn the hay so the stuff on the bottom is exposed to that curing sun and breeze.

For short stem hays, a day or so after turning the hay may be ready. Long and coarser stem hays may take another day or three, and another turn or two.

Almost anticlimactic is gathering the hay and tossing it in storage (for loose hay) or baling.

Dad baled hay, and my neighbors bale hay. This includes a tractor, and first a mower or conditioner, then a rake, and finally a baler. The result is, usually, a very consistent stream of round or square bales laid out in the field, to be gathered and stacked until needed.

I don’t have that kind of equipment. I have a ball of Sisal twine, a blue plastic muck bucket, a box knife, and a hay fork.

Baling implements

Using the same fork I used to turn the hay, I laid some hay on the bucket and pushed it down in, about centered. A couple-three modest forks full, and it is time to mash the center of the bundle of grass together, grab one end of the twine and reach down one side of the hay to the bottom, reach down from the other side of the grasses to the bottom of the bucket, grab that twine, and pull it on around. A quick (!) square knot while mashing the center of the bundle together and pulling the twine tight, and cut off the bale of hay. Lift the bale out (it looks a lot like a bundle of grass with a string around the center), and repeat.

Twine just about wrapped around bundle

When I tried it using the wheel barrow instead of the muck bucket, it was easier. The wheel barrow allowed for a bit bigger bale (fewer baling operations), and reaching around the bundle was easier than stuffing my arms into the muck bucket full of hay.

My bale of hay.

The hay fork is useful transporting the bales, too, as I can usually stick the tines through two stacked bales. I estimate the bales range between small muck bucket size, about two pounds of short grasses, and maybe ten pounds for a moderate sized wheel barrow bale. Toss them into the hay bin, and let them complete airing out.

My problem with Johnson Grass hay is the weather. We have been getting rain showers with little accumulation, just enough to wet everything, and that delays curing. This isn’t great, because the wet/dry cycles are letting the sun bake out the nutrients in the hay, and keeping the moisture up so I cannot gather the hay yet.

The pony stands about three feet, five inches. Johnson Grass runs from four feet to seven feet. The pony likes to nibble the tender ends of the grass. So fully grown Johnson Grass doesn’t feed the pony that well. Where I have cut the Johnson Grass, the new-growing returning stems are short, and the pony (“Little One”) gets a better nibble in. And I get (some) hay put by for later, if it is needed.

I reckon that gathering hay is something folks with livestock could be considering. Hay from along fence lines, along unkempt roadways, on unused lots. Chickens will eat some hay, and use it for bedding, hogs eat hay and use the bedding, cows, goats, and sheep, too. Learning to hay takes practice to learn the grasses you harvest, the tools you use, the process and exceptions of curing, and the techniques for transporting and storing hay.

I turn 59 this year, with back pains and lowering heat tolerance. Gathering in fields at a time is for the young folk. I don’t have a lot of storage, and find the hour or two a day very satisfying (that is, I don’t want more, at the time).

The sisal twine I got from Big Lots, in the garden section. It is light, strong, and traditional for haying. The fork I picked up at a farm sale, a treasure that too many people decided isn’t needed, since they went to crops-only, or automated livestock farming. A modern three tine fork can run from $30 to $40 dollars, hay forks and the larger field hay forks would be much more expensive.

Last year I sharpened the scythe blade with a flap sanding disk on my angle grinder. Last winter I ordered a ‘scythe stone’ from Amazon.com, and it works a wonder. The package the stone came in mentioned wrapping the stone in cloth. I whacked out a six inch wide strip from the leg of a pair of rag-bag bib overalls, about two and a half times the length of the stone (about 10 inches by 1 1/2 inches). I lay the stone in the center of the cloth, lengthwise, and fold the top and bottom over, then the sides. I can stick that wrapped bundle in my pocket for convenience; the stone unwrapped would catch and hang in my pocket something fierce.

Little One, in Johnson Grass just starting to grow

The article is great, and covers a lot of topics which expand even further in the comment, including the impact of choosing industrial-style farming – right down to imported, Irish butter – over finding and choosing locally produced butter.

“I suppose farming will keep on going how it is”

I think that is pretty obvious. Climate and economic instability make our ability to feed our neighbors, our nation, and the world an issue worthy of concern. The current affluent-era, industrial style farming currently meets that need. I don’t see anyone winning anything if industrial style farming were dismantled before local, sustainable, superior food quality production is ready to replace it.

The currently aging industrial farm population, without an incoming legion of apprentice and journeyman farmers supporting, learning, and preparing to continue the practices make such a transition not just desirable, but pose a looming threat to food security.

The current debt deflation crisis (eroding the affluent credit market that makes industrial, Monsanto-style farming feasible) and rising energy costs, as well as threats to oil availability as world demand continues to erode the ability to produce enough oil to meet demand (that is, erratic availability and rising prices of all classes of energy) contribute to that looming threat.

I think looking at so-called “modern” farming practices, and farmers, is the wrong focus. Yes, there will be some fringe few willing to experiment and change. One focus might be to influence state agriculture colleges to investigate alternative practices and promulgate better ways through state extension services. Unfortunately, the focus on what a small farm can do doesn’t relate well when an operation is already at the level of 500 head of livestock, or several thousands of acres under cultivation.

One thought I had was a form of homestead program. An area of an existing, large farm might be set aside, and leased out in a rent-to-own proposition to “homesteaders” – people that would occupy and farm the land, perhaps a 10-40 acre parcel, for 10 years at modest rent (much below industrial-style farm land rent!). County extension or some similar service would be ready to educate, equip, and counsel the occupants on low-energy, sustained fertility, sustainable farming practices. The donor farm and occupants should receive tax benefits during the “settling” years. At the end of the 10 years the occupant would acquire clear title, the county tax base would increase, and hopefully the local food security would improve. Possibly applicants could be targeted to those with backgrounds or interest in farm life – or just desperately unemployed but educable. Farm life, after all, is scary as all get out, for those used to a highly structured corporate or union life.

I don’t see getting all the pieces ever getting put together for such a scheme. But there may be opportunities, where a local farm ceases to operate on the death of the operator – and China and other nations are kept from buying the land for producing food for their own people.

Many of today’s farmers have families that provide ballast that keeps them on the track they are now. Convincing an adult’s mate to choose chores over convenient shopping, making do over the latest advertised fashion or widget, or tearing up part of the yard for (more) garden space goes way beyond the issue.

It gets all the way back to how we choose a mate. The “pioneers” that took wagon trains from their beginnings back east picked a mate, for the most part, that was capable of and willing to work for security and survival. Many mates today are chosen for willingness to cuddle or whether they dress and act like Playboy or Chippendale icons. I can see revering a school football team – with a success record of providing a high number of armed services soldiers and sailors. The local acclaim that is the most any teams today boast is pretty petty and transitory – but it gets a lot of couples together, that have little cultural guidance or values established that emphasize respect, honor, and character. Or service. Too many people in the last several generations have known only the relatively forgiving, affluent life we see eroding around us today.

The real place to start for change, is going to be with the children. This is something the government in the 1950s and 1960s convinced my parents and grandparents not to do – that the nation needed every child to be an engineer (or fashion model or trophy wife), not to learn the culture and craft of their family and neighbors.

Check out Matron‘s delightful photography and presentation of her various small farming techniques – all chosen to maintain and improve the fertility of the soil, improve the quality of the beef and produce she raises, and joy in her life.

The little girl, maybe four or five years old, was dressed very nicely, as if just returned from church services with her family. She was bright eyed, impeccably groomed, and very respectful and energetic. She rushed to the Wal-Mart Santa, had her picture taken with a great smile – and rushed to the back of the camera to view the results. She hovered there, watching what the camera captured as her siblings took their turns with Santa.

I was moved. I intervened to speak to her mother. “Please consider a camera for her (indicating the girl). She has been all over that camera.” Mom looked surprised at the suggestion, as if the thought of camera and that girl had never come together for her. I was satisfied.

I was satisfied with my intervention, not because I got that girl a great camera, or even that I was glad her mother was now considering a camera for a Christmas present.

I was satisfied because now I was sure that her mother *noticed* that her daughter *noticed* cameras, capturing images and information. Mom now saw more than just another little girl.

Further thoughts

I don’t know that the camera was the seat of the girl’s attention and interest. Perhaps a sketch with charcoals or water colors – or crayons – would have expressed the core of what drew her attention. So the correct response should not have been an expensive camera, nor one much beyond her current knowledge and skills. I imagine that underestimating her abilities to use a camera is more likely, but still, any basic $12-30 camera should do.

Because the real gift should be the parents’ time. Time to be sure the girl knows how to use the camera – and begin to see how to view the world and capture that image. Her parents should take the time to help explore the things that camera images can build and contribute to – from documenting accidents and injuries, to furnishing family trees, to capturing portraits, to building a portfolio of images that express her feelings and appreciations for some aspect of life, nature, and belief (that is, art).

The gift should be recognition that the camera and the images it captures are a way to view, express, explore, and share the world. Recognizing that kind of gift of the spirit of that girl is an immense treasure. Appreciation by the parents of that sensitivity and artistic flourish is expressed in attention and participation – time – and not in dollars.

First off, Don makes an unwarranted assumption. No where is there a fundamental limit on what a “tax” means. A tax is whatever a government takes, to fund operations or for other purposes. Taxes are a big part of the cost of government. Regulations, inspections, fees, and mandates to perform certain functions to government standards are indirect costs. Prohibitions against using things, or performing actions – such as growing hemp fibers or carrying a weapon to defend yourself, your family, and your community, these are taxes against the nation. The time of service of anyone drafted into or employed in government service is another cost of government; the services of government workers and soldiers are not available to the national economy during their term of service.

Under most Presidents that swear to protect and defend the Constitution, prescribed limits on authority tend to keep the cost of government reasonable for the demands of the nation upon that government. The common practice has been to assay taxes on the income of citizens. But the estate tax, excise taxes on luxury items including new cars, taxes on capital gains, taxes on the income of businesses – when that income will be taxed again when it becomes income of owners – these are clear examples of taxes on money other than personal income. During wartime, the military draft was a direct tax of people of the United States. Mandates against states, doctors, and police forces to implement various provisions from building roads to serving Medicare patients constitute another non-income tax.

So I think Don’s initial complaint about misleading by calling an extension of tax relief a “tax break” is quite accurate. But his assumption that the government can’t tax anything, anything at all, is wrong, if you allow that an unscrupulous government won’t abide by any constraints.

Threatening farms with the Estate Tax.

I think there is a side issue that should be addressed with the estate tax.

Farming is a marginal activity, perhaps especially modern type farming as directed by Monsanto and the US Dept of Agriculture. In good years there can be a really impressive cash flow when harvesting crops from hundreds or thousands of acres of highly productive crop land. In other years, the vast costs of purchasing and maintaining the equipment, of buying the increasingly expensive (patented, GMO Monsanto) seed, of artificially made and transported fertilizers and cost of purchase and application of crop chemicals to manage diseases, weeds, and insects, of the costs of transporting grains to ever fewer and more highly regulated (remember the three biggest lies, ending with “We are from the government, we are here to help”??) grain elevators. Because there is so much grain being harvested and so few places to handle it, harvest “season” gets horribly compressed into days and weeks – and most grain must then be dried down to survive even temporary storage, at cost of fuel and money to the farmer.

And in years that the yield, due to inclement weather, crop diseases, etc., is rather meager – not all the bills get paid. Debt accumulates quickly on a farm, waiting for the next harvest.

Now consider that the average – the average, mind you, ’cause that means half of them are older – age of farmers in the US is 57 years. For the most part, the next generation of farmers left the farms. And the generation after that. For the first time in human history, according to one ASPO USA presentation, the people that will be raising an impressive portion of the world’s food – including the food the US depends on – won’t be raised by farmers. The next generation of farmers won’t have their parents and grand parents to teach them about the land, about the crops, about the equipment, about the markets. About debt, and combining farm operations with off-farm employment, as most farms are forced to do.

Now look at the remaining “farm families” – and the estate tax. Too many farms, when the owner dies, had to be sold to pay the estate taxes, back before the Bush tax cuts. That is a quandary facing farm families, and America’s farmers, with the “tax the wealthy” cry we here from Obama and the Democrats. While farm land might be worth $3500 an acre in parts, on paper, when a family sells the farm – who can afford to buy it? Few banks want to sink that much money for land and equipment into a farm with such a low historical return – on an unproven young farmer. So the land becomes part of a larger spread, and gets farmed, and the US muddles along with a few less farmers ready to operate in the next generation. That, or speculators pick up the piece – we know China and other nations are purchasing crop land around the world, to raise crops to feed their people – crops that *won’t* be available to feed Americans, or to contribute to sales of food overseas.

There are international and food security issues that make the estate tax a very real risk to national security, and a risk to the ability of America to feed itself should supplies of energy (peak oil, peak coal, over-subscribed national electricity grid) or vagaries of weather, or mere passage of time and this last generation of American farmers, come to pass

The cost, though, is prohibitive. Regulations regard every operation as if they are selling into the mainstream, national exposure of industrial agriculture.

Consider the hamburger, a chunk of meat taken from the ground up parts of perhaps 1,000 different cows, or maybe just one. The point is that the meat industry takes all the pieces and blends them together, so that meat from grass-fed young animals won’t taste one way, and retired (old) dairy cows and bulls (tasting of their stronger hormones) won’t taste another. Blend them all, and the taste stays consistent, hiding the healthier taste and quality into the mix.

Or milk. Milk is gathered from the cow, mixed into the daily gathering’s tank, gathered into the bulk transport, gathered into the processing plant vats. Each gathering from transport, from farm, from cow, must be clean and safe, in order for the bulk tank to be safe, and then for each container filled from that tank to be safe.

When Joe down the road milks his cow, and pours it into a quart jar with his name and date, you need the cow to be healthy, and Joe to work cleanly. And that is it. If Joe makes a mistake, maybe 20 people will be affected; if Joe were selling to a big dairy association (they won’t take Joe’s milk if he has less than a hundred cows), his mistake could affect thousands of households. It economically affordable to be extra sure the big, bulk processing inputs are all regulated and mistake-free (or almost).

Joe and his cow, and the folk that prefer the taste of non-watered milk from Joe’s cow, should be allowed to buy what they want. Even if it doesn’t have enough water added to make it USDA-compliant so-called “whole” milk.

My thought has been to limit regulations to those selling 10,000 servings per year. That would place a fairly reasonable definition of “small producer” on the books.

A local supplier selling their own products, under their label, means that tracking problems back to the source gets quite simple. Different regulations should apply when your products aren’t mixed in with someone else’s products. The tomatoes in a bin labeled “Brad’s Tomatoes” should have different regulations than the bin labeled “Product of Chile”. (I have nothing against Chile or other places, and I am happy to have their fruits when they are available.)

If I sell Sharon a bushel of, say, loofa (if I can get the dang fruit to grow nearly as well as the vine), and it keeps that “Brad’s Garden” identifier right to the sale to the customer, so the customer can call and complain to me or identify me to the county health or doctor or whoever needs problems reported to – that satisfies, and should set that bushel aside from, public health concerns. Because at that point, the exposure isn’t “the public” to “the product” – it is “my community” exposed to “Brad’s Garden”. And that is a personal, entirely different kind of relationship.

Just one for-instance. Try suing Brad’s Garden for $10. I go out of business. And anything I might have been growing is lost to the community. If I should be shut down, then everyone (but me) wins. Should someone think twice about cost to the community, before suing? I think so. Especially if any problem could be corrected in person.

This kind of approach would pose a problem for a roadside stand or grocer that wants to lump the last of apples from Brad’s Garden with the apples from two neighbors into a remnants bin. Maybe.

I read a piece pointing out that most of what we know about so-called renewable energy, short of hydroelectric, really isn’t. Wind farms are expensive in money and energy for an intermittent power source – meaning they cannot displace coal fired power plants, and that the national distribution grid isn’t designed to make good use of such diverse, modest sources of electricity. Nuclear power, ultimately, consumes a non-renewable resource, uranium, uses a lot of precious resources including water, people, and besides, nuclear power produces wastes that pose problems of national scale for security and toxicity.

So I was thinking – how to capture the energy difference between an asteroid in orbit, or even de-orbiting, and the surface of the earth?. Since I was young, when Project Mercury introduced the nation to the hazards – and heat – of reentry, I have “known” about the way heat accumulates in the path of an object deorbiting into the atmosphere.

And I wondered – what if . . What if there was a way to capture, to encapsulate that heat of friction as an object at orbital velocity begins to impact the upper atmosphere. That heated almost-air, that blanket of superheated . . plasma. Some SF writers, including David Weber, posit a magnetic field to encompass the plasma of a high-output, nuclear-related (fictional) space drive. Could some type of mechanical or magnetic field hybrid container be constructed, to save and store the plasma – the heat – generated by a rock hitting the atmosphere?

That would be an astronomical quantity of elemental plasma, at temperatures similar to a nuclear reactor, I imagine, at times.

And that could be a mechanism for generating reasonably inexpensive energy: send men into space, reclaim an asteroid or section of an asteroid, shift it (I apologize for the hand-waving here, in the blithe assurance that if SF authors have figured it out, then industry and rocket science could, too. Solar sails, for instance, would be reasonably sustainable, and not contribute to carbon accumulation in the stellar field) to Earth orbit. Then carve it into 10 kilo size or whatever size is useful, fit with the “US Deorbital Plasmotic Energy Process and Collection Kit” (USDPEPCK, “Peck” for short, as in “a peck of plasma,” but name is subject to change), and drop the package using a powered ‘sled’ type minimal craft to deorbit the package, and release it in a way that the package lands somewhere innocuous but useful. The sled returns to the work site for the next chunk. Repeat until the asteroid (or fraction) is used up.

(Note – if you get an asteroid into orbit, there may well be more things to do than drop rocks – things like build manufacturing facilities for space-born processes, and processes that are toxic in the atmosphere. Or even building space colonies, interplanetary exploration and research launch platforms – the “airport” and “island outpost” raised to Low Earth Orbit.)

But – what about de-orbiting spacecraft? Or satellites? Could the heat that we currently ablate with consumable shields be captured for useful purpose? Could capturing plasma act as a shield to the spacecraft?

What if the compression of air in front of a vehicle in motion could be capture – by a rail train, or a freight truck? Or commercial aircraft?

Hmm. I wonder if DARPA has looked into this?

I wonder if you got an asteroid into orbit, and cut it into small chunks – could you drop each into a certain lake or reservoir, and just capture the heating to the targeted water?