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BamaRider
Guest
So ya like the local fare better?
- Status
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vern_humphrey
Guest
Yeah. My wife and my priest have asked me not to talk about real native food and drink. The priest was especially put off by learning how chicha (the national drink of Peru) is made.
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Ridgerunner
Guest
I’m just a few miles from Stone Co, Mo. and it’s lucky I don’t live there or people would accuse us both of being “Stoners”.
Hay is a speculative thing. Last year I paid from a low of just over 2 cents/lb to almost 4 cents for Caucasian bluestem. $5.00 to haul. There was more hay here last year than people could sell. I expect it will be higher this year with diesel at $4.00.
Still, feeding hay is a profit killer, even though I truly don’t think these hay growers are coming out, considering the cost of fuel and the equipment. I figure I’m two years away from feeding only when there’s ice on the grass. This year, I wont otherwise start until sometime in January. Maybe not then.
I’ll argue that fescue is good stuff as long as you don’t feed it in midsummer when the toxicity is high. In spring it’s pretty close to Alfalfa in protein. For these rocky, droughty hills, you can’t beat Caucasian for midsummer pasture, though you can’t overseed rye into Caucasian for winter pasture like you can in Bermuda.
The New Zealanders here have a neat trick I haven’t tried yet. They “no-till” beets into the pastures. They graze the lactating cows on the tops along with the grass, then follow on with steers they’re backgrounding. The steers learn very quickly how to pull the beets out of the ground and eat them. Best feed you could ask for, and cheap. No corn. Some people around here put goats in after the cattle rotate through. The export market for goats is big. Middle Easterners (and Mexicans) love goat meat. Bringing a little of that oil money back, which is nice.
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vern_humphrey
Guest
You bet it will!
I have horses and donkeys, and they need hay – a lot of it.
The problem is, once it’s there, it’s there. No getting rid of it.
I have neighbors who raise goats – they seem to make a profit.
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drpmjhess
Guest
ribozome, you are quite right that peak oil production – which we will certainly reach some time between 2010 and 2013 – will exacerbate the food problem. This is a problem Catholics should monitor. The global human population was around a billion at the time petroleum began to be produced in 1859. Cheap, plentitful fossil fuels in combination with modern medicine have boosted the human population to nearly seven billion.
Humans (like all animal species) are constrained by available energy. Animal populations go through natural boom and bust cycles, and when the energy supplying the boom disappears, the population crashes back to a sustainable level. Our current population of seven billion is being artificially propped up by cheap oil, and when that become scarce, the population will inevitably crash back to a sustainable level. You are quite right be be concerned about the conversion of corn from food to ethanol production.
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Ridgerunner
Guest
Both animal populations and human populations are governed by a lot more than available energy, but when it comes to energy, animals are far more limited, (what they ingest and absorb through their hides) and have no ability at all to affect the nature of it or the supply available to them. Men have been altering our energy supply and demand therefor from the first time a man realized he could kill an animal with a sharpened stick. Once one admits the fairly obvious fact that men can and do affect outcomes through ingenuity, the whole Malthusian analysis fails, as history has repeatedly demonstrated both before and after Malthus. The more appropriate question is, then, not “whether” men can survive changes in the availability of petroleum, but “how”. Mechanistic doomsday scenarios are, in effect, a matter of “barking up the wrong tree.”
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Semper_Fi_1
Guest
If we could get some SANE LEADERSHIP in Zimbabwe which actually wanted to help the region and its neighbors, Zimbabwe could easily become a regional power with a major clout on the international scene. It was the breadbasket of southern Africa providing most of the food to the region (remember those WHITE FARMERS ?) but now, since Mugabe’s racist policies have went into effect, their people are starving and his grip on the economy, media and government is tightening. Africa can sustain itself if China keeps its hands off and we get our heads out of the sand and actually do something voer there. The Commies know that Africa is the future – but its going through the post-colonial growing pains. The reason that South Africa is striving as it is now with the strong Rand is because the infrastructure was already there. My girlfriend/fiancee is from Durban, so yes it is a very familiar subject to me.
Northern Africa is already lost and has been for centuries.
Northern Africa is already lost and has been for centuries.
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The_Barbarian
Guest
When South Africa became free, there was a strong movement on the part of many people to take revenge on the people who had oppressed them.
It was a brilliant and Christlike policy on the part of Nelson Mandela to have a process to bring out the truth about all of the evils done under Apartheid, and then forgive.
He didn’t seize property, toss people in prison, or assume dictatorial powers. And while South Africa will continue to have huge social and economic problems recovering from Apartheid, he pointed the way to a better future. If Mugabe had done that, Zimbabwe (which was in far better shape than South Africa when he assumed power) would indeed be major power in Africa.
It was a brilliant and Christlike policy on the part of Nelson Mandela to have a process to bring out the truth about all of the evils done under Apartheid, and then forgive.
He didn’t seize property, toss people in prison, or assume dictatorial powers. And while South Africa will continue to have huge social and economic problems recovering from Apartheid, he pointed the way to a better future. If Mugabe had done that, Zimbabwe (which was in far better shape than South Africa when he assumed power) would indeed be major power in Africa.
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drpmjhess
Guest
Humans have more latitude than do other animal species to increase the energy available to them. That’s why it is doubly tragic that humans are sitting around fiddling while Rome burns. Once we cross over the “Hubbert’s Peak” of oil production,there will be less and less petroleum available, at the same time that the demand from both developed and developing countries will be greater and greater.
Allowing for decline in existing fields (such as Ghawar and Mexico’s Cantrell), by 2017 the world will have to add about 55 million bbls per day just to keep even, and then another 112 million bbl/day to meet increased demand from growing populations around the world. It will be like the improbable adding of nine new Saudi Arabias over the next decade.
Petrus
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Ridgerunner
Guest
When politicians prevent exploration and Congress is busy grilling oil companies about why they have the audacity to make money, one cannot be overly optimistic about increased worldwide production, even though most of the earth’s surface has never been explored.
Humans also have the ability to alter the ways and quantities in which they consume energy. If we were still burning wood the way we did 150 years ago, the only trees left would be in exhibits. We use a tremendous amount of petroleum to produce electricity that nuclear power could produce. But politically, we have not yet made that choice.
My last point, though, was that a lot of our present inefficient fuel use has been determined by an abundance of cheap petroleum, and that not all agricultural production is necessarily dependant on continuing wasteful practices. Feeding grain (and in some situations, even hay) to cattle the way we do now is, in my opinion, definitely one of them. Takes a lot of fuel consumption to do it, and it isn’t really necessary. I am reasonably confident there are other inefficiencies in agricultural use of fuel as well. I just don’t claim to know what they are.
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drpmjhess
Guest
Quite right, Ridgerunner – the temptation since 1859 has been to grab the cheap petroleum first. As the easy fields are being depleted, companies are spending more and more money and time drilling for more costly petroleum, and passing those costs on to consumers. When it costs a barrel equivalent of energy to produce a barrel of oil, it will no longer be cost-effective to extract that oil, and oil production will cease.
I quite agree with you that we should have been building nuclear power plants two decades ago. However, all resources have a Hubbert’s Peak, and I work with people who think there is only about a century’s a worth of uranium. We want an inexhaustible supply of power that can provide for human needs for another hundred thousand years.
I don’t buy the “great die-off” scenario that humans will become extinct, but I do suspect we are in for a “great pruning,” as the current population of seven billion is not sustainable without the equivalent of the energy we no get from oil, which is at peak production. The “green revolution” is overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels for plowing, planting, fertilizing, harvesting, producing, and transporting food. We need to calculate how many people the earth can support in the long term without reliance on fossil fuels. Before 1959 it was around one billion. With better technologies I suspect the human carrying capacity of the earth is between two and three billion.
Petrus
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Ridgerunner
Guest
I don’t question the 100 years of uranium, because I have insufficient knowledge of that. I would wonder, though, whether there might be better ways to use it that might extend that time period.
If the use of wood had remained unchanged from 1859 to now, trees in the U.S. would exist only in museums. But that did change. Doubtless anyone in a position to assess the wood supply would have declared that one billion people were too many, let alone 3 billion or 7 billion. And, given the state of knowledge at the time, they would likely have been right in saying it. Anyone contemplating the possibility of 300 Americans in 1859 could have likely calculated, with justification, that by 2008, virtually all agricultural production would be used to support horses, leaving nothing for people to eat.
But I suppose, given no breakthroughs, no real efficiencies, no innovative ways of procuring or using energy, those who say 7 billion is unsustainable, would be right eventually. I guess I would have to admit that my doubts about a “dieoff” or even a “pruning” are based on my belief that people are sufficiently innovative to avoid such an eventuality. Having observed some really energy saving innovations in my own lifetime, I don’t feel altogether unjustified in having that belief.
But the truth is, none of us knows.
It would be a shame to expend a great deal of energy and coercion to “prune” the population and then find that it was not only unnecessary but harmful in some manner.
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drpmjhess
Guest
Ridgerunner, God forbid you should think I’m in favor of “pruning” population – that would be an awful euphemism! I don’t think even the misanthropes who look eagerly to the “great die-off” of the mass of humanity are thinking in terms engineering it themselves. Rather, they mean that famine, plague, and resource warfare will kill off most of the population above the sustainable level.
I am professionally optimistic because I am a theology and philosophy professor, and I cannot let my personal reservations kill the hope and optimism of my students. I agree with you that there are many things we might do to engineer a “soft landing,” and I hope these will be done. That being said, I am personally pessimistic, because there is tremendous inertia in modern capitalist society. We are wedded to the model of eternal economic growth, where a steady state means death. Corporations must always expand, cities must always grow, GNP must always increase.
What I think would be a shame would be if the growing awareness of global warming and petroleum decline fails to serve as a wakeup call. Suppose we are wrong about oil,and the peak is actually twenty years out, rather than in 2012? For heaven’s sake, let’s not squander these two decades with more growth in population and consumption. Rather, let’s use them as a grace period in which (1) to convert agriculture to a post-oil model; (2) to restructure our living patterns so that people live close to where they work, and no longer make costly commutes; (3) to build safe nuclear power plants as fast as we can as a stopgap measure to prevent people from freezing in the winter and dying of heat stroke in the summer; (4) to commit ourselves to electric high-speed inter-city rail, and intra-city light rail networks; and (5) to bring down the population gradually through smaller families until we reach a level where billions won’t starve to death. As Catholics (and others), I think we ought to begin to regard these five points as essential to the project of saving civilization.
Prayerfully yours,
Petrus
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Ridgerunner
Guest
I commend you for expressing optimism to your students, as they are the ones whose function it will be to bring about innovative means of dealing with the needs of society when changes become necessary, as they always do. Certainly, my instincts (not any scientific knowledge on my part) incline me to favor some of the things you feel would be beneficial.
But, limited though it might be, I do have some knowledge of agriculture, being involved in it in a limited way myself. When I see mile after mile after mile of land that could be productive stand empty and idle year after year after year, it’s difficult for me to be persuaded that starvation is just around the corner. When I, myself, who have no scientific background at all, can effect large increases in productivity while simultaneously cutting fuel use drastically, by very simple means, I’m just not persuaded that better innovators can’t rise to the challenge in many ways. When I see some of the formerly most productive land in the world (e.g. Zimbabwe) reduced to starvation because of misrule, and when I see some societies finally “take off” and gain prosperity despite population levels no one would have thought sustainable, I am inclined to think man has a few more tricks up his sleeve before giving it up and resorting to reduction in human populations.
I’m no historian either, but I think about the years between the Stolypin reforms and the October Revolution in Russia. Finally, finally, farmers were able to obtain good prices for their products, a change that was likely to fuel an explosion of productivity and prosperity in Russia, as it had elsewhere. But no, the Bolsheviks saw economics as a “zero sum game” and squelched the very thing that held so much promise. Seeing the food and capital shortages they created, they deliberately set out to reduce the population (and the innovators who held so much promise), and did. Lenin even experimented with the NEP, saw that it worked, and shut it down. Russia has never recovered from all that, and perhaps never will.
I recall reading that precolumbian plains Indians were few and far between, living always on the edge of starvation while billions and billions of pounds of inaccessible protein on the hoof thundered past them twice annually. With the coming of the horse, then the gun, they could access it, and their populations exploded. Was that sustainable? Almost certainly not. Yet things changed further, and the populations in the Great Plains are far bigger now than they were then.
Perhaps I have too much faith in the ability of mankind to come up with new ways of doing things and am too optimistic as a result. But I don’t expect there to be no bumps in the road.
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peregrinus_WA
Guest
One thing that also has not been mentioned is that yields of crops has been improving through bio-engineering. This is and will continue to increase supplies of food being produced in the same amount of land.
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drpmjhess
Guest
True. What we need to engineer, however, is crops that do not need fertilizer, as almost all of our fertilizer comes from fossil fuels. Whether than can be accomplished is another question.
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Ridgerunner
Guest
It’s interesting that you said this. I recall reading that when the Arab invaders came, they noted to their astonishment that they could, e.g., travel from Tunis to Tripoli without ever once leaving the shade of olive trees. But, as someone or other said, James Michener perhaps, they brought the desert with them wherever they went.
If I said the Israelis cured at least one part of a devastated land, the pro-Hamas crowd might pounce, so I won’t say it.
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peregrinus_WA
Guest
Yes, there are crops that need less fertilizer and more and more fertilizers are coming being made organically.
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latin_rite
Guest
Yup. Gotta love how someone talks about how a famine is gripping large parts of the world and clowns here start denying it or making light of it, talking how they can go to a all you can eat joint for 8 bucks or tells them to stop farming with oxen and start using tractors. No wonder christianity has a world wide image problem. But hey if they have no rice tell them to eat cake eh? The more i read of this site the more right wing protestant it appears. maybe the catholics in the u.s are leaving the chruch in droves because they see no difference between evangilisim and catholisim:shrug:
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Ridgerunner
Guest
Good heavens! You called me a hypocrite in one thread and a clown in another, all in the same morning! Am I both, or have I changed?
In order to save everyone from completely morphing into right wing protestants (who, to you, I guess, are uncharitable…a gross misjudgment, but we’ll let it pass to stay topical) I’ll pose the following questions to you:
- Assuming there is a worldwide food shortage (which is not conceded, but is assumed arguendo) what is/are its cause/causes? It would be best if you laid a foundation for your conclusions, but for now, the conclusions alone will do.
- As specificallyl as you can state it, what is your solution?
- Status