Blog Anniversary Overview

I have been writing this daily column for a full year now. I think that there were only one or two instants that I lacked an obvious topic. In any event, this is as good a time as any to reformulate my theme of the application of agriculture to resolving our perceived difficulties with CO2 in particular and environmental issues in general.

I have always looked for ways in which the small farmer, who represents a likely third of the global population, can adopt beneficial protocols.

My initial postings commenced with the need to restore good husbandry to the maintenance and use of the woodlot in temperate North America. We recognized the need to produce a larger authority than the individual who could be capitalized over the long time spans necessary. We opened discussions on the methods and established practical protocols.

What I am very conscious of is that all protocols must be first properly implemented by some form of collective agency that has access to title creation and enforcement. After all, why are you going to grow a Macadamia nut plantation if after five years I can come in and convert the wood to charcoal?

This form of agricultural barbarism is inhibiting agricultural development in the underdeveloped world. The impoverished and disenfranchised simply do not care if their neighbor’s family is thrown into poverty and this is the selfish foundation of so called ethnic cleansing.

We went on to almost immediately discover terra preta. There was little coverage then but that has since totally blossomed. The power of terra preta is that it clearly answers the age old problem of maintaining soil fertility and I showed how even the original makers used corn waste to make it happen. This can be done today by any subsistence farmer.

Getting that world wide problem behind us was extremely necessary and very timely. Now that we know how to produce highly fertile soils in only a few years, we will be able to at least tolerate poor practices until the current operators are replaced. We actually have the time. I expect to see the ruined soils of Mesopotamia to be fertile again.

Education and gentle pressure will do the rest.

More exciting, millions of acres of tropical forest soils, now been cropped on a slash and burn system can be converted to continuous sustainable agriculture, This actually puts feeding our projected population of ten billion within easy reach.

We talked about the buffalo commons development that is quietly underway with no need to call on government involvement. I expect that in two centuries, that we will have more buffalo ranched than was ever alive in the wild. This particular protocol will also be implemented in the Asian steppes where their brethren were wiped out many thousands of years ago.

Recently we have been made aware of the productivity of cattail culture which allows a wetland protocol that will produce massive amounts of starch suitable for ethanol. This was unexpected and promises to be hugely productive and very low cost. The agricultural protocol can be applied from the tropics to deep in the Boreal forest. Whoever thought that there would be a crop that could prosper in those dismal swamps? Even the moose will be happy. The mosquitoes and black flies will be even happier which is why the work will have to be largely done after first frost.

We also discussed the onset of peak oil conditions in the energy markets. Pricing was shifted from an abundance regime to a chronic shortage regime. This obviously hurts and is now creating a huge immediate market for ethanol. Again, the obvious first step is to impose optional ethanol usage on all new vehicles. Industry and agriculture will sort out how to do the rest.

Many other protocols are now been experimented with and we have reported on these as they arose.

It is very comforting to know however, that almost all global soils in use can be easily restored to full health, that most wetland areas can become massive producers of starch for ethanol and if we care, for human consumption, and that temperate dry lands are best served by buffalo husbandry.

I have also commented on the need to bring the entire ancient hunter gather protocols under proper management. This will not likely occur until the hunters are run out of business. I do not think that it will be too difficult to restore the soon to be extinct salmon fishery or the soon to be extinct blue fin tuna fishery when the so called owners are completely out of business. It did happen to the world’s greatest cod fishery and once they are finished wrecking the ocean bottom so that any other form of fishing is impossible, it should be possible to get agreement with everyone to stay away forever and allow a full optimized recovery.

I welcome my readers to comment and I also welcome new ideas that I have never seen. Feel free to contact me through this blog.

Greatest Human Ecological Disaster

The global warming debate is driven by growing public unease throughout the world over our visible disregard for good husbandry practices in our industrial economy. It is expressing itself most clearly over the CO2 issue, even though this is most likely a red herring. The direct linkage to global warming is at least controversial, and I for one have a great deal of faith in the Earth’s carbon cycle and its ability to restore such imbalances.

More importantly, the ecological movement is about good husbandry. And strange as it may sound, it is not about conservation. Mankind has already transformed most of the environment to serve its needs thousands of years ago, and mankind’s task increasingly is to improve on this legacy. The only areas that we can rightly conserve are inimical to human habitation and even that often needs the fine hand of good husbandry practice.

With the true wild a policy of haven maintenance must be implemented to properly manage human exploitation. An ideal model of this is to overlay a checkerboard and designate every ninth square as a haven. Of course in practice, this must be negotiated and studied in detail to ensure proper sizing sufficient to the various needs. For example, it makes plenty more sense to preserve old growth forests as a corridor along river beds. Once stake holders understand what is at stake, it can sort itself out quickly.

Let us put this argument in reverse. Extinction is the direct result of a loss of habitat havens. Distributed havens of old growth forests sufficient to support the spotted owl ends threats to that species and as the forests recover their range naturally expands. If we learn to manage havens then our industrial scale exploitation can be recovered from.

Remember, the bison succumbed to the global shoe leather market. Had havens not existed in Canada, the current 500,000 animal herd would simply not exist. Today that herd is on the way back to its millions and people living today will live to see many millions of bison on the prairie because it is simply a better meat animal for that particular climate. I also expect to see the bison introduced into the steppes of central Asia, restoring the native bison hunted to extinction thousands of years ago. That is good husbandry.

It came as a complete surprise to me to learn that the areal extent of the terra preta in the Amazon basin equals that of France. If this is true, then the acreage and the corn and cassava culture would easily have supported massive populations equal to that of contemporaneous India and China. What really stunned me is the fact that if it was not for the soil itself, we would have no evidence whatsoever that such a culture even existed. The Amazon was a lousy place to build permanent structures that could be found in the jungle, although we now will be looking.

What I find most sobering is that tens of millions of individuals have lived theirs lives and passed leaving almost no trace of their existence. How often has this happened globally over the past 10,000 years? Societies do not build with stone unless they are highly organized so a lack of such evidence is very misleading. The so called Stone Age for example did an excellent job of leaving evidence of its existence behind, even though a better name would be the wood and bone age. I have no difficulty setting out to construct a very sufficient tool kit with those two items as the Indians in the Amazon do to this day.

When copper became available and later iron, both metals were too valuable to throw out, so the material was constantly recycled. Yet populations expanded and social complexity increased. The only evidence left would be in the form of pottery. You can also bet that even broken pottery had some commercial value and was largely recycled.

We all know that large populations existed in the Middle East and even Europe, simply because we have looked hard enough. The Sahara desert represents several million square miles and it was once populated and the climate was amenable to agriculture. At least they raised goats. Recall today that the southern edge of this desert currently houses 100,000,000 people in conditions almost as technically primitive as 6,000 years ago on perhaps ten percent of the Saharan littoral. The fools still raise goats.

It has been argued that the collapse of the Sahara was a natural disaster. I suspect that just the opposite is true. It was instead the greatest human caused ecological disaster ever. It is as if China or India disappeared abruptly. Of course we do not know to what extent the desert was fully covered with vegetation. Since an extensive lake system existed I am inclined to err on the side of a nearly one hundred percent coverage, however fragile and terribly susceptible to easy devastation by the grazing of goats.

It is just now in our power to restore this desert back to human agriculture and general fertility just as it is possible to restore the terra preta fields of the Amazon to agriculture. It would be nice to actually absorb that big chunk of solar energy hitting the Sahara and bouncing back out. And a Sahara restored can support a couple of billion people at least.