Food & Water

Albert Bates on peak oil, relocalisation and why the hippys were right all along

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What is so wonderful about Albert’s talk is the incredible story he tells about what can be achieved when people work together to make something happen. The story of hundreds of middle-class city hippy kids turning up on 1000 acres of poor farmland in Tennessee and having to work out how to grow food, build houses, make electricity and so on, is a great story for our times, showing what the combination of circumstance, passion and necessity can draw out of us.

The minimum tools for small-time garden farming

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One of the chief advantages of the small garden farm based on grassland farming with pasture and crop rotations is that only a small portion of the total farm is cultivated, and of that cultivated part, only an even smaller portion needs to be cultivated at any one time. To ascertain your power and tool requirements on such a farm, you do not look at total acreages, but rather the number of acres that necessarily have to be cultivated in any one day.

Survival 101: They don’t teach that in most colleges, and there’s a dilemma

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Can a young person risk going to college these days?
If you’re 18 and college-bound, you may be skilled at computers and driving a car; know how to take the second derivative of a quadratic equation in calculus and have learned about electron orbits in chemistry; and may be able to discuss Shakespeare and “To Kill a Mockingbird” intelligently. But do you know how to kill and dress a chicken, or find and prepare wild edible plants in every season, or keep a goat healthy so it produces milk and meat?

Terra Preta: Biochar and the MEGO effect

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“Terra preta” refers to the rich, fertile artificial soils found in the Amazon. In this post I’ll have a look at modern day techniques to produce terra preta (often called biochar or agrichar) which have the potential to increase soil fertility, generate energy and sequester carbon all at the same time.

The peak oil crisis: Saving the Chesapeake Bay

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Cellulosic ethanol was a perfect fit for the Chesapeake’s watershed which has lots of forests and underutilized agricultural land, and is not particularly good corn country. A massive move towards growing and using cellulosic ethanol has the potential to help clean up the Bay and the air as well as powering our cars and providing a new source of economic growth for the region.

A teaching garden in our National Mall in Washington D.C.

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Recently, going through some old papers, I found the design for that long-lost garden. It never got built because in 1980, Ronald Reagan became President and appointed Earl Butz Secretary of Agriculture and that was the end of that. No money for organic research, and especially no “teaching garden” for the National Mall. Heaven forbid people learn that there’s an alternative to big chemical ag.

Fannie, Freddie, Subsistence Farming and You

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We talked here quite a bit recently about what we might do to make money after our new normal begins to emerge, and John Michael Greer, whose new book _The Long Descent_ was one of the best books I’ve read this year, has offered his own take on the future job market. I agree with nearly everything he says – nearly everything. And churlish as it is to disagree with someone on the smallest point, who you agree with on every large particular, I’m going to take the time to meditate on at least one of his observations that I don’t quite agree with, because it is something that I think quite does matter in our future…