Gene Logsdon

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.

How do we deal with all of the financial distress?

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Looking at the situation from a historical perspective, we have been privileged to live in the world at a very unusual time – a time when oil was in abundance, and we were able to have conveniences that people a few generations ago wouldn’t even have dreamed of. We know that this must come to an end, and that gradually we will get back to a world more like it has been over the millions of years that people have walked the earth.

Towards oil resilience

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Queensland has a choice. We can either plan for an oil restricted world or we can become victims of the global market. With an oil-resilience strategy, Queensland has the opportunity to set its own future. We must get ahead of the game by designing how we live and move around in an oil-constrained world. (Foreward to an online paper from Australia. McNamara is the Queensland Minister for Suatainability, Climate Change and Innovation.)

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?

The net energy cliff

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Charles Hall, the father of the energy return on investment (EROI) concept, once told me that our current society would probably not be able to function if the EROI for the entire society slipped below five. … Hall estimates that the United States is currently running on an EROI of just under 40 to 1. This looks like a fairly substantial margin of safety over the 5 to 1 that might lead to societal breakdown. But worrisome developments in the oil, natural gas and coal fields may send us rushing toward that figure.