Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Crises multiply and grow, and still the petroleum bags are just dispensed as though they were falling autumn leaves doing no harm. We are now in the fall before the big autumn storm. Not many will make it through the coming “winter” of our own making.
Just as certain as death and taxes is the knowledge that we shall one day be forced to learn to live without oil.
The Shifting Terms of Trade Between Grain and Oil. In 1970, a bushel of wheat could be traded for a barrel of oil in the world market. It now takes nine bushels of wheat to buy a barrel of oil.
Three stories regarding the pressures of high energy costs on farmers and nitrogen fertilizer producers.
Fresh and local food … and not just at weekend markets anymore.
Q: Do you think that we have changed the carrying capacity of the earth through fossil fuels to the extent that we could not support the current population with organic agriculture free of synthetic fertilizers?
The first step to overcoming peak oil is to start a Compost Pile.
CHICAGO – Grain prices soared on Monday after the U.S. Agriculture Department jolted the world market by shrinking its estimates of last year’s U.S. crops and its projections for 2004 world grain stockpiles.
Foreign corn production is expected to drop by 900 million bushels in the 2003-2004 crop year, according to University of Illinois Extension marketing specialist Darrel Good.
While Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and President Bush discussed Taiwan, currency rates and North Korea on December 9, a more important and far-reaching development in U.S.-China relations was going on far from the White House.
DETROIT- PAUL WEERTZ lives less than 10 minutes from downtown, but the view from his window is anything but urban. On a warm day this fall, the air was ripe with the smell of fresh-cut hay and manure. In the alley behind his house, bales of hay teetered and listed where garbage cans once stood. Chickens scratched in the yard, near a garage that had been turned into a barn. Mr. Weertz drives a Ford — not a sleek sedan but a rebuilt 1960 tractor.
The Cuban experience with an artifical ‘oil peak’ gives some hope for how a society can re-organise around organic agriculture to avoid the worst possible consequences.
