sastyk
Posts by this author
April 4, 2012
My absolute favorite kinds of presentations to give (even though they are by far the most work) are the one's I've been doing increasingly often, giving analyses of regional food security.
I focus on both present and prospective food issues in a lower energy, less economically stable and warmer…
April 3, 2012
Check out ASPO-USA's first webinar, with Art Berman. Note that full membership will get you the whole webinar series. It is coming up on Thursday, so don't delay!
Sharon
April 2, 2012
Your blogiste will be getting ready for Passover, spring planting and travelling to visit family. So don't expect too much from me. I'll be back to normal mid-week next week, by about the point that I never, ever want to see another piece of matzah again.
Back to Passover cleaning. Hope all of…
April 2, 2012
We're very tiny maple producers, and only on a home scale. I boil the syrup down on the back of our woodstove, and collect the syrup from old plastic buckets. Our operation is stone-age compared to our more serious neighbors. We don't have much of a sugar bush - most of our land was open 30…
March 30, 2012
The mother of mulch gardening explains how she did it - in her 90s. My favorite part is how she grows all her own vegetables, does all the housework, preserves her vegetables and never does anything after 11am.
March 29, 2012
I know some of you have already BTDT or started earlier this season, but I do know I have some readers expecting their first mammal babies and maybe a little bit nervous about it.
My feeling is that there are three things you should remember in kidding.
1. 99% of the time, the animals should be…
March 29, 2012
In Mildred Kalish's brilliant memoir, _Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression_ she writes of the ways that children and adults alike were blindsided by fear in a crisis. For children, the fear was that events out of their control terrified and…
March 28, 2012
I've always liked Tom Murphy's "Do the Math" work, and I really like his latest piece on phantom loads and electricity cutting. That's one of the very first steps for most of us whe we seriously try and cut our electrical usage, but one that a lot of people don't know to do about. We've been able…
March 27, 2012
I would like to create more oil. Specifically, I'd like to create it up on my field - a gusher of light, sweet crude would be just the thing to fund my farming habit, plus provide some neat little tax benefits. Rural upstate New York has a sad lack of oil fields, and given its recession-prone…
March 23, 2012
...My laundry pile was empty. I mean, empty. Nothing more to wash.
This unprecedented state of affairs (in a working farm household with 6 people, four of them attracted to mud like magnets) didn't last long - then Asher dumped his muddy socks on the floor and Eli took a bath and pushed the…
March 20, 2012
If you are interested, check out my peak oil review commentary for this week, which explores what collapse really is - and what we might do about it. The main issue is that it is a heck of a lot more normal than most folks imagine. The piece is a shortened excerpt taken from my forthcoming book…
March 20, 2012
Richard Heinberg has a nice piece about drawing conclusions from present trends. Among his observations:
If current economic trends continue . . .
China's economy will be 8 times as big as it is today by 2040.
China's economy will surpass the size of the present global economy before 2050.
The US…
March 20, 2012
Check out the celebrity cow tippers, of course. What else?
Harrison Ford owns a property out by me and he's out in the pastures ALL THE TIME. "Han Solo is messing with the cows again" is practically the neighborhood refrain.
I swear.
Sharon
March 19, 2012
The always-thoughtful Gail Tverberg has a great post that simply shows in visual terms the history of world energy consumption - well worth a look. I've reproduced one of her graphs here, but please read the whole thing.
One graph not in her post (not suggesting it should be, but I like the…
March 19, 2012
The season cycled over the weekend - officially it is not quite spring, but in fact, spring now has a toe hold. Even if it goes back to chilly or even snows, the ground is too warm for it to last, by the end of an unusually warm week the grass will be green and the soil dried enough to move…
March 15, 2012
It has been a few years since I've done a really close examination of how much of our food we're producing/getting locally/getting from elsewhere. In that time, some things have changed at our place - some of our fruit trees have begun producing, we've gotten more and different livestock, we've…
March 15, 2012
This was an important discussion back when I wrote it in 2007, and somehow, I've never re-run it (although it does appear in Aaron and my book _A Nation of Farmers_). It is definitely time to talk more about this model, and I'm hoping to enlist many of you in doing an evaluation of the real…
March 15, 2012
Probably the biggest loss to last year's flooding in upstate New York was my potato crop. I could have dug them by the end of August, but as the saying goes "shoulda but didnta." It was a warm summer and potatoes stay better in the ground in August here than they do in my house - unless, of…
March 13, 2012
(Mac, doing the guard thing)
I don't live in New York City, so I don't have to go quite through what these folks did to adopt a cat. If one of my neighbors hasn't rescued a cat some idiot dropped off (because that's what you do with cats you can't take care of, right, throw them out of your car…
March 9, 2012
Spring is a trick of the light - it should be, after all, since ultimately the shift of seasons is about angles and sun. At some point in March the light changes - a new "certain slant of light" and thus, spring is here. It will be a while most years before the green and the daffodils or even…
March 8, 2012
Well, I guess I timed that last piece reasonably well ;-), no? As you may have noticed, I am at present typing this on the internet, rather than carving it into a stone tablet (actually I'd probably just use a pen and a piece of paper, but stone tablet does sound more apocalyptic), so the latest…
March 6, 2012
Quite a few years ago I wrote a piece arguing that the single most likely scenario for most of us having to deal with long term electrical shortages doesn't involve gridcrash scenarios, but the growth of poverty and utility shut offs. I suggested that people should be prepared to deal with…
March 5, 2012
I wrote this for Dr, Seuss's 105th birthday, and thought it was worth posting (a bit belatedly) for his 108th.
I once read an incredibly entertaining literary critical analysis of _The Cat in the Hat_ which began from the premise that all the action in TCITH is an attempt to fill up the…
February 29, 2012
For the last several years I've been working on the invention of "Urban and Suburban Right-to-Farm Laws" and have had some notable successes including a legal conference on the idea and a few municipalities that have implemented them. This is one of the reasons I think this is so incredibly…
February 29, 2012
Michael Ableman has written a lovely manifesto from the 2% - the tiny percentage of Americans who actually farm:
There are far more people in prison than growing our food, more stockbrokers and lawyers than those of us who feed our neighbors. We are the 2 percent we call farmers.
There is nothing…
February 27, 2012
I admit it, I'm a generalist in a world of specialists, and I always have been. Looking back on my career history, for example, I see the way I attempted to make the academic model of specialization adapt to my own taste for generalism - my doctoral project was a little bit insane, integrating…
February 24, 2012
I got to see it back in November when I gave a talk to a class at UMASS - next time I go there I'm asking for payment in cuttings ;-).
Neat videos of how it came together:
February 23, 2012
Note: I wrote a slightly different piece under this title on ye olde blogge back in August, but given the emphasis on discussion of contraception going on, I thought it was worth reiterating and mulling over further.
When your specialty as a foster family is taking large sibling groups, you hear a…
February 21, 2012
Did something unpleasant to my elbow the other day and I'm taking a few days off from typing - promise I'll be back soon!
Sharon
February 16, 2012
I loved, loved, loved this video! Hysterical.