Category: Sustainable living

The stink of propaganda


One of the authors of the study, Ingram Olkin, has been doing propaganda work for corporations since the 1970s.

When the story first came out on Sept. 3 about the Stanford study that slammed organic foods, was I the only person who caught a strong whiff of propaganda?

At the time, there wasn’t much that a non-expert could say in response. One just has to wait for experts to have time to respond. The unfortunate thing is, the responses never get the buzz that the original propaganda splash gets.

The article, by the way, was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. You can’t even read it without a pricey subscription. But clearly someone at Stanford made a big publicity push before the article was published, to get highly spun articles into the press, articles like the one in the New York Times.

The most damning piece of information to come out so far is that one of the authors of the study, Ingram Olkin, has been doing corporate dirty work since the 1970s. He was behind much of the data cited by tobacco companies that denied the link between cigarettes and cancer.

Some in the blogosphere are connecting dots that would link the release of the Stanford study to the campaign against California’s proposition 37, which would require the labeling of genetically modified foods.

There also have been responses from academics at other universities. But these things are slow. It’s going to take more time for all the dirt on the Stanford study to come out. As for the science and statistics involved, I’m not qualified to judge. But keep in mind that the Stanford study did not involve any new research. It was a “meta-study,” a statistical crunching of numbers gathered in previous studies. And it was just such statistical mangling that Ingram Olkin brought to the science on cigarettes and cancer.

One thing is for sure: the ugliness of the outpouring of smugness, self-righteousness and triumphalism from the propagandists for industrial agriculture. The smugness and contempt just ooze from a couple of these essays in the New York Times by Lomborg and Wilcox. I thought it was us organic types who were supposed to be smug.

Political propaganda generally can be shot down rapidly. An exception was the propaganda around weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It took months for the lies of the Bush administration to be exposed. Scientific propaganda is always slow to be shot down. Science works slowly. That’s why the disinformation campaign about cigarettes and cancer went on for so many years.

In cases like this, it’s important to check back in — in a week, a month, six months, a year. It will take that long for all the dirt to come out about this Stanford study.

Update: How scientists spin the results of their studies.

Unmanageable chickens


There are three escaped chickens in the circle — Josephine, Fanny and Fiona.

First it was only Josephine who was escaping from the chicken fence. Then she taught Fanny, Fiona, and Helen how to do it. Evangeline, the rooster, has never escaped, nor has Patience. The rooster is just too dumb, I think. And Patience is from an older, more proper generation of chickens for whom such behavior is unthinkable. Patience had a solid, old-fashioned upbringing.

I still am not certain how they’re doing it. And I soon discovered that, not only can they get out, they also can get back in. This goes on many times a day now. I’ve stopped rushing out to scoop up escaped chickens. What good does it do? I thought it better to try to keep an eye on them to try to catch one of them in flagrante delicto and discover their secret passage.

One of the things I’ve dreaded is that a chicken would find herself trapped outside the fence at dusk. Tonight that happened. Josephine was running back and forth along the bottom of the fence on the woods side, frantic to get back inside, calling out in fear and frustration, after everyone else had gone into the chicken house to go to bed. On the woods side, the fence is up against a thick thicket of briars, blackberry, and poison oak. There’s just no way I’d go in there to retrieve her. I tried to entice her toward the gate, but every time we got near the corner of the fence she’d turn and run back into the thicket. I thought that if I watched her long enough, she’d eventually find her way inside and reveal her secret as well.

After throwing herself repeatedly against the fence in a state of panic, finally she started to climb, with those strong chicken feet. Up she went, as though climbing a ladder, all the way up six feet of welded wire fence. Then she perched on top, holding tight as the fencing wagged in and out. After she got her balance, she flew down into the orchard. Then she strode, clucking and grumbling, up to the chicken house and flew inside.

Now what in the world am I going to do with a bunch of fence-climbing chickens?

Seriously, this is Ken’s doing. He trained them to be curious and bold, and sassy but sweet, to question authority, to push their boundaries. And while Ken is off somewhere pushing his own boundaries, here I am trying to round up rebellious, fence-climbing chickens and get them safely to bed.

Ken, maybe chickens that like to climb fences would enjoy a long hike? I could overnight them by Fedex…

The future of rain


Projected change in summer rainfall by 2080-2099. See link below to full chart.

Is it surprising that servants of the oil industry continue to deny climate change, even though they aren’t really fooling anybody? A poll last year found that 83 percent of Americans believe the world is warming, including 72 percent of Republicans.

But ask the farmers. They know. Just recently I overheard a group of elderly Stokes County farmers talking about what they used to be able to grow that they can’t grow any longer. In Canada, some polls have found that only 2 percent of the population deny climate change.

But the propaganda is getting results. Some polls have found a slight rise in climate-change denial in recent years. But the most important thing the propaganda accomplishes is shutting down any hope of our having a national conversation about climate change, and doing anything about it. And of course that is their goal.

Meanwhile, as Washington fiddles while the heartland burns, we must each think about our own water security. One of the reasons I gave up on the idea of retiring in California is that the future of water in California looks terrible, particularly to the south of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here is a link to a chart showing expected changes in rainfall, by season, for the entire country.

Lucky for me, northwest North Carolina appears to be in a bit of a sweet spot. It’s not far enough south to be at high risk of dryer winters and springs. In the summer, it appears that it’s beneficial to be east of the spine of the Appalachian chain. Fall on the east coast is little changed from today’s normal. The models I checked before deciding to buy land in northwest North Carolina showed a slight increase in expected future rainfall, from about 44 inches per year to 46 inches per year.

However, as I have mentioned many times in the past, the summers of 2009, 2010, and 2011 were terrible. In retrospect, I believe — or at least hope — that this was because of an unusual persistence of La Niña. This summer, La Niña is gone. What a difference it makes.

Last September 1, I started keeping very careful rainfall records using a gauge on the back deck. As of midnight last night, I’ve now collected exactly one year’s worth of data. The total comes to 54.5 inches. This is a stunning amount of rain. It probably is never going to get any better than this.

Here are the totals by month:

September 2011: 6.03
October 2011: 3.35
November 2011: 5.35
December 2011: 3.20
January 2012: 2.10
February 2012: 2.15
March 2012: 3.95
April 2012: 2.50
May 2012: 6.65
June 2012: 5.15
July 2012: 6.01
August 2012: 8.10

I have never seen such lushness here. The abbey is surrounded by green. All the young trees have grown like crazy this year. I have a certain amount of survivor’s guilt, because America’s agricultural heartland has been scorched this summer. That may be the new normal. Maybe for winter wheat it won’t be so bad. But the future of corn is not looking good.

Speaking of corn, a few months ago, 25 pounds of chicken feed (which is only partly corn) cost $6.50 a bag at my local mill. It has risen steadily all summer. Yesterday I paid $8. Though the corn in my chicken feed is local corn, commodity prices are global.

Your future: 54.5 miles per gallon

Yesterday, the Obama administration made it official. The new target for gasoline mileage for 2025 is 54.5 miles per gallon. Though the usual stark-raving-mad lunatics in Congress are deeply offended by something so sensible and call the new rules “burdensome” (among other things), the auto industry stopped fighting and cooperated. They’re on board. Why?

Partly, no doubt, it’s because anyone who has two clues to rub together (that would exclude most of the U.S. Congress) knows that the era of cheap gasoline is ending. People probably will be delighted, come 2025, to be able to buy cars that get that kind of mileage.

Does that mean that everyone will be driving tiny cars? Not necessarily. Automobile engineers have lots of tricks up their sleeves that they haven’t used yet, including better fuel injection systems, better turbochargers, and more efficient transmissions. They also have more than 10 years to develop new technologies. They’ll find ways to make vehicles lighter, including greater use of aluminum and technologies borrowed from aircraft design that make components light but strong. You can be sure that engineers also will continue to build safer cars, because automakers already compete on safety. The automobile industry is a truly competitive industry, so automakers will compete to design cars that are safer, more fuel-frugal, and not tiny. Yes, the cars will cost more. But the savings in gasoline will more than offset the increased cost.

The reason the Obama administration gives for the new rules is very sensible: to reduce dependence on foreign oil, and to cut vehicle emissions in half. But they (and the automobile industry as well) know more than they tell us, and I believe they know that gasoline will be much more expensive in 2025. Car manufacturers are nowhere near stupid enough to be caught with nothing but gas-guzzlers to sell if people can’t afford the gas for them. Only right-wing shills for the oil and fracking industry are that stupid.

Would the oil companies like to catch us with a fleet of gas-guzzlers in an era of $8 gas? You bet they would. By agreeing to the new standards, automakers are protecting their industry and their future profits, at the expense (heehee) of the oil companies. Because I love cars and hate oil companies, I say that’s a darned good lick. Anyone who sees it otherwise is getting money from the Koch brothers or someone similar.

By the way, on a recent fill-up, the Smart car hit 53.6 miles per gallon — not quite enough to meet the 2025 standard, but I’m not complaining. The weather has been cooler, and I’ve used the air conditioner less. That has increased the mileage. I’m also finding that the brand of gasoline makes a difference. I’ll have more on that after I’ve collected more data.

An Amish well bucket


It looks like a rocket, but it’s a well bucket.

If a big storm or other crisis kept the power off for a long time, how would you get water? Everyone should have some containers of water tucked away for relatively short outages, but storage is not a good solution if for some reason the tap stopped working for days as opposed to hours. Those of us with wells are lucky. We have our own water. But we have to get it out of the well.

Some people with water wells solve the problem with electric generators. That will work. They’re expensive, though, and in a seriously long crisis in which the electric grid went down and stayed down, one might also run out of fuel to power a generator.

A cheaper form of insurance is a well bucket. Until a few decades ago, wells were fairly wide, and well buckets were six or eight inches, or more, in diameter. These days, though, modern wells are much smaller in diameter. Lehman’s sells a well bucket that is only 3.5 inches in diameter. It’s 52 inches long and holds 2 gallons of water. They are usually on back-order. They’re made by an Amish gentleman who has a hard time keeping up with the demand.

They’re made from galvanized stove pipe. The design is simple. The only tricky part of making a well bucket is the valve at the bottom. The valve must open and allow water to enter the bucket when the bucket hits the water, but the valve must close when the bucket is lifted. The valve in this bucket appears to be a piece of rubber which is fastened to a shaft that runs the full length of the bucket. The long shaft is a nice touch, because it should keep the valve moving smoothly. Some people also make narrow well buckets out of PVC pipe. Again, the foot valve is the challenge.

I’m stashing a bucket as cheap insurance, along with some rope, a pulley, and other hardware needed to mount a windlass over my well.


The top of the bucket


The bottom of the bucket

Brother Evangeline

From early on, we had our suspicions about Sister Evangeline. She had large feet, and she grew unusually fast. Still, she was gentle enough, though she didn’t like to be petted like the other hens. And she did not have the flashy comb that roosters (or so I thought) are supposed to have.

The first convincing sign came about three weeks ago, when there was a strange noise from inside the fence that scared the cat and me both. It sounded vaguely like a fox barking. But when I dashed to the door and looked, I saw an adolescent rooster practicing his crowing.

The second convincing sign started about two weeks ago. Watching chickens do it is not a pretty sight. It looks like rape to me, and now it happens first thing every morning, as soon as I let the chickens out, and again at random times during the day. He pinches the hens on the back, or on the back of the neck, to hold them still while he does his ugly little thing. The hens squawk. But so far no one seems to have been hurt.

I’ve been opposed to having a rooster, for several reasons. For one, they don’t lay eggs. For two, they make a lot of noise. For three, they can be mean. I have very clear memories of a rooster who used to flog me when I was a child and was sent to the barn to feed the chickens. I came home from school one day, and he was in the oven.

However, Brother Evangeline doesn’t spend a lot of time crowing. And, so far, he has never been aggressive with me. He continues to spat with Patience, the oldest and largest hen, but she hasn’t backed down yet and given up her place at the top of the pecking order, and they have not hurt each other.

So I guess the abbey’s nunnery is stuck with a rooster.

Persimmons, volunteering

I have carefully protected the four native persimmon trees that volunteered around the edges of the yard. They’re about eight feet tall now. This year, two of them are bearing. There are lots of wild persimmons along the edges of local woods, but they’re usually so surrounded by undergrowth and tangle that it’s hard to retrieve the fruit. I can mow around these four trees. They’ll be easy to get at.

Something else to fight the raccoons for.

Peaches and cream

For years, fats have been so demonized that I avoided cream. Now I confess that I keep cream in the refrigerator all the time. Cream makes a great base for a quick sauce for fish or vegetables. And of course there’s peaches and cream.

I buy organic cream from Whole Foods. Most of what is sold as cream these days is full of adulterants.

Unfortunately, I didn’t grow those peaches. I had a great peach crop coming along, but a raccoon got into the trees and stole every last one of them. No doubt it was the same raccoon that also stole all the corn and made a wreck of the garden in doing so.

I can’t bring myself to shoot a raccoon — at least not yet. I need to make a winter project of making the garden and orchard fence raccoon-proof. There are spots where they can get under the fence. With those spots fixed, and some work around the gates, a raccoon-proof fence should be possible. I might even throw in a low run of electrical wire to discourage meddling.

A sacred summer ritual

For many years, I’ve wanted to get myself into a situation in which I could can tomatoes. If your situation permits the growing and canning of tomatoes, you’re all set. It’s a yardstick against which you can measure your lifestyle.

But it took so long! Even after I bought the land, it was seven more years. The steps, roughly, are:

  • 1. Buy your land
  • 2. Build your house
  • 3. Build a garden fence (maybe some areas could do without a fence)
  • 4. Rehabilitate and prepare your garden soil, organically
  • 5. Deal with the irrigation problem
  • 6. Grow enough tomatoes to produce at least one peck of surplus tomatoes that ripen together

    • If you fumble a step, you lose a year. For example, last year I did not have irrigation. Hot, dry weather torched the garden. This year, the irrigation system made a huge difference. And in the early years of the Acorn Abbey project, my hands were too full to get around to things like preparing the garden soil or building the garden fence.

    Why do we work so hard for tomatoes? I think it’s not just because they’re so good eat. I think it’s because tomatoes are sacred.