Alex Tiller's Blog on Agriculture & Farming

9 Simple Methods to Control Erosion on the Farm

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:23:51 -0600

Erosion is the bane of every farmer, particularly those who farm in erosion-intensive environmental conditions. Aside from the relatively minor inconveniences of erosion such as fields collapsing and drainage systems getting clogged up, erosion actually costs farmers money – I’ve seen estimates that indicate even mild erosion on a field can reduce the yield on that field by 20%. Less visible, but equally expensive, is the fact that subsurface erosion on pastureland can reduce the rate of regrowth by as much as 80%. The paddock looks fine on the surface – but erosion has reduced that field’s productivity to a fifth of its maximum.

Fortunately there are some relatively easy ways to keep erosion under control. It’s almost impossible to completely stop erosion – water and wind moves soil and that’s all there is to it. But with a little planning and effort, you can reduce erosion to a minor nuisance instead of a budget-busting disaster.

The first things to look at are what you should stop doing. Here are just a few of the practices which can accelerate erosion:

Planting under extreme cold or dry conditions. (The slow growth of germinating seeds mean that the top layer of soil is open to the environment.)

Cultivating steep slopes. Its probably not worth it.

Heavy grazing on sown pastureland.

Burning stubble after harvest.

There are also some positive steps you can take to control erosion.

Minimum tillage. The less you tear up the top layers of soil, the more resistant that soil is to water runoff. –Despite my last name, I encourage no-till whenever possible.

Stubble mulching. Putting that harvest waste back onto the ground provides an additional layer of insulation against environmental effects.

Contour cultivation. It’s not suited for all farmland, but it can reduce erosion by 25% to 90% when done properly.

Rotate foraging animals in fields before the pasture is depleted.

Plant filter strip in low lying gullies and runoff areas of your fields.

Plant grasses and small trees on those steep slopes.

Use strip cropping to control erosion in windy areas.

Consider using a cover crop (especially legumes) during off season times.

Plant tree line windbreaks, or keep the ones you’ve got.

By controlling erosion on the farm, you preserve the value of your land and prevent yields from declining over time.

4 Tips to Cut Your Farm Operating Costs

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:48:00 -0600

Looking to boost your farm’s income over the next few years? You can always hope for higher commodity prices – although things have been softening up there recently so that might not be a winning strategy. Unlike some other businesses, farmers generally don’t get much input in the prices they receive for their products. So improving the farm’s bottom line generally means either making and selling more product, or cutting costs. Here are a few ideas for doing the latter.

Tip 1: Go Organic

Organic farming techniques are more labor-intensive, but zero out some of your largest line-item costs. No pesticide spray passes, no weedkiller applications – it adds up. If you’ve got more time/hands than you have work, and less money than you have bills, a switch to organic production methods can make hard financial sense.

Tip 2: Let Mother Nature Feed Them

If you’re maintaining a dairy herd, consider moving to natural pasturage rather than confining your herd and providing the feed. This interesting article details some of the findings of research around grazing, and it may surprise you. The conventional wisdom is that naturally grazed cows produce less milk – and they do. The surprising part is, they don’t produce much less milk – and the net financial output per cow is as much as two or three times higher, even after taking into account the increased management work of keeping track of pasturage and moving animals around.

Natural grazing doesn’t just mean letting the herd out onto the first open field you see and trusting to luck – you’ll need to understand what your soil conditions are, ensure that there’s enough nutritional energy in the available forage, etc.

Tip 3: Get Bigger or Change Businesses

The simple truth is that for conventional farming techniques, small herds lose money. If a herd has less than 500 animals, then you’re not likely to be at the break-even point for your fixed operational costs. If you can expand into the profitable range, then that might be worth looking into. If you can switch to organic production, that’s one way to keep a small herd viable. Otherwise, sell your small herd and the associated equipment and use the money to optimize your other farming activities.

Tip 4: Get a New Lease on Life

If you are leasing your land, one way to cut costs is to change the terms of your lease. Rather than a cash arrangement, consider going to a share-lease arrangement. The downside is that if you have a great year, you don’t keep all the profits – but the upside is that a portion of your operational costs get charged to the landlord instead of to your bottom line. If your farm steadily makes a profit, this is a bad option – but if like most farmers you have good years and bad, then a share-lease can make the bad years much more survivable.

Russian Agriculture, The Come Back Kid?

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:19:43 -0600

Agriculture in Russia has a long and often tragic history. This interesting article in the New York Times (not my usual source for cutting-edge agriculture news!) talks about how the wheel has turned around – what once were individual peasant farms, then noble estates, then savagely collectivized national farms, are now on track for global agricultural development. The collective farm system, one of the last vestiges of communism, is finally on the verge of being swept away.

Foreign investors are beginning to buy millions of hectares of prime Russian farmland. What earnest Russian political reform efforts proved unable to accomplish, massive world market price increases on staple agricultural commodities has brought into being. Because of the inefficiencies of the collective farm system, a sixth of Russia’s arable land – nearly 35 million acres – has remained fallow for years, if not decades. The price of food has risen so much that these acres were coming back into cultivation even with the tiny Russian yields enjoyed by Russian farms (yields owed to poor access to chemicals and infrastructure, not weather or soil quality).

The collective farms are being reorganized – not into small freeholds as original reformers had envisioned – but into enormous clusters of consolidated farms, run by corporate organizations. Western-educated Russian industrial oligarchs, hedge fund managers, and investors are bringing Western capital and technology to this acreage. Yields have doubled on investors’ plots, and almost a seventh of Russia’s land has been brought into the consolidated system.

There is still looming peril that has limited outside investor’s enthusiasm – unlike a software company or even an industrial concern, a farm cannot pick up and move when the local government gets acquisitive or overly assertive. Many analysts warn that a renationalization of the Russian farm industry is not only possible but may even be likely.

Follow Up; Mexican Salmonella Peppers

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0600

About a month ago, I reported on the false connection of tomatoes to the salmonella outbreak, and how it turned out to be peppers imported from Mexico that were the source of the infection. Now it seems that not only were the Mexican peppers the source of the problem, but that Federal border inspectors have been turning back Mexican produce imports for months.

FDA officials told reporters during the salmonella crisis that they hadn’t looked at Mexican produce imports because they didn’t know there were problems there. Yet according to an Associated Press analysis, the FDA’s own records clearly show that shipments of Mexican peppers and chilies were regularly turned away at the border for being literally filthy and disease-ridden for months prior to the outbreak.

Between January and the AP’s record review in August, 88 shipments of fresh or dried chilies and peppers were turned away at the border. Ten percent of those shipments were turned away because they were contaminated by salmonella. In July alone, six shipments of fresh jalapenos were found to be contaminated with salmonella. The FDA has offered no explanation for the discrepancy between these statistics, and the statements of Dr. David Acheson, FDA’s food safety chief, that peppers and chilies had not been a source of concern for the FDA because they hadn’t seen problems with those products.

Almost 500,000 tons of Mexican peppers are imported annually, and only about 1% of those shipments are inspected. In August, the FDA finally put about a dozen Mexican food producers on its watch list, meaning that their products would have a higher chance of being screened.

Again, I believe that this points to the importance of produce labeling requirements – (Country of Origin Labeling; COOL) - consumers have a right to know where the food they are eating came from. When particular countries have health risks associated with their products, then consumers need to be able to make informed and rational decisions about what to buy.

Farmers Get Diversified to Gain Stability

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Many farmers find that vertically integrating their product lines is an excellent way to increase profitability. In the case of Pat and Sharlene Daninger, owners of the Autumnwood Farm in Forest Lake, Minnesota, it’s saved the farm that’s been in their family for 100 years.

The Daningers decided to open an organic creamery on-site, and after just six months in operation they are selling around 500 gallons of milk a week. A dozen stores in Minneapolis sell their products, and there is also a retail shop at the farm itself, stocked with half-gallon bottles of milk and chocolate milk.

Locally-produced and hormone-free, the Daninger’s creamery experiment has been a lot of work. “We knew how to get the milk out of the cows, but nothing about processing,” Pat Daninger said. “It’s labor-intensive. But to hear people say, ‘This is the best milk I’ve had,’ that makes you feel like you’re doing a service to the community.”

Pat Daninger’s family has worked Autumnwood Farm since 1982, when his grandparents immigrated from Austria. Pat and Sharlene took over in 1982 – and realized that they would need to enhance the farm’s revenue stream to keep afloat. Expanding their dairy farm was one option – but when your farm is surrounded by suburban development, additional acreage is impossible to acquire. However, the Daninger’s realized that their problem was also their opportunity – all those houses, all those people, were customers for the products they produced on their farm. While giving tours of the farm to local schools, the question kept coming up – “can we buy milk from your farm?”

That inspired the creamery venture. It took a lot of research and planning, and a $500,000 mortgage, but the Daninger’s are now in the finished milk business using their own dairy herd as the raw material. The Daninger’s teenage children help with deliveries, manning the store, and stocking. 14-year old son Nathan was even moved to start his own beef operation, selling the meat in the family store.

Next time you have a nice glass of milk, raise a glass to the Daninger’s and their venture. It’s exciting to see farmers getting control of the process and ensuring their own financial futures.

US Farmers Help Hungry Africans

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Farmers feed the world – and in the case of Amazeing Grace, a coalition of Iowa farms, businesses and churches, they feed some of the world’s poorest people. Amazeing Grace supports agricultural development programs in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Central America, and in developing countries all around the world.

A twenty-acre cornfield in Grundy County, Iowa, is the latest addition to Amazeing Grace’s donor base. The charity doesn’t ship food to the developing world – that’s not cost-effective. Instead, they sell donated crops on the US market, supplement the funds with donations from other sources, and contribute the money to development programs in the poorest nations on earth through the Foods Resource Bank. The money goes much farther than it would here, and supports local farmers and local food producers instead of undercutting their markets, as many direct food donation programs often unintentionally do.

Amazeing Grace focuses on self-help programs, teaching small farmers around the world how to enhance their incomes and provide educational opportunities for their children. The Foods Resource Bank started in 1999 and consists of 15 Christian denominations (or their aid agencies) that fund projects that supply seeds, livestock, tools, and – most importantly – advanced agronomical knowledge to help poor farmers feed themselves.

The foods bank raised more than $2.6 million last year, through crop donations, private donations, and other funding sources. Last year, Amazeing Grace had 74 acres of corn donated by two Iowa farmers. The harvest of 189 bushels an acre raised more than $60,000 for the food bank.

If you’re interested in working with this charitable organization, they can be contacted via their website, www.foodsresourcebank.org.

Side note to this blog post: I have some friends that run an organization called the Cunningham Foundation. They are extremely active in providing help to the poor orphaned children of Africa. Although they don’t have a huge agricultural component, I can tell you this; I know them well. I trust their organization, and I encourage you to also check out their website to learn more about what you could do to help. Please visit http://www.cunninghamfoundation.org

Hawaiian Plantation 2008– I am on the road again and I was lucky...

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 14:15:00 -0600

Hawaiian Plantation 2008– I am on the road again and I was lucky enough to visit a plantation on Hawaii that grows pineapples, sugar cane, bananas, coffee and macadamia nuts. They also have a green house to grow some specialty flower and seeds. It must be nice to have a growing season that lasts all year. (Click the photo to view the pictures.)

Government, Farming, & Knowing Your Soil – Lessons Learned

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0600

There’s an interesting article about soil problems around the world in the online National Geographic. (Soil problems! Water crisis! Fuel shortages! I swear, I will find some good news to report on this month.)

The author visited the Wisconsin Farm Technology Days (lucky stiff, I had to miss it this year) and used that as the jumping off point for talking about soil issues. This being National Geographic, there was a lot more about China and Burkina Faso than about Wisconsin – but some of the lessons he picked up apply here as well.

The most interesting part of the article for me is the way that local farmers, using their own expertise and knowledge of the conditions on their own plot of land, have vastly outperformed government mandates for soil conservation. (In fact, in China, the government actually told farmers to take measures that ended up destroying soil and increasing erosion greatly in an attempt to boost yield – talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face!) Among many stories told in the National Geographic piece:

One farmer in the Sahel, the semi-arid zone south of the Sahara in Africa, rebuilt his compacted, overworked land bit by bit. He started with “cordons pierreux”, a clever and simple technique well-suited to the low-infrastructure African farming environment. To build a cordons pierreux , a farmer builds a line of rocks across the path of rainfall runoff. The rocks hold the water back and let it percolate into the Sahel’s damaged soil. Suspended silt in the rainfall settles back onto the soil rather than running off, and over time seeds that are caught by the rock line turn it into a line of plants, which then serve as a permanent water retention system.

The farmer, Yacouba Sawadogo, then used the downtime of the dry season to use a traditional technique for land reclamation. He hacked thousands of holes in the land with his hoe, about one feet deep, and filled them with manure. The manure attracted insects, which dug through the surrounding soil and greatly increased the aeration and looseness of the earth. He then planted trees in the holes, and planted millet in the spaces between the trees, converting what had been an arid wasteland into a productive forest/farm combination. The technique spread, and soon many people in his region were reclaiming their land as well. Unfortunately for Sawadogo, it worked so well that the local government ended up claiming the forest and redistributing it among local farmers – leaving him with one tiny parcel of the wealth he had created.

That points to the importance of government in the process – for good and for ill. A civil government that respects the knowledge and skill of the local farmers can be a force for good, providing the stability that farmers need in order to make it worth their while to practice good land management. A government that sends down irrational mandates or, worse yet, punishes labor by appropriation, makes it foolish for farmers to do anything but maximize their immediate profit. Yacouba Sawadogo is unlikely to create any more forests.

Water – For Agricultural Use, Change is Inevitable

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:41:57 -0600

There is no solution to the water problem. Instead, there is a set of solutions and approaches that, taken together, will improve humanity’s ability to manage this most precious of commodities. Anyone who reads about the water problem quickly realizes that many of the people pushing the “crisis” are also pushing an agenda. Socialists think the water crisis means that the government needs to nationalize the water table. Capitalists think that everything should be privatized. Even farmers have an agenda, and it probably involves making sure that agriculture is #1 on the priority list for water.

There will undoubtedly be some structural changes in the way that water is managed – and whether that means privatizing decrepit and mismanaged public systems or creating markets to set rational prices for water or investing the billions it will take to put public water systems on a sound footing is more a question of local conditions than it is of the ideological merits of various forms of management. The truth is that, as with our energy problem, we’re going to need to try a lot of different approaches and ideas.

Fortunately, people are already applying their ingenuity to the water situation, both on the local level and on a global scale. Some municipalities are shipping in fresh water from nearby ports that have a surplus. Activists are raising public awareness of the water problem with traveling exhibits encouraging conservation and more responsible use of water. Wild-eyed geniuses are developing technologies to literally pull pure clean water out of the air – or just collecting the incredible bounty that often falls on developed land and then runs straight into the sea. Other organizations take a larger scale approach, urging the adoption of better irrigation techniques and conservation in the developing world. (where much irrigation water is wasted because the water infrastructure is so primitive)

From an agricultural point of view, there are two key points to keep in mind. One is that water for irrigation, over the long run, must come from sustainable sources. We cannot indefinitely “mine” the aquifers, nor will urban populations accept the diversion of drinking water into the fields past a certain point. Water for agriculture is an incredibly important priority, but it is not the only priority. The second point is that solving the water problem is going to require changes both on the large scale and at the level of the individual farm. Farmers, whether in Oklahoma or Thailand or Zaire, cannot rely on irrigation techniques that put more of the water into gulleys than onto productive fields. Many US farmers are already highly efficient in their water use, but others have become accustomed to plentiful cheap, or even free, water because of local weather or because of fortuitous water treaties and agreements that were made in decades or even centuries past. Many of those agreements are simply going to change, whether farmers wish them to or not; it would be wise for farmers to understand the changes that are coming and make adjustments in advance, rather than being taken by surprise.

In coming weeks, I will have some posts on the types of things that farmers can do to improve their water use, saving both the water and in many cases, a lot of money. From tillage techniques to land-use planning, there are a lot of ways for a farm to make better use of the water it has access to – and the better the use we make of what we have, the more likely we are to be able to keep using it in the future.

Previous post on this Topic Series Below

August 15, 2008: Water – 80% to 90% of Global Freshwater Used for Irrigation; Sustainable?

August 6, 2008: Water – Agriculture and Changing Weather Patterns

July 30, 2008: Water – US Farmers, Count Your Blessings

July 23, 2008: Water - The Next Farm Crisis

VIDEO - I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but I might...

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:01:00 -0600

VIDEO - I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but I might agree with Paris Hilton on her “energy policy.” –It’s at least worth a good laugh.

Algae Farming Continued, Thoughts from an Expert

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:11:13 -0600

I have a treat for all of you that expressed an interest in my Algae Farming piece from June 9, 2008.

Mark Edwards, a professor at Arizona State University, has provided us with his speaker notes on Green Algae Strategy: Engineer Sustainable Food and Biofuels which summarizes his many years of research on algae production for food, fuel and other coproducts and solutions. Mark said, “Algae is not a silver bullet for energy independence and I say in paragraph #2 that energy solutions will be a suite of renewables. I believe algae present an important piece in the energy and food puzzle. Algae will play a pivotal role in liquid transportation fuels.”

I have reviewed Marks materials and while I can’t say I agree with all of his comments, (example: “End Subsidies Now!”) I can tell you that he has provided some thought provoking research that has truly opened my eyes to the raw potential that algae provides. His research is extensive, robust, and comprehensive and deserves further consideration by all of us.

I have provided links to four (4) PDF documents below. Please check them out.

Speaker Notes: http://alextiller.com/agribusiness_resource/green_algae_strategy_paper.pdf

Additional Information:

http://alextiller.com/agribusiness_resource/green_algae_supplemental_1.pdf

http://alextiller.com/agribusiness_resource/green_algae_supplemental_2.pdf

http://alextiller.com/agribusiness_resource/mark_edwards_speaker_brief_2008.pdf

If you like Mark’s work or want to learn more, he also has a book called Green Algae Strategy available for purchase on Amazon.

Farming Alternative Fuels

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:50:00 -0600

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, this is NOT the “alternative fuels” blog. But I keep finding these great information resources about the viability of ethanol and other alcohol fuels, and I really think this is something that is important to farmers. The agriculture sector is already an important player in the energy economy and that trend is gong to get stronger.

A lot of people are a bit at sea about what the new fuels are, and how they’ll work or be produced. I was going to create a summary, but then the nice people at Popular Mechanics went and did it for me. They break out the current research and development into seven basic fuels. I won’t repeat what they say about the various production methods and research breakthroughs that will be needed but I’ll talk about the impact on agriculture and what these fuels mean for farmers.

The first two fuels are our old friend ethanol – cellulosic ethanol, to be specific. PM calls this two different fuels because there are two different ways to make it – one biological, where enzymes “cook” the cellulose into simple sugars, and a gasification method where extremely high temperatures are used to break down the feedstock into synthetic gas. Cellulosic ethanol is likely to be a boon for agriculture because it will use waste material that has no economic value right now. When cellulosic ethanol is viable (probably in the early 2010s) it will mean every farmer has two harvests, one for the primary crop, and another to sweep up the detritus (cornstalks, broken plants, etc.) for shipment to the ethanol plant.

Algal biodiesel is produced by having genetically-modified algae plants convert waste CO2 from CO2-intensive industries like power plants into an oil-like sludge that can then be processed into diesel fuel. This is an exciting technology from the environmental point of view but doesn’t have much impact on farmers, who won’t be producing the CO2 the process requires.

“Green gasoline” is a produced by taking cellulosic feedstocks or sugarcane and using a catalytic reaction to create high-powered hydrocarbon fuel. This one will be good for farmers (especially sugar growers) but like cellulosic ethanol, we have to get the costs of breaking down the cellulosic feedstock into a reasonable range before the economics work.

Biobutanol is a high-energy alcohol fuel derived from sugary feedstock – again, cellulose after we invent some new technologies or sugarcane today – produced by genetically modified microbes that essentially excrete long-chain hydrocarbons. Butanol is a great fuel for current infrastructure because we can use existing pipelines to move it around.

Designer hydrocarbons use simple, tiny organisms which have been genetically modified to turn sugar into fuel. The difference is that with the right genetic engineering, it might be possible to produce fuels chemically identical to the fuels we use today – a big advantage in terms of infrastructure and being able to fuel existing vehicles right out of the vat.

“Fourth generation fuels” is a buzz phrase that essentially just means algal biodiesel, but with additional genetic manipulation. Current algal biodiesel requires a processing phase where the oil-bearing algae are centrifuged or pressed to extract the oil; it should be possible to engineer the organisms to excrete the oil, however, meaning that processing would simply involve skimming off the floating oil from the algae tank.

Environmentally, the algae- and microbe-based fuels are better because we don’t have to use any existing farmland to produce the fuel. Economically, however, those techniques aren’t likely to do the entire job on their own, and crop-based feedstocks will provide the bulk of the energy budget. That will mean better revenue per acre for farmers, as the new fuel techniques will produce a strong and permanent demand both for waste material from food crops, as well as creating new potential for high-energy cellulosic crops like switchgrass. It is an exciting time to be a farmer!

Where’s the Beef? Nebraska State Beef Industry Impacted by Poor Name Choice

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:32:21 -0600

I don’t usually blog about daily news stories here, but I thought I’d make an exception for this Nebraska Beef Ltd. recall that’s currently going on. Just this morning the company recalled another 160,000 pounds of its beef products, bringing the total under recall to 1.36 million pounds. It’s a very serious recall, as the company (after working with USDA) has determined that all this meat was produced under unsafe conditions and poses a Class 1 risk – meaning that the meat poses a serious risk of health impact or even death if consumed.

This is bad news for the affected consumers – at least 30 people have gotten sick so far. It’s worse news for Nebraska Beef Ltd. – and for the state of Nebraska, too. Careless headline writers have made this story look like all Nebraska beef is being recalled – when in fact Nebraska’s beef supply is as safe as ever. This is a problem with one (admittedly large) operation, not a system-wide problem in Nebraska, but you wouldn’t know that from headlines like “Nebraska Beef Recalled”. The American Meat Institute is asking for the press to clarify the situation before more damage is done to the safe meat processors in Nebraska.

That’s not just an idle concern. The beef industry is responsible for fifteen to twenty percent of all the jobs in the state of Nebraska, and the state is the #1 producer of beef in the United States. This recall, large as it is, is only related to a tiny fraction of the beef produced in Nebraska – 7.22 billion pounds last year. (To put it in perspective, if you had a warehouse with 6,000 pounds of beef in it, one pound of that would be beef that has been recalled.)

So, it’s important for us to maintain food safety standards and to hold the agriculture industry responsible for hygiene and safe food handling. At the same time, we have to keep things in perspective, and – especially among segments of the press that are perhaps a little bit undereducated about agriculture and farming – make sure we get all the facts straight before we start another “tomato panic”.

And, perhaps, Nebraska Beef Ltd. needs to look into a name change – one that doesn’t implicate whole states next time you mess up!

Custom 3D Illustration by IDEAVIZ

Water – 80% to 90% of Global Freshwater Used for Irrigation; Sustainable?

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 10:16:02 -0600

The global picture for freshwater use is fairly grim. Water supplies, as we discussed previously, are large but finite – and we currently tap pretty much all of the easy and cheap sources for freshwater. A relatively recent paper on the use of freshwater in agriculture around the world puts the blame, if blame is the word, on irrigated agriculture, which worldwide accounts for between 80 and 90 percent of freshwater use. (Abstract here).

Currently, about 1.1 billion people lack adequate access to fresh water, and almost half of the world’s population doesn’t have adequate access to water for sanitary purposes. The impact of this lack of fresh water on disease and health is complex but negative, as you can probably imagine. As incomes rise globally, we can expect a demand for better water conditions from the formerly impoverished citizens of many nations – a demand that is likely to redirect water use from agriculture in the short run, as wealthier people are able to bid up what they are willing to pay for clean drinking and cleaning water and thus outcompete local agricultural sectors.

As farmers around the world are forced to pay more for water, governments and land-use planners are likely to have to shift their priorities for land use, including greater use of naturally-watered land for agriculture. It is unlikely that we are going to see many governments tearing down housing developments in order to return the land to agricultural use, but over time the market will make it economically rational to farm where the water is.

In the long run, it is likely that it will require human intervention into the freshwater system to produce more of a now-scarce resource. Remember we said that water is finite? Well, it is – but it is a finite resource that we can create more of, if we really need to. Except for rarities like the Gulf states, nations which are energy rich and water poor at the same time, nations have “made do” with the freshwater supplies available through nature and a modicum of dam-building, river-rerouting civil engineering. The only way we currently can increase our freshwater supply is to desalinate sea water, which is effectively infinite in quantity. Desalination is enormously expensive in terms of energy, however, meaning that even in situations where freshwater is very difficult to acquire, desalination is, at current prices for fresh water and for energy, an option of last resort.

How expensive is desalination? Some analysts say that it is easier to raise a gallon of water vertically by 2000 meters, or to ship it across 1600 kilometers of terrain, than it is to desalinate a gallon of seawater – the most efficient modern plants can desalinate water for about fifty cents per cubic meter. That sounds cheap – and it is, if you just need a drink of water. If you need a billion cubic meters a day for your agricultural irrigation or for your metropolis, it’s another story.

However, the existence of desalination does mean that water is, over the long term, a problem to be solved rather than a crisis that we do not have a solution for. The difference between a crisis and a problem is that problems usually have known solutions; some problems remain problems because we don’t want to do what’s necessary to fix them. In the case of the water problem, there are solutions, desalination among them – they just require us to do things we don’t really want to do. Next week we will conclude our look at water and agriculture with a review of the possible solutions to the problems we face.

"A man with food has many worries, but a hungry man has only one."

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:13:00 -0600

“A man with food has many worries, but a hungry man has only one.”

- Anonymous

Sharing Some News: Willie Nelson Concert in Denver to help Darfur

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:05:16 -0600

I know this is kind of a local topic, but some of my friends over at Project C.U.R.E. and Denver for Darfur asked me to let you all know about an upcoming concert here in Colorado. It sounds like a lot of fun and I am disappointed that I won’t be in town to attend. –But that doesn’t stop you from going, helping a great cause, and meeting Willie Nelson in person! Here are the details:

WILLIE NELSON TO MEET WITH FOUR LUCKY FANS AS PART OF

VIP PRE-CONCERT RECEPTION TO BENEFIT DARFUR

Meeting With Fans Part of August 26^thEvent at Red Rocks Attended by “DARFUR NOW” Star Adam Sterling

DENVER – Denver for Darfur and local nonprofit Project C.U.R.E. announced today that Willie Nelson has invited four people onto his tour bus for an exclusive private meeting with the star prior to his concert at Red Rocks on Tuesday, August 26. The offer comes as part of a VIP pre-show event that Adam Sterling, a star of the movie DARFUR NOW, will attend to help raise funds to send a container filled with $400,000 worth of donated medical supplies to clinics and hospitals in the Darfur region of Sudan.

“This is a once in a life-time chance for fans to meet with the legend himself on his private tour bus,” said Jeff Bridges, spokesman for Denver for Darfur. “Mr. Nelson has once again shown he’s a true class act with his generosity to our cause, and we deeply appreciate the work done by Chuck Morris at AEG Live to make this happen. We’re also delighted that Adam Sterling, one of the stars of the movie DARFUR NOW, will join us at the VIP reception.”

While Nelson will not attend the pre-show VIP event, a premium sponsor of the event will receive two spots on his tour bus, and the other two spots will go to the winner of a drawing held during the event. Tickets to the pre-show VIP event cost $250 and include entry into the drawing, as well as food, drinks, and premium seats for the concert.

Tickets for the event, which will take place between 5:30-7:30pm at the Red Rocks Visitors Center, are available online at www.denverfordarfur.org. Companies or individuals interested in sponsoring the event and securing two spots on the tour bus can contact Brittany Morris at 303-592-5458.

The nonpartisan event is open to the public and also features entertainment by musician Nina Storey and a silent auction with several art pieces by Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones, courtesy of Fascination Street Fine Art Galleries. Sterling will attend the VIP reception to discuss the horrific situation in Darfur and ways that individuals around the globe can help make a difference. At 24 years old, Sterling successfully passed a bill in California to keep all state funds out of Sudan.

“With the tragedies in Darfur it is easy to feel helpless and removed from the situation,” said Project C.U.R.E. President and CEO Dr. Douglas Jackson. “This event allows individuals and communities the opportunity to make a direct difference in the lives of people in this beleaguered and war-torn part of the world.”

Support for Ethanol (Not just Corn)

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:54:01 -0600

After my last post, let’s get back onto dry land where we can get some farming done. We know that we need to move to an alcohol economy so that we can grow our own fuel instead of being dependent on hostile foreign countries for it. That’s a multi-step process. It would be great if we could just turn a valve somewhere in Missouri and have a billion barrels of ethanol come flowing out, but it doesn’t work that way. We have to develop the ability to make alcohol-based fuels, like ethanol, in economical and environmentally sustainable ways. We also have to give the transportation and heating infrastructure time to adapt to the changing fuel base of the country. A trillion barrels of ethanol does us no good if there are no cars that can burn it; right now we scrape by with adding a bit of ethanol into regular gasoline so that engines can burn it, but the millions of ethanol-friendly cars we need simply aren’t on the road yet. They can’t get on the road without a fuel base already in existence. Corn-based ethanol is the first step on a stairway that leads upwards to fuel independence for our country; it isn’t the whole stairway.

Bad press about the deficiencies of ethanol – some real, some exaggerated, and some just plain invented – has caused some people to sour on the concept of alcohol fuels. This is just wrong; it would be like deciding that basketball is a terrible sport because certain players behaved badly in their hotel rooms after the game. Corn-based ethanol will not be the salvation of our fuel economy, but it will be the first step in developing the cellulosic ethanol technologies that can save us.

Cellulosic ethanol is the production of an alcohol fuel from cellulose. Unlike current ethanol technologies, which requite a very high grade of organic product as feedstock, cellulosic ethanol can use really terrible plants (otherwise useless) and organic matter – stuff that farmers pay to have hauled away from the fields after harvest, it’s so useless at the moment. Cellulosic ethanol can also be created from old phone books, sawmill/paper mill and cotton gin byproducts, lawn clippings and all the fruits and vegetables that your grocer throws away after they expire. (–think flux capacitor from the 80’s movie Back to the Future) The waste-to-energy potential alone of cellulosic ethanol is staggering – and that’s just using the stuff that we throw away now. Crops formulated for cellulosic ethanol potential, like switchgrass and miscanthus, actually have far more energy per acre than our current corn-based feedstock. Even preliminary test results are impressive. It would take 25% of US cropland converted to corn in order to produce enough conventional ethanol to meet 20% of US energy needs, but only about 9% of cropland planted with miscanthus – a 250% improvement over the yield from corn. And unlike corn, miscanthus is very tolerant of poor soil and weather conditions – it doesn’t need to be planted on prime agricultural land. We can grow it on garbage land that would otherwise simply be barren – expanding the farm economy, rather than just redirecting part of its output into energy.

Cellulosic production is not economically feasible at the moment – but it is getting better every year. The existence of an ethanol economy based on corn is providing the driver for research and development into cellulosic ethanol, because companies, individuals and entrepreneurs can see that there is a market for their product if they can get the processes working. Like the sailing ship economy, corn-based ethanol provides a structure for the development of new and better technologies – technologies that wouldn’t be developed in a vacuum.

Corn won’t get us to the finish line, but we need it in order to get off the starting line.

What does Corn have in Common with a Sailing Clipper? – Sounds like the start of a joke…

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 12:54:00 -0600

I’ve been getting a lot of good comments on an earlier post about the viability of ethanol fuel. Many commenters seem to feel that corn-based ethanol is not a realistic long-term solution to our fuel problems, and it always seems to surprise them when I acknowledge that in fact, that’s true.

Corn-based ethanol cannot possibly become the primary, or even a primary, fuel source in the United States. The reason is obvious: even if we took every acre of arable land that wasn’t absolutely required for food production and planted corn on it wall-to-wall, the amount of fuel that would be produced would only be a fairly small fraction of the fuel we use. There just isn’t enough available land; plant-based fuels are relatively low in energy density and so you need a lot of plant feedstock to make a gallon of good fuel.

Why, then, should we be pursuing corn-based ethanol? The answer is simple: it is a bridge to an alcohol economy. Bob Zubrin’s excellent book “Energy Victory” lays out the case for transitioning the US to an alcohol-based, rather than petroleum-based, economy for our heating and transportation needs. He makes the case far better than I could, so although I won’t promise not to blog about it, I will forego the ten-page lecture for now. The bottom line is that the US can very easily become self-sufficient in fuel if we have an alcohol-based fuel economy, a self-sufficiency that we simply cannot attain with a petroleum economy. We should use our oil to make plastic, and use our staggering agricultural power as the basis for our fuel needs. At the very least, we need an alternative fuel source.

But wait – didn’t I just say that we can’t do it with corn? Yes, I did. But right now, corn is the feedstock of choice for the ethanol technologies that we have. We have to start somewhere; it’s very difficult for both technological and economic reasons to just declare a full-fledged alcohol economy. The analogy I like to use is the development of oceangoing ships. We started with sailing vessels, which over time became larger, more complex, more powerful, and more capable. Eventually sailing ships became obsolete as wood- and then coal-burning steamships were developed – and for a long time, both sailing ships and steamships plied the same trade lanes. Coal-burners were in turn made obsolete by oil-burning ships, which used the same basic technology but which were much easier to refuel at sea and could go longer distances without refueling. Those ships were in turn made obsolete – although again, there are still plenty of them in the ocean – by nuclear-powered vessels that drew on the power of the atom and never need refueling.

In terms of the alcohol economy, we are at the sailboat stage. We’ve begun to develop the next generation of coal and wood-burners – but we’re still quite dependent on the sailing ships we already have sitting out at the dock. We still have to trade with countries overseas, and we can’t just shut down the trading economy while we wait for the steamships to get better – because the steamships will never get better if there is no trading economy for the researchers to sell into. We go to sea with the ships we have, and we constantly work on making the next generation better.

On Monday I’ll tell you more about why we need corn in order to get to the next stage of ethanol development.

WSJ Video - New Recipes for Cattle Feed, Mix in a Little...

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 10:02:05 -0600

WSJ Video - New Recipes for Cattle Feed, Mix in a Little Chocolate

Water – Agriculture and Changing Weather Patterns

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:38:34 -0600

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked about water and the unique role it plays in a modern agricultural economy. I mentioned how some nations without adequate rainfall have nonetheless developed thriving agriculture sectors, through the use of “fossil water” – water laid down and locked up thousands or even millions of years ago in aquifers - which countries like Saudi Arabia pump to the surface and use to irrigate strategic food crops, such as grain. That era is coming to an end, because the easily accessible aquifers are being drained dry, and fossil water does not replenish itself in the way that the normal water cycle provides.

In the immediate years to come, that’s probably good news for US farmers, because it means that grain and other commodity crop prices will be rising globally, without a parallel rise in American farmers’ cost of production. Irrigation is important to many US farmers, but most of our crops are grown with dryland techniques – they rely on rainfall, not engineered water systems, for the water every crop needs to grow. In addition, the irrigated crops that we do use don’t tend to use fossil groundwater – instead, we bring water from the natural water cycle to a new geographical location.

In the medium and long term, however, US agriculture may be facing a water crisis of epic scale. The reason is our old friend, climate change. Global warming alarmists are fond of claiming a stronger scientific consensus than actually exists, but regardless of the politics and controversies, there has been one constant in the history of weather and climate: it changes. It changes on the short timescale, and it changes on the long timescale. Northern Britain used to be a tropical forest. The Great Plains used to be a glacial tundra. Whether Al Gore is an idiot or a genius is irrelevant: we can predict with 100% certainty that our current climate expectations will be changing.

And unfortunately for many US farmers, one of the most commonly forecast change is a vast reduction in the amount of snowfall over the western United States. Unlike the eastern half of the country, which is well-watered through rainfall, the west relies on the snowpack to even out water flows throughout the year. Snow accumulates all winter, then melts and runs off all through the spring and summer – turning the Colorado River, among other vital arteries, into a huge torrent of water that is used for drinking and irrigation. Even modest warming can have an enormous impact on the west, because modest warming means rain instead of snow – and rain in wintertime does agriculture no good whatsoever absent some means of storing that water until it is needed. Snowpack provided that service for free – we can construct reservoirs, but the quantity of water involved is truly stupendous and so would be the expense.

The results of continued reduction in the snowpack could be very grim for western farming and ranching in general. Most farmers have water rights, entitling them to a certain amount of water from local sources and from rivers like the Colorado. But those water rights will not be worth much if the water isn’t there to fulfill the contract. Climate change could put a serious cramp in western agriculture’s style in the next few decades.

Next week we’ll see how the water problem is likely to affect agriculture worldwide.