Commodity prices are soaring. Grow food.

[atash]

Nov 10, 2010 15:05:40 GMT -5 spacecase0 said:

atash, you have Chenopodium pallidicaule seeds, where did you get them ?

I "won" an eBay auction. I'm growing them out next year. They'll either grow or not, and if they grow I should have plenty to share. Because 1 plant makes a lot of seeds, they should be quick to grow out (if they don't fail).

[Alan]

This thread represents the exact kind of information which is desperately needed here at Homegrown Goodness, I would like to move it to the Homesteading section if no one minds. If we are not now preparing ourselves and helping others to prepare ourselves for shit to hit the fan, then there is no reason to run this site any longer.

I've been absent from the site due to the workload lately but also because I always feel like I'm holding back where I'd like to see the site go because of the judgment of others. I may in coming weeks re-order some categories and wording and make some specific areas where we can discuss those areas where current events meet self reliance. Don't worry guys, I won't make the site any bigger, just a bit of reorganizing.

[atash]

No objections; your proposal to move it makes sense. Only reason I put it here was because when I first raised this issue (on another forum), it started a tempest in a teapot. I think that among rank-and-file growers it's not an issue. It's just a few people who are touchy about financial bad news.

I'm not sure what happened to farmers during the 1970s stagflation. Commodity prices were soaring then, too, but I would guess that a lot of them were either already going out of business, or were taking on a lot of debt to expand.

I do know that this time around, there are opportunities and dangers. The opportunity is to sell harvests into a bull market for commodities, and less competition from agribusiness plantations that are going bankrupt as they are currently unable to roll over debt. The danger is rising costs of production.

I suggest part of the conversation should be how to run a tight ship.

I'm currently reading a book on small-scale grain production, written by a farmer. He mentions several times how farmers were convinced to take loans to buy equipment that would allow them to expand their operations, and therefor their yields and (in theory) profits.

Of course what happened is that it's true they increased the size of their operations and their output, but so did every other farmer they were competing with!! And now they had all that debt to pay back, and no increased net profits to show for it. The "efficiency of scale" went to the banks, not the farmers!

I am, alas, still very infrastructure poor. It's tempting to just "go out and buy what I need". But I am making spending decisions on what I think will give me the quickest return-on-investment.

[mnjrutherford]

I think its a good idea to "tidy" up. I just have to wonder when and how you plan to find the time!

Suggestion: Educational materials section. A place where we can put basic know facts. For example, potting soil... What formulas are good for starting cabbage seeds? Can you use the same formulas for cotton seeds? What formula would you use for starting scion wood? In this area, it would be good to "lock" the entries so that only data would be entered here. Questions would/should be on a separate thread so that researching the data can be done more quickly and easily.

[mnjrutherford]

ATASH: I'm no expert, but I would imagine that the profits that come from inflated commodities prices land in the pockets of those between farmer and consumer. The best way to eliminate such waste, in my opinion, is to eliminate those in the middle. Not an easy task particularly in an age when so many people are consumed in and by the process of earning a living doing nothing. Insurance companies being a prime example. Paid protection...

There is a federal agency that audits federal contracts. Every year they have to justify themselves to get funding for the coming year. The focus of their justification process is the ratio of dollars saved to dollars spent. I seem to recall that one year we saved the government $4M and we spent $12M? I dunno, it's been a LONG time.

Additionally, there are so many people whose sole enterprise is tied up in useless activities there is no way to fully know just how well managed they are or how honest or dishonest they are.

How can you really convince that sweet bank teller or the grocery store clerk you are so fond of that they and their families would be SO much better off if they stayed at home and baked bread instead of buying bread. How can you convince them that the time they spend "earning cash" has no value compared to the time they spend teaching their sons and daughters how to plant and harvest; fish; hunt; sew, knit, or crochet a garment; plant a tree, cut down a tree, build a house with the cut tree while watching the new tree grow and flourish...

I watch the articles about Haiti and I see pictures of the public restrooms strewn with feces and hear reports of a cholera epidemic and the horrid poverty induced filth and I hear my Aunt's voice out of the distance of time saying, "Just because you are poor doesn't mean you have to be dirty." and I wonder why there aren't deep latrine ditches. With so many "unemployed" people.... ? Why?

Am I crazy or is this really as insanely stupid as I think it is?

[garnetmoth]

This post is a little OT:
I am grateful that I have found this forum!

So many other "gardening" sites are hobbyist or single crop.... I read a great rabbit forum with a subforum on meat rabbits and natural feeding if anyone else is interested.

For Atash- I think its a good idea to buy what you can afford before inflation hits- Im not entirely convinced everything will inflate, but its not a bad idea. DH and I are getting a hatchet and thinking maybe ammo cases for better seed storage.... we have a small lot and Im trying to come up with a few other useful tools for Christmas.....

Jo- yeah it seems lost on most people that they can make things- heat and eat foods are SO expensive, I just dont understand how folks dont get that. We have a freezer full of locally raised pork and turkey, and 4 home raised rabbits. its a nice feeling.

[bunkie]

great thread atash!

atash, i have been experimenting with the soaking method and am finding the end results very tasty when making bread and muffins, so far.

jo, i had two Arbequina(sp?) olive trees in pots in our greenhouse. the first winter, i brought them into the cabin and put them in our loft. one died! imo from observing hem, they do not enjoy heat! the next winter (last), i kept the plant in the cold greenhouse covering it with cloth when it frosted. it maintained nicely! i'm thinking of taking a couple branches off the plant next spring and seeing if i can start a couple new trees.

synergy, very interesting links on the Oregon olive project. i see there where they succeeded in starting new trees from cuttings.

listening to our local news this morning, they were talking about higher food prices. i was shocked to hear of some things rising to as much as 40 percent within the next couple of weeks.

[Alan]

Nov 11, 2010 0:32:40 GMT -5 atash said:

No objections; your proposal to move it makes sense. Only reason I put it here was because when I first raised this issue (on another forum), it started a tempest in a teapot. I think that among rank-and-file growers it's not an issue. It's just a few people who are touchy about financial bad news.

I'm not sure what happened to farmers during the 1970s stagflation. Commodity prices were soaring then, too, but I would guess that a lot of them were either already going out of business, or were taking on a lot of debt to expand.

I do know that this time around, there are opportunities and dangers. The opportunity is to sell harvests into a bull market for commodities, and less competition from agribusiness plantations that are going bankrupt as they are currently unable to roll over debt. The danger is rising costs of production.

I suggest part of the conversation should be how to run a tight ship.

I'm currently reading a book on small-scale grain production, written by a farmer. He mentions several times how farmers were convinced to take loans to buy equipment that would allow them to expand their operations, and therefor their yields and (in theory) profits.

Of course what happened is that it's true they increased the size of their operations and their output, but so did every other farmer they were competing with!! And now they had all that debt to pay back, and no increased net profits to show for it. The "efficiency of scale" went to the banks, not the farmers!

I am, alas, still very infrastructure poor. It's tempting to just "go out and buy what I need". But I am making spending decisions on what I think will give me the quickest return-on-investment.

Those who are touchy about financial bad news should most certainly be facing their fear at the moment, if anyone gets touchy here about our bordering on the verge of conspiracy theories they know they can leave, there are plenty other sites out there for them to enjoy. This is for all of us who not only are working in the field of plant breeding but in the field of self sufficiency in case of emergency.

Yes, commodities did skyrocket in the 70's and farmers expanded way beyond their means, all at once, and unfortunately relied on the middle man to move the product and take their cut, when it was all said and done the debt mounted and we had a farm crisis which led to government subsidies. Government buying debt from farmers who get into more debt from the companies they work for and take on even more debt from the bank.

The difference this time is that farms are increadibly consolidated and increadibly unsustainable. If things go downhill it don't matter how many Tyson chicken houses you have or how many acres of corn and soy you have, you'll never get enough feed or seed or fertilizer to take care of it on that scale. The little guy wins for once.

That said, the bull market is an excellent time to make waves in alternative agriculture by using the stupidity of the stock market system and the rising price of comodities, all while both using the "system" to base your prices on (plus a good % profit more for yourself) all while never playing the game. You've got a ton of people out there with backyard gardens and backyard chickens and they need feed and seed, most of these people are also preparing for their percieved vision of "worst case scenario". Got a corn crib full of corn? Why would you run it to the nearest grainery when instead you can ask a slight to large premium on whole ear corn sold to the local farmers and gardeners who didn't grow any for their animals? That's what I've talked a couple of farmers here locally into doing this year and they are already seing the benefits of the local ag economy. The farmer makes money, the buyer gets feed from a locally produced and stored as well as convinient location and nobody had to go out of their way to sale or buy the commodity using a third or even fourth party. This works best for those who use open pollinated seeds that they save themselves and who can produce or procure their own fertilizer cheaply. As an example my seed was free this past season and I used my own compost which was essentially free, I produced nearly 400 bushels of corn for use here on the farm, had I the room and resources to grow excess this year with the price of corn say come December or January, I could have made a killing. Figure it like this; you go to the feed store, a 50 lb bag of whole corn is going to cost between 6-7 dollars a bag, meanwhile 50 lbs isn't even a bushel, with a little bit of marketing you could make quite a large profit locally, particularly if like me you live in a small community. Make it a specialty corn (organic, eco-logically grown, high protein, whatever) and you can always mark it up a bit more, particularly if your focused only on actually selling to those people who might have a very small backyard flock and are willing to spend a bit more on locally grown feed.

This money automatically gets reinvested in the endless "shit I need" list.

As far as infrastructure, it is truly a pain in the ass to budget any kind of infrastructure while figuring out what you really "must" have. I still struggle with it, but if you play your cards right and get good at trade and barter it's a lot easier to get what you need in terms of building materials. I just traded five turkeys for 80 sheets of gently used 2 x 15 barn metal and a ton of old (but not rotten or termite infested) black walnut to use rebuilding my family barn.

I traded nursery stock to another friend for 20 additional turkeys and 70 Pharoh/Coturnix quail. Always a deal to be found and made if your looking.

The opporotunities are there, we just have to seize them.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

I'm just curious to know if any of the Canadians to the north share this preparing for "Shit to Hit The Fan" type of thinking that many of the people on here seem to share from the U.S. ? If you will notice, almost everyone who commented on this thread seems to be from the U.S.

I'm wondering if maybe the Candians are less paranoid than their average U.S. counterpart, because of cultural differences, or maybe they have more faith in their economy and government.

I suppose my observation could just be coincidence, but i'd like to know for sure.

[mnjrutherford]

Nov 15, 2010 10:40:14 GMT -5 keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) said:

I'm just curious to know if any of the Canadians to the north share this preparing for "Shit to Hit The Fan" type of thinking that many of the people on here seem to share from the U.S. ? If you will notice, almost everyone who commented on this thread seems to be from the U.S.

I'm wondering if maybe the Candians are less paranoid than their average U.S. counterpart, because of cultural differences, or maybe they have more faith in their economy and government.

I suppose my observation could just be coincidence, but i'd like to know for sure.

Excellent question! I'm definitely a member of the "Fan Slammers" club. I don't think I'm paranoid about it... maybe I am and never realized it? I'll have to ponder this some more. I do think it's important to be prepared for .... well, for whatever. I feel like a lot of things in a lot of places are way worse than they should be due to a lot of reasons that are really unnecessary. The most anguishing example to me is the need for entire clinics devoted to treating fistula in certain parts of Africa.

[mjc]

Personally, I'm not so much a 'slammer' as I am an 'oozer'...yeah, it's going to get bad, but it is going to go progressively downhill at a fairly steady pace, until the fecal matter is so deep we're like the bottom fence post at CAFO...

[mnjrutherford]

Nov 15, 2010 12:44:01 GMT -5 mjc said:

Personally, I'm not so much a 'slammer' as I am an 'oozer'...

Quite a picture your planting there!

[grunt]

I think we just always expect the splatter to reach everyone, so it's not worth mentioning in particular. We are pretty much expecting our politicians to dip us in it on a regular basis, so we're more or less always ready for it, and don't need to do much extra preparing.
I have always had a pantry I could live out of for a year at a time = might get tired of what I'm eating before the year is up, but I'll still be eating.

[atash]

I'm wondering if maybe the Candians are less paranoid than their average U.S. counterpart, because of cultural differences, or maybe they have more faith in their economy and government.

Good question. Here are the differences that I am aware of:

1. Canada is rich in natural resources. During commodity booms, Canada prospers.
2. Canada has around 1/10 the population density of the USA. Of course it also has less ability to grow food, but the high plains of Canada produce a lot of wheat, canola, and similar hardy crops.
3. Canada's banking system is more regulated than ours in terms of risk-management. Canada will lose a few banks but its whole banking system is not on the brink as ours is.
4. Monetizing the US financial system is debasing the $US at an alarming rate. There is less demand for bailouts in Canada.
5. Canada's exposure to resource-related wars and "blowback" is relatively negligible.

BTW, just to set expectations correctly, it is possible though not a foregone conclusion that commodities could see a "correction" due to the potential for a massive recession in China. I remain bullish over the long term due to overall rising demand versus falling production, not to mention the long-term trend towards debasement of pretty much all of the world's currencies (some more than others, beware!). Watch Chris Martensen's crash course videos if you do not understand this.

[atash]

Slow burn versus sudden collapse of civilization:

Unfortunately, many people have difficulty modeling such situations in their heads. As a result, they do not know what to plan for, and do not have realistic plans in mind.

There will be a slow but alas accelerating decline, with periods of short but intense crises. The years between about 2012-2015 will start getting pretty hard.

This point has confused a lot of people: Russian analysts are talking in the time-frame of around 2025-2050. That has to do with when our economy gets bad enough to weaken our government and military capabilities. Long before that, average people (that is, individuals and families, not the national government) will be in trouble. MANY ALREADY ARE. Witness the foreclosure fiasco, and year after year of new record levels of personal bankruptcies.

I've been recommending getting ready no later than 2012, because that's the time-frame when real crises are likely to start happening. That particular year also tends to spook the superstitious. It's just a coincidence! Some of my friends say I am too optimistic, and some of my detractors say I am crazy. It is somewhat relative to your own perspectives. If your job got offshored and your house got foreclosed, you might wish you met me earlier (I figured this out over 20 years ago). If your name is "Goldman-Sachs", the party is just starting.

"Getting ready" means getting ready for crises (note that is the PLURAL of "crisis") as well as for long-term decline.

Some potential crises could be things like "banking holidays" (American euphemism for shutdowns of the banking system) or an EMP attack. One EMP attack would shut down most of our economy, due to the catastrophic effect it would have on our electrical grid and any and all unshielded electronics, notably computers.

For what it is worth, either crisis is unlikely. But if one did happen, it would ruin your whole day. For example, if the banks are closed for more than a few days, many operations cease to run as bills do not get paid. More likely than a banking holiday would be some sort of limit on withdrawals, but that would backfire as it would create psychological panic as people would realize the banking system was in trouble and would act accordingly.

In the short term, a hyperinflation is unlikely. In the long term, a certainty I suppose whereas pure fiat currencies are inherently unstable and prone to ending that way. The longest-lived example was in Imperial Mongolian-ruled China, where a fiat currency circulated for around 200 years before ending in hyperinflation.

Double-digit inflation is a near-certainty. It hasn't happened yet because most of the money created during QE1 is not circulating yet; it is being held on deposit at the Federal Reserve. If and when it circulates, it will cause severe inflation especially due to something called "the multiplier effect" whereby banks loan out more money than they actually have in reserve ("fractional reserve banking").

BTW, contrary to the deflationuts, cascading bankruptcies do not necessarily imply falling prices. Companies that are bankrupt cease producing...but people still want to eat during depressions. Demand is not infinitely elastic. In any case, money is being simultaneously "destroyed" through debt repudiation, and spawned through monetization, which is currently called "quantitative easing". Both happen at the same time; the dichotomy between "deflation" and "inflation" as being "opposites" that cancel each other out is false.

For a complete overview of the situation, have a look at Chris Martensen's crash course. It's free. Also look for youtube interviews of Jim Rogers (former partner of George Soros) and Marc Faber (called the "Asian contagion" and got his clients out of Asian stocks before the crash).