Post by atash on Feb 26, 2011 13:26:07 GMT -5
This came up in another thread, and I was invited to provide details, which I have not done up to now. As you sit in front of your computer reading this, consider that it was written for a wide audience, and therefor some of it might not be relevant to your own situation. Some of you are farmers, some of you are crop breeders, some of you are experts in your field, and some of you are backyard amateurs. Take what is relevant to your own situation.
The challenge is to grow as much of your own food as possible this year, in order to deal with rising food prices. Probably would not hurt your health and well-being as well, to the extent that you'll be replacing a lot of overly-refined processed foods, many of them unbalanced, and many of them missing key nutrients because those nutrients are perishable (for example, essential fatty acids), with fresh wholesome potentially better-balanced foods.
Now the bad news: what I think most of you will find is that it is harder to accomplish than advertised. There are numerous problems that need to be solved:
1. Many of you do not live on what is traditionally farmland. You will be fighting soil problems and lack of agrarian infrastructure.
2. You will find it harder than expected to find real staple crops. The most common corns available to home growers, for example, are not a staple but a vegetable, namely sweet corn. You don't make cornbread or tortillas out of it.
You could find dent corn, but dent corn is designed to be fractionated, and you are unlikely to have the tools to do it.
3. Because people have not expected to grow their own food for a long time, to the extent that even farmer's drive long distances to shop at Wal*Mart, you will discover that a wide gap has developed between staple crops, which are overwhelmingly commercialized, and what is available for smaller-scale production, say in a backyard, homestead, or small farm.
Commercial crops tend to be designed for large-scale production, AND MANY OF THEM SCALE POORLY. For example you get squashes that produce far too high a fraction of female blossoms, and might even be pollen-sterile. I've had numerous disasters like that without any warning. Many commercial crops are intentionally sterile triploids, and I've gotten such things from seed companies like Park's or Burpees with NO WARNING.
I don't know what the story is at this point but there was a movement to make sugar beets 100% GMO Roundup-ready (tm). Then there was a lawsuit over that in Oregon; I dunno where it stands now. In any case this is a common problem.
If you have ever tried to buy modern wheat you've probably run into an unpleasant surprise: most of them are controlled. You're not ALLOWED to grow them without permission, which involves contractual obligations on your part.
BTW, what is the right height for combines is not necessarily the right height for easy harvest by human labor, if it comes to that.
What is the right plant for productivity is not necessarily the right plant for staying out of reach of weeds and predators when you're not using herbicides and rodenticides.
What about heirlooms and legacy varieties?
Well, first of all, good luck finding heirloom wheat. Tomatoes are heirlooms, but you can't live on nothing but tomatoes. You can still find, if you look real hard, a few older classic wheat varieties such as Red Fife.
The problem with heirlooms in general is that almost by definition, nobody's been working on them. Nobody's been taking 19th century wheats and breeding them for resistance to modern strains of stripe rust. A lot of the work has, almost by definition, been done by amateurs who were not aware of issues such as inbreeding depression and buildup of unfavorable mutations as the result of lack of selectivity, or unconscious adverse selectivity.
I'm not discounting heirlooms; I'm only pointing out that they have a specific purpose which is not the same as growing food on a large scale when it really really counts.
There is also the problem that some well-meaning people who have found stuff in gene banks don't always know what they want. They distribute stuff like wheat that is 7 feet tall and was designed for thatching roofs and feeding livestock, not for making bread out of. Since most people are not seriously pursuing growing their own food, these problems tend not to get noticed.
For this reason I suggest starting with whatever are relatively easy crops for people in your climate and soil conditions. For example, depending on climate, potatoes and sweet potatoes. Depending on where you are, you may run into problems even with these easy crops, such as buildup of disease where the soil neither freezes nor seasonally dries out, which is a major problem in my part of the world. You'll need to learn about crop rotation, which is one of the reasons we like true potato seed (you can rotate the potatoes out completely for years, and have them again when you are ready).
I also suggest growing relatively few crops any one year (rotating from a bigger selection year to year), and growing crops that are easy to store (eg, wheat, dry beans) and/or easy to use in large amounts (eg, tomatoes).
I also suggest starting with crops that are relatively easy to grow and harvest with hand-tools. Corn for example is easier to harvest than wheat; the size of the plant is typically ideal for manual labor and it just takes a bag with a strap to put around your shoulder, a sharp curved knife, and preferably a corn sheller. Digging potatoes is work but not bad because of the high productivity--you get a lot of potatoes from relatively little digging.
We need multiple short lists of crops that are relatively easy to grow, suitable for various parts of the country in terms of climate and soil conditions.
I am working on a lot of these problems. Why didn't I work on them sooner? I plead innocent ignorance.
I was getting advice from people who were making the classic mistake of
"fighting the last war"
They were implementing strategies that worked spectacularly well in the 1970s. The problem is that the game has changed.
Gold mining stocks have not exploded the way they did in the 1970s, even though gold prices have risen dramatically more. The reason is that banks make money by expanding credit. Their activity of expanding credit causes inflation. If someone starts "doing something about inflation", that takes the punch bowl away and the party ends.
To keep the party going as long as possible, banks including investment banks have a vested interest in sabotaging a feedback loop whereby expectations of inflation actually make prices rise all the faster (that's what ultimately causes "hyperinflation"). So, they lobby the government to lie about inflation statistics (the CPI is bogus), and they sabotage signs of inflation such as the price of precious metals rising.
In order to do this, the investment banks tricked people into buying supposed "gold ETFs" and "silver ETFs", which have nothing to do with either gold or silver other than in name only. The whole point of them is to sidetrack people who would have bought gold and silver by having them buy something whose purchase has no impact on the price of gold and silver.
The ETFs don't actually own any precious metal. They're full of unbacked promises known as "derivatives". Eventually much of this stuff will default under a rule known as "force majeur".
By the same token, the investment banks had incentives not to promote the stocks of mining companies as much as other stocks. Stock prices are largely a function of promotion, not inherent value. Their prices are a function of investors' willingness to buy them, which is largely psychological and manipulable.
The problem with investing in petroleum-related assets is that...they are wasting assets. If you buy a royalty trust for example, you are buying a depleting asset. There are other problems too involved in predatory legislation; your favorable tax treatment can get taken away suddenly precisely because your profits attracted unwanted attention.
If you buy a production company, their profits margins actually go DOWN as their customers become less able to afford their product. Commodities markets are not safe for small investors; you need deep pockets, generally.
In any case, although I made money it was not the 50-fold increase I would have needed to make a real fortune and have had to finance my enterprises the painstaking way. I'm always in the right business but so far not with the right connections to be leveraged enough to make it easy.
And self-financing makes things slow and difficult. No greenhouse, no tractor, no well, no hirelings to do all the work for me. We're two old duffers armed with hoe and shovel.
The challenge is to grow as much of your own food as possible this year, in order to deal with rising food prices. Probably would not hurt your health and well-being as well, to the extent that you'll be replacing a lot of overly-refined processed foods, many of them unbalanced, and many of them missing key nutrients because those nutrients are perishable (for example, essential fatty acids), with fresh wholesome potentially better-balanced foods.
Now the bad news: what I think most of you will find is that it is harder to accomplish than advertised. There are numerous problems that need to be solved:
1. Many of you do not live on what is traditionally farmland. You will be fighting soil problems and lack of agrarian infrastructure.
2. You will find it harder than expected to find real staple crops. The most common corns available to home growers, for example, are not a staple but a vegetable, namely sweet corn. You don't make cornbread or tortillas out of it.
You could find dent corn, but dent corn is designed to be fractionated, and you are unlikely to have the tools to do it.
3. Because people have not expected to grow their own food for a long time, to the extent that even farmer's drive long distances to shop at Wal*Mart, you will discover that a wide gap has developed between staple crops, which are overwhelmingly commercialized, and what is available for smaller-scale production, say in a backyard, homestead, or small farm.
Commercial crops tend to be designed for large-scale production, AND MANY OF THEM SCALE POORLY. For example you get squashes that produce far too high a fraction of female blossoms, and might even be pollen-sterile. I've had numerous disasters like that without any warning. Many commercial crops are intentionally sterile triploids, and I've gotten such things from seed companies like Park's or Burpees with NO WARNING.
I don't know what the story is at this point but there was a movement to make sugar beets 100% GMO Roundup-ready (tm). Then there was a lawsuit over that in Oregon; I dunno where it stands now. In any case this is a common problem.
If you have ever tried to buy modern wheat you've probably run into an unpleasant surprise: most of them are controlled. You're not ALLOWED to grow them without permission, which involves contractual obligations on your part.
BTW, what is the right height for combines is not necessarily the right height for easy harvest by human labor, if it comes to that.
What is the right plant for productivity is not necessarily the right plant for staying out of reach of weeds and predators when you're not using herbicides and rodenticides.
What about heirlooms and legacy varieties?
Well, first of all, good luck finding heirloom wheat. Tomatoes are heirlooms, but you can't live on nothing but tomatoes. You can still find, if you look real hard, a few older classic wheat varieties such as Red Fife.
The problem with heirlooms in general is that almost by definition, nobody's been working on them. Nobody's been taking 19th century wheats and breeding them for resistance to modern strains of stripe rust. A lot of the work has, almost by definition, been done by amateurs who were not aware of issues such as inbreeding depression and buildup of unfavorable mutations as the result of lack of selectivity, or unconscious adverse selectivity.
I'm not discounting heirlooms; I'm only pointing out that they have a specific purpose which is not the same as growing food on a large scale when it really really counts.
There is also the problem that some well-meaning people who have found stuff in gene banks don't always know what they want. They distribute stuff like wheat that is 7 feet tall and was designed for thatching roofs and feeding livestock, not for making bread out of. Since most people are not seriously pursuing growing their own food, these problems tend not to get noticed.
For this reason I suggest starting with whatever are relatively easy crops for people in your climate and soil conditions. For example, depending on climate, potatoes and sweet potatoes. Depending on where you are, you may run into problems even with these easy crops, such as buildup of disease where the soil neither freezes nor seasonally dries out, which is a major problem in my part of the world. You'll need to learn about crop rotation, which is one of the reasons we like true potato seed (you can rotate the potatoes out completely for years, and have them again when you are ready).
I also suggest growing relatively few crops any one year (rotating from a bigger selection year to year), and growing crops that are easy to store (eg, wheat, dry beans) and/or easy to use in large amounts (eg, tomatoes).
I also suggest starting with crops that are relatively easy to grow and harvest with hand-tools. Corn for example is easier to harvest than wheat; the size of the plant is typically ideal for manual labor and it just takes a bag with a strap to put around your shoulder, a sharp curved knife, and preferably a corn sheller. Digging potatoes is work but not bad because of the high productivity--you get a lot of potatoes from relatively little digging.
We need multiple short lists of crops that are relatively easy to grow, suitable for various parts of the country in terms of climate and soil conditions.
I am working on a lot of these problems. Why didn't I work on them sooner? I plead innocent ignorance.
I was getting advice from people who were making the classic mistake of
"fighting the last war"
They were implementing strategies that worked spectacularly well in the 1970s. The problem is that the game has changed.
Gold mining stocks have not exploded the way they did in the 1970s, even though gold prices have risen dramatically more. The reason is that banks make money by expanding credit. Their activity of expanding credit causes inflation. If someone starts "doing something about inflation", that takes the punch bowl away and the party ends.
To keep the party going as long as possible, banks including investment banks have a vested interest in sabotaging a feedback loop whereby expectations of inflation actually make prices rise all the faster (that's what ultimately causes "hyperinflation"). So, they lobby the government to lie about inflation statistics (the CPI is bogus), and they sabotage signs of inflation such as the price of precious metals rising.
In order to do this, the investment banks tricked people into buying supposed "gold ETFs" and "silver ETFs", which have nothing to do with either gold or silver other than in name only. The whole point of them is to sidetrack people who would have bought gold and silver by having them buy something whose purchase has no impact on the price of gold and silver.
The ETFs don't actually own any precious metal. They're full of unbacked promises known as "derivatives". Eventually much of this stuff will default under a rule known as "force majeur".
By the same token, the investment banks had incentives not to promote the stocks of mining companies as much as other stocks. Stock prices are largely a function of promotion, not inherent value. Their prices are a function of investors' willingness to buy them, which is largely psychological and manipulable.
The problem with investing in petroleum-related assets is that...they are wasting assets. If you buy a royalty trust for example, you are buying a depleting asset. There are other problems too involved in predatory legislation; your favorable tax treatment can get taken away suddenly precisely because your profits attracted unwanted attention.
If you buy a production company, their profits margins actually go DOWN as their customers become less able to afford their product. Commodities markets are not safe for small investors; you need deep pockets, generally. In any case, although I made money it was not the 50-fold increase I would have needed to make a real fortune and have had to finance my enterprises the painstaking way. I'm always in the right business but so far not with the right connections to be leveraged enough to make it easy.
And self-financing makes things slow and difficult. No greenhouse, no tractor, no well, no hirelings to do all the work for me. We're two old duffers armed with hoe and shovel.
