Urban Farmers’ Crops Go From Vacant Lot to Market

Denniston Wilks grows produce for sale in East New York, Brooklyn.

IN the shadows of the elevated tracks toward the end of the No. 3 line in East New York, Brooklyn, with an April chill still in the air, Denniston and Marlene Wilks gently pulled clusters of slender green shoots from the earth, revealing a blush of tiny red shallots at the base.

“Dennis used to keep them big, and people didn’t buy them,” Mrs. Wilks said. “They love to buy scallions.”

Growing up in rural Jamaica, the Wilkses helped their families raise crops like sugar cane, coffee and yams, and take them to market. Now, in Brooklyn, they are farmers once again, catering to their neighbors’ tastes: for scallions, for bitter melons like those from the West Indies and East Asia and for cilantro for Latin-American dinner tables.

“We never dreamed of it,” said Mr. Wilks, nor did his relatives in Jamaica. “They are totally astonished when you tell them that you farm and go to the market.”

For years, New Yorkers have grown basil, tomatoes and greens in window boxes, backyard plots and community gardens. But more and more New Yorkers like the Wilkses are raising fruits and vegetables, and not just to feed their families but to sell to people on their block.

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Dharma in the Dirt

MUIR BEACH, Calif.

AS a proudly Birkenstocked Zen gardener, Wendy Johnson can mindfully muster up affection for many of the earth’s species, with the possible exception of persimmon-devouring gophers.

But poison hemlock holds a special place in her heart.

Without the presence of this pernicious carrot look-alike, a potent vertigo-inducing poison that when ingested can cause death, she reasons, her garden would be all cloying lilac- and lily-scented perfection — boring, in short. The innocent-looking malevolent weed, which she allows to flourish for its capacity to draw rich minerals from the soil for compost, “gives the garden its punch,” she said, “snapping me back to my senses.”

Like her beloved hemlock, Ms. Johnson has deep taproots in California. Her own garden, bordered by a mountain creek with a view of the Pacific Ocean, lies down the road from the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, where she helped pioneer the concept of organic gardening in the United States. Now the farm’s unofficial gardener emeritus, she lived at Green Gulch for 25 years, marrying, raising her two children and growing produce for Greens Restaurant, which was founded by the Center in 1979.

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The North American Bioregional Congress is coming to Tennessee in 2009.  Its three hundred or so participants will arrive at The Farm, in Summertown, next September. They will spend a week in intensive interaction, and then journey back to their respective bioregions, inspired through communion at the Congress to ever more deeply reinhabit their home watersheds and bring their friends and neighbors back–or is it forward?–to Earth as well.

What in the world am I talking about?  Bioregions?  Communion?  At a Congress?  Reinhabit their watersheds?  Maybe I’m the one who needs to get “brought back to Earth”?

Well, thank you for your concern, but I feel pretty well grounded.  I am reinhabiting the place I live–staying home a lot, learning my local flora and fauna, water cycles, weather, dirt, and my human neighbors–though sometimes that seems like the hard part.   It’s the culture we live in that has come ungrounded.

Now, in the course of human events, it has become obvious that the political system we have built since 1776 no longer serves us, or most of the other inhabitants of the planet–human and otherwise–either.  We need to reimagine our relationship with our communities at all levels.  Politics is a function of culture, and to truly and deeply change our politics into something that will work in the coming centuries, we have to initiate a culture change, a psychological and spiritual change that starts with renewing and revisioning our felt connection with the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the plants and animals that make it possible, as well as the way we relate to our children, our mates, our families, and our friends. The North American Bioregional Congress is a safe space in which to join with like-minded people and do all that.

“Bioregonal”?  What’s “bioregional”?

A “bioregion” is, to quote from the North American Bioregional Congress’s website,

A geographical area whose boundaries are roughly determined by nature rather than human beings. One bioregion is distinguished from another by characteristics of flora, fauna, water, climate, rocks, soils, land forms, and the human settlements, cultures, and communities these characteristics have spawned. “Local community is the basic unit of human habitation. It is at this level that we can reach our fullest potential and best effect social change. Local communities need to network to empower our bioregional communities. Human communities are integral parts of the larger bioregional and planetary life communities. The empowerment of human communities is inseparable from the larger task of reinhabitation — learning to live sustainably and joyfully in place.”

and a “Congress,” in the Bioregional view, is

a way of holding a working meeting of fully-participating, well-informed, aware equals who see themselves in some sense as representatives—officially or unofficially, formally or informally—of groups, or organizations, or movements, or ideologies, or philosophies or of regions or watersheds, or of natural ecosystems, and plant and animal communities. It is an assembly of peers working consensually in a representational capacity. In this a congress is much different than what we commonly call a “conference”.

In order to allow this community of equals to fully form and maintain coherence, there are no “drop-ins” allowed.  Participants come for the whole thing, or not at all, and that includes the media.  Everyone helps with the cooking, the cleanup, and the childcare.  This is not a “conference.”

At a “conference,” attendees’ main duties are to show up for workshops and meals and have food and information poured into them.  At a “conference,” there are well-known outside speakers, big-name entertainment, and a set schedule of workshops.  A “conference” tries to draw in as many people as it can. This ain’t no stinking conference.  This is do-it-yourself, participatory, and by invitation–and, by the way, you are invited.

This temporary village is considered a “sacred space,” not in any narrow, sectarian sense, but in the broadest possible terms–that the gathering of this intentional community for the purpose of reconsidering everything from one’s most intimately personal thoughts and attitudes to the state of the planet is itself a holy purpose and that all participants are worthy of respect.  Rituals and blessings are shared and invented.  Lives get changed.

Bioregionalism goes far beyond mere “environmentalism.”  Here’s another quote from the website that explains it better than I could:

While environmentalism does much good work in consciousness raising, it is only a part of what must be done. Environmentalism fails to propose comprehensive and systemic change at all levels — based on ecology. Bioregionalism does, reaching for something far deeper and more holistic that must be manifested.

Bioregionalism is an all-inclusive way of life, embracing the whole range of human thought and endeavor. It advocates a full restructuring of systems within a given bioregion, orienting toward regeneration and sustainability of the whole life community. This inclusion of the nonhuman in the definition of community is vital. Indeed, one of the basic tenets of bioregionalism is the notion of “bio-centrism,” or “eco-centrism,” where reality is viewed from a life-centered or ecologically centered perspective, rather than from a human-centered focus (anthropocentrism).

Bioregionalism speaks to the heart of community. If we are to continue to live on Earth, the definition of community has to include all the living things in our ecosystem. Without the flowers, mammals, insects, trees, birds, grasses, and the living soil and waters in community with each other, we would not be here at all. Humans need other life forms in order to survive. Without a respectful, cooperative relationship with others, we are both physically and spiritually impoverished. Without their ecological teachings we are ignorant and cannot know how to live.

Elsewhere on the website, somebody comments, “If you think you’re an independent organism, try seeing how long you can hold your breath.”

The bioregional movement is a seed for a new human culture, one in which the proposals of the Green Party, so often a voice crying in the wilderness, would be as sensible and obvious and implemented as the next breath you take.  We need a new culture and a new politics, and we’re running out of time to get on the road there.  Got ideas?  Bring ‘em to the North American Bioregional Congress.  We’ll listen.

music:  Kate Wolf:  “Medicine Wheel”

The decline of the honeybee attracted worldwide attention in 2007. Investigations carried out by the Institute of Science in Society implicated a synergistic interaction between the recent widespread use of new pesticides (including Bt toxin from GM crops) and fungal infections  [1, 2] (Parasitic Fungus and Honeybee Decline , Parasitic Fungi and Pesticides Act Synergistically to Kill Honeybees?, SiS 35). Sub-lethal levels of neonicotinoid pesticides act synergistically with parasitic fungi in killing insects pests. Fungal spores, widely used as biocontrol agents are applied in sprays and baits, and when delivered in suspension with sub-lethal levels of pesticides are much more effective in killing insects. Equally, Bt biopesticides enhance the killing power of parasitic fungi synergistically. That information was transmitted through a written question to the European Parliament [3].

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another example of the government protecting people who don’t want to be protected…..

Raw milk lovers upset over Amish arrest

BY MATTHEW LYSIAK
DAILY NEWS WRITER

Thursday, May 1st 2008, 4:00 AM

It’s the milk spill that crossed state lines.

Brooklyn raw milk enthusiasts are crying over the loss of their supplier - a horse and buggy-driving Amish farmer from Pennsylvania.

Mark Nolt of New Line, Pa., was arrested and shut down last Friday for selling the contraband.

“Oh God. My heart is pounding. I can’t believe what a God—- police state this is,” said one Brooklyn customer who made monthly pickups of raw dairy products from Nolt that the farmer had dropped off in Manhattan by workers.

“I gave him $100 last week for a huge delivery of stuff, including raw cream that I planned on using to make cream puffs,” she said.

The Brooklyn outcry came after six Pennsylvania state troopers raided Nolt’s farm and confiscated his illegal dairy.

“They swooped in on Friday morning like a bunch of Vikings, handcuffed me and stole $30,000 worth of my milk, cheese and butter,” Nolt told the Daily News.

Nolt is a devout Mennonite who sells raw dairy products at his farm and has them transported by truck to customers in Delaware and across New York City, where the raw goods are illegal.

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WE CAN SURVIVE BUT CAN WE COMMUNICATE?

By Carolyn Baker and Sally Erickson

The distance between us is holy ground

To be traversed feet bare,

Arms raised in joyous dance

So that it is crossed.

And the tracks of our pilgrimage shine in the

darkness

To light our coming together

In a bright and steady light.

Raphael Jesus Gonzales

****

When we think of preparing our minds, bodies, hearts, and living situations for collapse, the focus is often on our individual or household living situations.  Equally important is our need to develop a circle of trusting, mutually interdependent relationships. The culture we live in is based on hierarchies of control and influence.  Work relationships, kept in place largely by paychecks and ordered by project managers and bosses, are the most common experience most of us have of being part of an organized group. We have little experience outside of those hierarchies. Even more rare in our hyper-independent culture is to depend on others for mutual aid, support and comfort. So, for most people, it likely feels overwhelming to consider how to build a wider circle of people based on mutuality, as part of preparation for the ongoing collapse of basic life support systems.

Costs killing Maine farmers

By Sharon Kiley Mack
Friday, April 25, 2008 - Bangor Daily News

LEVANT, Maine - Dairy farmer Brian Call doesn’t have a fancy milking parlor. He hand-carries the portable milking machine to each of his 30 cows, wiping their teats with pages ripped from an old telephone book. “Another way to save money,” he comments.

****

In her letter to the congressional delegation and Maine’s dairy industry members, Gibson wrote, “People need to be concerned that small farms and small businesses are closing their doors, as they are the backbone of our economy and they fuel rural communities. We are becoming ghost farms and ghost towns, the end of an era and the start of a vacuum to be filled by monopolies, a form of economic totalitarianism.”

By telling her family’s personal financial story, Gibson hopes solutions will be found to save Maine’s small, family farms.

“I will tell you that we realize no profit from our dairy farm, nothing,” she said.

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Peak Farmers: A Guest Post by Elaine Solowey

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Joel Stein, the Angelino columnist said just last fall. “Agribusiness feeds us. Farmers are obsolete. They are one step above fire starters and cave painters”.

Now with food prices rising, food riots in 35 countries as of this writing and the concerns about peak oil, peak food, peak phosphorus, peak fertilizer finally crashing into mainstream consciousness it is surprising to me that no one connects the current crisis with a peak that was passed long ago.

Peak farmers.

But that peak should not be a surprise to anyone.

For the last 100 years there has been a world-wide effort to get rid of farmers…
Some were eliminated for political reasons the way that Stalin starved the Ukrainians to death and shipped the kulaks off to Siberia.

Some were driven off their land by the vast illegal enclosure actions of wealthy landowners in South American nations.

The Nazis in WWII swept up the farming inhabitants of Russian and Polish and Jewish villages and worked them to death in the factories that fed their war machine.

Millions of farmers were displaced by dams financed by the World Bank

Millions more were removed from agriculture by the policies of the WTO.

Some had their farms were taxed out from under them and the land tuned over to developers who built cheap houses and strips malls on it.

And more were eliminated by agricultural globalization, the belief that every farmer should specialize and produce as much of their single product as possible (to the neglect of everything else) - then we would all merrily cross- ship these things to each other for ever.

Still others were “sanitized” out of business. The small dairies and animal husbandry operations could not afford the large and expensive machines needed to raise animals and process milk and meat under the rules of “modern” hygiene.

These small operations were declared to be inefficient and dirty, never mind the fact that modern “hygienic” production units for meat and milk are nightmarishly cruel, filthy, and squalid. (Indeed, a backyard pigpen or chicken coop is a relative paradise compared the confining “crush” pens of the modern pig farm or the cage batteries of the modern poultry house.)

So farmers were eliminated, one after another, by murder, displacement, bankruptcy, by taxes that would not let land be passed from generation, by on- farm prices that left farmers unable to feed their own families, by subsidies that favored farms beyond human scale.

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Independence Days: My First Challenge

It is so desperately needed that we do declare our independence from the globalizing, totalitarian, destructive, toxic, dangerous agriculture that destroys our future and our power and pays to destroy democracy.  And so, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for people to divorce themselves from a system that has become destructive, and thus:

We the people, in order to form a more perfect union of human and nature, establish justice and ensure food sovreignty, provide for the common nutrition, promote the general welfare and ensure the blessings of liberty, for ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this constitution for the United Food Sovereign People of the World.

***

I challenge myself and all of you to work on creating food Independence Days this year - that all of us try to do one thing every day  to create Food Independence.  That means in each day or week, we would try to:

1. Plant something.  Obviously, those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere and having spring are doing this anyway.  But the idea that you should plant all week and all year is a good reminder to those of us who sometimes don’t get our fall gardens or our succession plantings done regularly.  Remember, that beet you harvested left a space - maybe for the next one to get bigger, but maybe for a bit of arugula or a fall crop of peas, or a cover crop to enrich the soil.  Independence is the bounty of a single seed that creates an abundance of zucchini, and enough seeds to plant your own garden and your neighbor’s.

****

3. Preserve something.  Sometimes this will be a big project, but it doesn’t have to be.  It doesn’t take long to slice a couple of tomatoes and set them on a screen in the sun, or to hang up a bunch of sage for winter.  And it adds up fast.  The time you spend now is time you don’t have to spend hauling to the store and cooking later.  Independence is eating our own, and cutting the ties we have to agribusiness.

4. Prep something.  Hit a yard sale and pick up an extra blanket.  Purchase some extra legumes and oatmeal.  Sort out and inventory your pantry.  Make a list of tools you need.  Find a way to give what you don’t need to someone who does.  Fix your bike.  Fill that old soda bottle with water with a couple of drops of bleach in it.  Plan for next year’s edible landscaping.  Make back-road directions to your place and send it to family in case they ever need to come to you - or make ‘em for yourself for where you might have to go. Clean, mend, declutter, learn a new skill.  Independence is being ready for whatever comes.

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The Politics of Food is Politics

By DE CLARKE and STAN GOFF

In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the devaluation of the dollar create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand — because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance. As air carriers have gone bankrupt, the knock-on effects on travel agents, airports, airport-colocated hotels, “package” vacation resorts, etc. are considerable.

This is how one cascade pours into another, as the manifold contradictions of our global system merge and co-amplify. Tourism, which was supposed to be a relatively benign, non-extractive industry for colonized nations — an alternative to brutal extraction and cash cropping — turns out to have been just as extractive all along due to the climate (and cultural) damage done by commodified air travel.

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My own…anecdotal evidence….using simply composting mulch on organic compost over non-compacted soil, is that in 12 square surface-feet, one can grow three species of food, with six plants each… producing okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, bush beans, etc. Mixing them, and adding a couple of marigolds and aromatics (like mint or parilla) seems to keep the little critters from taking more than their share. Last summer I had one cucumber vine that produced around 50 mature cucumbers, totalling well over 20 pounds of food, for around three months. By rotating seasonals, it is easily conceivable to take a 12 square-foot plot in a temperate zone and raise 100 pounds of food a year… being very conservative. Neither Syngenta, nor Cargill, nor Archer-Daniels-Midland want you to know this.

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We are not accustomed, especially on the political left, to thinking about such practical activities as “political.” We are still trapped in a strategic-theoretical model that equates power with policy, and policy is then undertaken as a purely ideological struggle. The persuasion of the word and the concept is given primacy over the persuasion of actual conditions and deeds. Metaphorically, we have constructed a line, running from left to right, and we use a constellation of policy-issues to place both people and discourse along that line.

The system, however, reproduces itself most earnestly through “facts-on-the-ground.” Fighting a system with nothing more than ideas is the most Quixotic, and ineffectual, form of struggle. Before we can suggest ideas, we must first have some facts-on-the-ground of our own to point to. Fortunately, we do. Some of them have just been recited above. We just need to point to them with more urgency now. Because the facts-on-the-ground of the present capitalist system, as we can see, have slammed into something like the end of an unexpected cul-de-sac. The epidemic of dollar hegemony has torn through the world like a plague; but plagues burn themselves out when all who are susceptible have been wiped out.

The airlines have run into the deep impasse of tooling and organization… and so has our food system. Our system has arrived decisively at what Ivan Illich called its second watershed: all our “cures” have become the disease. We are in a state of accelerating iatrogensis. The capitalist/extractive/technomanagerial system can only prescribe more of the same medicine that is killing us… or new medicines to treat the symptoms of the last medicine. This is not a metaphorical treadmill, but a downward spiral… and there is a bottom.

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Capitalism began by kicking people off their land and forbidding them to grow their own food; the end of capitalism may come when people who grow their own food and share it with neighbors are able to say a resounding No to capitalism’s end-phase exterminism.

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Canada’s C-51 Law May Outlaw 60% of Natural Health Products; Big Pharma Pushing to Criminalize Supplements

(NaturalNews) A new law being pushed in Canada by Big Pharma seeks to outlaw up to 60 percent of natural health products currently sold in Canada, even while criminalizing parents who give herbs or supplements to their children. The law, known as C-51, was introduced by the Canadian Minister of Health on April 8th, 2008, and it proposes sweeping changes to Canada’s Food and Drugs Act that could have devastating consequences on the health products industry.

The Act also changes the definition of the word “sell” to include anyone who gives such therapeutic products to someone else. So a mother giving an herb to her child, under the proposed new language, could be arrested for engaging in the sale of unregulated, unapproved “therapeutic substances.” Learn about more of these freedom-squashing changes to the law at the Stop51.com website: http://www.stopc51.com

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Michael Pollan on the Revolutionary Act of Gardening

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

***

Here’s the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

The “cheap-energy mind,” as Wendell Berry called it, is the mind that asks, “Why bother?” because it is helpless to imagine — much less attempt — a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant. Since the cheap-energy mind translates everything into money, its proxy, it prefers to put its faith in market-based solutions — carbon taxes and pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it believes, the economy will properly value everything that matters and nudge our self-interest down the proper channels. The best we can hope for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has no use for.

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Food crisis telegraphing the future
It’s pretty fortunate that the world’s largest oil exporters tend to be ones with small’ish populations. It won’t be very long, maybe a few years, maybe a decade before oil producers start reverting to mercantilist leanings, and start limiting the export of oil in favor of subsidized and affordable domestic consumption. Though it may not seem obvious on the face, oil and natural gas are absolute requirements for survival in the modern world, as inputs for pesticides for our monoculture crops, transportation fuel, and the manufacture of NPK derived fertilizer. The interlocking of petroleum and food security cannot be undone. You can’t feed the world with wind, nuclear and solar. It’s inevitable that food production will take priority over optional transportation, and costs of food and fuel will skyrocket in tandem.

One of the second order effects of the rise in the price of oil is that seed, fertilizer, and pesticide costs are all skyrocketing. Crop yields in many poorer nations are down severely, because farmers simply can’t afford to plant, and it devolves into a vicious cycle which drives supply down even further in a time when inputs are all skyrocketing.

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the good, the theory, the practice.

this from the blog

I’ve written about this more extensively in an article about Vegeculture - that is, the use of root crops as staple foods.  I believe that more and more of us, who do not feel we can produce our own wheat, will transition our diets towards small scale production of root crops - potatoes, sweet potatoes, parsnips, cassava, manioc, taro, beets….  In a world where food grains are increasingly scarce, our ability to rely on our own local, staple vegetable crops may be essential.

Vegeculture has several advantages over grain culture. For example, you don’t have to till up a lot of ground at once, since these crops are adapted to “patch” culture. They often can be stored in the ground and dug up as needed, and can tolerate being integrated with perennial tree plantings. The tradition of planting in patches and leaving grown fallow to restore fertility in West Africa translated well in slave garden in the US and Caribbean islands because such gardens often had to be hidden. Often slave and later share-croppers had only hilly or otherwise difficult to use land, which is best served by being kept in perennial or semi-perennial root crops. Because slaves and tenant farmers had very little time to work their land, they needed high yielding crops that could provide nutrition and caloric density together.

In her essay “They have Saturdays and Sundays to Feed Themselves: Slave Gardens in the Caribbean,” Lydia Pulsipher observes that there is consi

morederable evidence that islands that included many slave gardens didn’t suffer the classic malnutrition of slavery. In fact, the available data on the history of produce sales by slaves (who sold their surpluses to both white and black customers), suggests that white people were considerably healthier on islands that had large numbers of slave gardens. The implication seems to be that the starchy, vegetable poor diet of Europeans on these islands was significantly inferior to the vegetable rich, nutrient rich diet of the slaves, and the influence of slave gardens improved the European seed diet enormously (probably to the less-than-total delight of the slaves themselves).

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meanwhile:

The Poor Eat Mud

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

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there’s work to do, eh?

Nine years ago The Economist ran a big story on oil, which was then selling for $10 a barrel. The magazine warned that this might not last. Instead, it suggested, oil might well fall to $5 a barrel.

In any case, The Economist asserted, the world faced “the prospect of cheap, plentiful oil for the foreseeable future.”

Last week, oil hit $117.

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Published on 20 Apr 2008 by Resource Insights. Archived on 22 Apr 2008.

Disaster in progress: North America’s home heating transition

With natural gas prices creeping higher on a daily basis, some homeowners dependent on natural gas for heat are starting to look for cheaper alternatives. In my area the outdoor wood burning furnace which is designed to supplement existing home heating has become a major source of friction among suburban residents.

The main complaint is the smoke produced by these furnaces as they heat water that is then pumped to the owner’s house where a heat exchanger disperses the heat. A loophole in U. S. Environmental Protection Agency rules has left such furnaces unregulated though many municipalities and states are now seeking to ban them or at least regulate them. Part of the problem is that some furnace owners don’t just burn wood; sometimes they burn household trash. Emissions from these furnaces have been measured by one government agency and the results are rather startling:

A 2006 report from the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, a nonprofit association of Northeast air quality agencies, found that average particulate emissions from one outdoor wood boiler equaled that of 22 wood stoves, 205 oil furnaces or as many as 8,000 natural gas furnaces.

The last wood heating craze occurred in the 1970s and abated when energy prices plunged and stayed mired in a 20-year bear market. But this time natural gas may be heading for a permanent decline in North America, and many homeowners throughout the United States and Canada will be scrambling for a more affordable source of home heat.

by Kurt Cobb

For the next few months?

These stories crossed my desk today:

Japan’s Hunger Becomes a Dire Warning for Other Nations

Japan¹s acute butter shortage, which has confounded bakeries, restaurants
and now families across the country, is the latest unforeseen result of the
global agricultural commodities crisis.

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A 130% rise in the global cost of wheat in the past year, caused partly by surging demand from China and India and a huge injection of speculative funds into wheat futures, has forced the Government to hit flour millers with three rounds of stiff mark-ups. The latest - a 30% increase this month - has given rise to speculation that Japan, which relies on imports for 90% of its annual wheat consumption, is no longer on the brink of a food crisis, but has fallen off the cliff.

According to one government poll, 80% of Japanese are frightened about what the future holds for their food supply.

Last week, as the prices of wheat and barley continued their relentless climb, the Japanese Government discovered it had exhausted its ¥230 billion ($A2.37 billion) budget for the grains with two months remaining. It was forced to call on an emergency ¥55 billion reserve to ensure it could continue feeding the nation.

“This was the first time the Government has had to take such drastic action since the war,” said Akio Shibata, an expert on food imports, who warned the Agriculture Ministry two years ago that Japan would have to cut back drastically on its sophisticated diet if it did not become more self-sufficient.

In the wake of the decision this week by Kazakhstan, the world’s fifth biggest wheat exporter, to join Russia, Ukraine and Argentina in stopping exports to satisfy domestic demand, the situation in Japan is expected to worsen.

Bakeries, forced to increase prices by up to 30% in the past year, are warning that the trend will continue. Manufacturers of miso, a culinary staple, are preparing to pass on the bump in costs caused by the rising price of soybeans and cooking oil. And the nation’s largest brewer, Kirin, is lifting beer prices for the first time in almost two decades to account for the soaring cost of barley.

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Japan could become an example to other rich nations that have relied too
much on foreign supplies

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these two articles also came in my mailbox today, quite related:

Relearning how to live as voluntary peasants

Written by John Siman
*****
I didn’t hear good things about The Farm when I was on my way to visit. I had participated in the Earth First! Rendezvous in the Appalachian Mountains. There I saw former mountains apocalyptically sliced down to nothing to yield up coal which will be called “clean” to perhaps be liquefied for toxic methanol — marketed as something disingenuous to shut Americans up about Peak Oil and Global Climate Chaos. The Farm was beckoning as a bastion of back-to-the-land activism in one of the mountain-top removal states.

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and this one from the Wall Street Journal–I’m including the whole thing because the WSJ is subscription access only (no I don’t have a subscription to the WSJ! Somebody was kind enough to send me the whole thing!)

Load Up the Pantry

By BRETT ARENDS

April 21, 2008 6:47 p.m.
THE JOURNAL ALSO SAYS THAT HIDING CASH IN YOUR MATTRESS (OR IN SOME OTHER SAFE PLACE) IS A GOOD IDEA. NOTICE THAT THEY ARE NOT SUGGESTING PUTTING IT IN A BANK. URL: http://online.wsj.com…

Write to Brett Arends at brett.arends@wsj.com