Water... It's All Wet

天下莫柔弱於水。而攻堅強者、莫之能勝。以其無以易之

There is nothing softer and weaker than water,

And yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things.

For this reason there is no substitute for it.

--Lao Tse, Tao te Ching

Shortsightedness with respect to our place in the world seems to be the human condition, and there are sound evolutionary reasons for that.  We won’t go into the nuts-and-bolts of Myers-Briggs personality profiling, but just as a “fer instance” the ratio of those whose primary data processing mode is “sensing” rather than “intuitive” (that is, based on sensory perception, tactile solidity, and temporal contemporaneousness rather than on a holistic and fluid understanding of patterns and trends) is somewhere on the order of a 70/30 split by percentages.

Sensors, naturally, are more concerned with “how things are” whereas intuitives tend to focus on “what things are becoming”.  One of the nicknames for sensors is “guardians” which more or less explains why they are so well adapted for their evolutionary niche – humanity has clearly done well (in terms of evolutionary success) with a wide array of culturally oriented adaptations (see: all technology since the invention of the pointy stick)… but we remain physically vulnerable as individuals, and many of the changes we have foist upon ourselves have made us more vulnerable still (see: pollution, industrial accidents, snowboarding, etc.) 

In general, sensors tend to limit these dangers – for themselves and others – by enforcing conformity, norms, and other social and personal barriers to excessive changes.  And up until such time as the only agents of change capable of global harm came in the form of avoidable innovations, this was a useful (if frequently irritating, especially to visionaries in the arts and sciences) trait for the majority of humanity to display.  Nietzsche may have railed against conformity-masquerading-as-morality, but in general, it has been a good system.

Times they be a’changin’, though, and it is likely that the majority of humankind is (sadly) incapable of philosophically/emotionally/cognitively keeping pace.  “It takes all kinds,” the saying goes, but it unfortunately doesn’t tell us in what proportion each of those kinds ought to be served up.

Nowhere is this more evident than as relates to the problem of water scarcity, exacerbated as it is by the pressures of climate change, urbanization, pollution, expanding agribusiness, and at least a half dozen other factors we haven’t even yet gleamed.

The CEO of the Nestle Corporation recently made news for stating that “access toclean water is not a human right.”  We’ll pass over why he would even wade into such unfathomably muddy moral waters for now, at least as pertaining to the issues at hand in his case, but the why and wherefore of his attitude is fairly self-evident as it relates to human psychology.

Basically, he is refusing to allow the debate over whether access to clean water is a human right to be framed by those who argue that there are teleological (cause-and-effect reasoning) implications in a moral debate – essentially, he is arguing that the fact that something changes (as an intuitive knows is true of everything) should have no impact on what is “right” or “wrong” with respect to that thing. 

Water is scarce?  “Move.”  So say the innately deontologist (a priori moral framework) sensors, like our exemplary CEO (and like a great many people in business and accounting).  Even when a sensor has some compassion, however, their essential reasoning will be similar – and similarly flawed.  A sensor who believes that access to clean water is a human right will face difficulty in accepting the clear evidence that not everyone can have it.  “Human right” or not, there is quickly going to be a day when it will simply not be possible for everyone on planet Earth to have access to clean water.

And we are not psychologically equipped, as a species, to come to terms with what this is going to mean.

To see some of the psychological trauma involved in the evolution of the human relationship with water supplies, a denizen of the Brazos Valley need not travel far.  In fact, though residents of Bryan/College Station like to think of ourselves as “the” Brazos Valley, the name applies to a far larger group of communities, ranging as far north as the Texas panhandle and even into eastern New Mexico.  And many of the cities and townships which draw their water from the Brazos River (particularly those in the northernmost regions of the Brazos Valley)… are running short.  Their neighbors outside the Brazos watershed are faring even worse.

Wichita Falls, as an example, has recently begun not only recycling grey water, but has actually begun reuse of all treated wastewater.  Their potable water supply comes from a number of sources, but among them are waters which at one time were part of the so-called “black water”.  (You’re not really going to make us spell that out for you, are you?)

Now…. It’s perfectly safe insofar as it is chemically and biologically virtually identical to other West Texas tap water.  We’re not going to get into the tap water vs. distilled vs. filtered debate at present, we’re just pointing out that something most Americans think of as “icky” has become a part of daily life in one particularly conservative community.  Exactly the sort of community where you would least expect radical changes to every day life to be welcome, in fact.  But they have bent to necessity, and are now making full use of every form of water available to them.

What would happen, one might wonder, if even reusing toilet water did not provide enough potable water for the community’s needs…?  What if they simply ran out?  This is the case in more than one West Texas community, in fact.  And what those towns have done is to ship in water from other places.  If you were to search the world over, it would be difficult to come up with a better example of the concept of unsustainability.  Yet “just move” is not an answer that most of these people will apply to themselves.  That is what they might say to someone else, from somewhere else, because nothing like that happens here.

The answer most sensors have had to this crisis over the last 100 years (and yes, strange as it may seem, we have known for even longer than that about the idea that getting enough water might be a problem for people living in arid places like, say, most of the region of the United States between the Mississippi River and Seattle) has been to “drill a well”.  When asked where well water comes from, their answer would typically be “from the ground.”

This was, is, and ever will be, what those focused on global issues call a problem.

Groundwater does, in fact, come from the ground.  It typically comes from naturally occurring reservoirs called aquifers, where water has collected (usually over hundreds and thousands of years, though in the case of the largest – and most used by humans – these zones took millions of years to develop) and most of which provide forms of natural filtration that make aquifer water among the cleanest naturally available sources of water on the planet, behind only a handful of glacier-melt sources in purity and desirability.

The problem (and trust us, it is a huge problem) is that aquifers are a limited resource.  They for the most part do not recharge especially quickly, particularly when compared to the rate at which it is possible to pump water out of them.  The largest aquifer system in the United States from which water is pumped is the Ogallala Aquifer, which spans the plains from South Dakota down through Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and the headwaters of the Brazos River high

up on the Edwards Plateau in the Texas panhandle. 

The population dependent on the Ogallala for drinking water is not especially large by percentage – roughly 2 million people out of the 300+ million citizens of the United States – but that does not begin to tell the whole story.  See… about 27% of the irrigated land in the U.S. lies atop the Ogallala.  Just over 1/4^th of all agriculture in the United States is dependent upon well water from an aquifer which is shrinking, has been shrinking for a long time, and will continue to shrink until it disappears.

Since 1950, agricultural irrigation has reduced the saturated volume of the aquifer by 9%; to make matters worse, the rate of decline is accelerating.  Between 2001 and 2009 alone, the aquifer declined by 2%. 

The rate at which the aquifer recharges is exceptionally slow.  Scientists are extremely sure of their classification of most of the water being drawn by wells as paleowater.  That is, it is water which got into the aquifer no more recently than the end of the last ice age roughly 10,000 years ago, and most likely far earlier than that.

It is, in short, foolish to make any plans based on the availability of water in the Great Plains, which just so happens to be the region we also call the nation’s “bread basket”.  It’s not a question of if this system will collapse.  It’s a question of when.

So…

What’s the good news?

We like to present solutions where possible.  Leave ‘em laughing, it’s said, or when they leave, they’ll never come back.  Myrtle likes visitors, so we’ll do our best to not end on a glum note.

There are several strategies for dealing with water scarcity and the coming of “peak water” (a concept about which much needs to be said, though we’ll say it later).  Some are obvious, some a little less so, and all fit with our general philosophy which is smaller is better.

To start with, it should be obvious to everyone (though obviously for some, it’s going to take a little longer to catch up with this reality) that the old industrial agriculture paradigm is doomed.  Big agribusiness can’t last, and it won’t last.  GMOs (about which we have written before) are a dangerous nuisance, but they ultimately won’t succeed because they are the philosophical equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. 

GMOs are just the latest in a series of stratagems put forth by agribusiness to try to make farming profitable in environmental niches where large-scale farming is not even sustainable.  Like every other stratagem, modifying crops to use less water, or to be more pest resistant, ignores the reality that eventually there won’t just be less water in these places, there will be no water in these places.   So the “big” model is dead, it just doesn’t know it yet.

What replaces it?

The small model, of course!  Not merely in the Ogallala region, where it will be the only viable model, but also in the places currently feeding off the degradation of the Ogallala (that would be everywhere else in the U.S., including places not currently experiencing water stress).

When you stop to think about it, this will be a necessity-driven change, as well.  What happens when 27% of the agriculture sector simply vanishes?  People will still need to eat, right?  Who will feed them?  The only people equipped to do so.  Market farmers.  People who grow fruits and vegetables (and eggs, and frequently milk and dairy) in their backyards, in vacant lots near their homes, on their roofs, in their converted garages/greenhouses, etc.)

Ecological and environmental economists (and weird as it sounds, trust us, those are two separate groups altogether) agree on very little, but one thing they both agree on is the idea that feeding people in the future is a very complicated, difficult task.  They’ve got all kinds of numbers and graphs and pie charts explaining why.

They are all full of poppycock.

It’s not a complicated question at all; the model is simply wrong.  We have been searching for almost a decade now, and we have not seen any serious academic investigation on the root question of how much food can be supplied for the world’s needs on a subsistence-plus scale – that is, production by those whose only aim is to grow “enough for my family, plus a little extra”. 

Urban homesteaders are more than a novelty, now, though, and it is time for their methods and philosophy to get more attention.  There are some things that urban homesteaders do which directly impact water consumption – rainwater collection systems, for example, or the use of hydroponic growing systems – but there are others, most notably the raising of large quantities of produce on small plots of land, using less water than large producers use, that do not get enough attention.  It is our strong belief that the numbers (should they ever be taken) would support the idea that more people worldwide can be fed from smaller plots than from the large ones.

California...as is so often the case... is leading the way.  There is a state law there which subsidizes the use of vacant lots as urban farming land; essentially, a new form of homestead law that allows urban residents to make use of undeveloped urban spaces for market farming projects.  So far, San Francisco is the only place where the model is being actively used, but we envision success there quickly becoming the model for the rest of the state.  Once California has success with urban farming, we suspect it won’t take that long for the rest of the country to see a good thing and copy it.

When human beings have no other choice, we at Myrtle’s place are certain we (as a species) will eventually get around to seeing things from the intuitive point of view.  Long term, it is not only the only choice for survival, it is also (happily) the most sustainable choice, offering the greatest degree of personal happiness and satisfaction.  So… we guess the good news is, yes it’s going to get worse before it gets better… but it is going to get better.

Happy farming!

The Pray for Rain Brain Drain

Texas Governor Rick Perry believes we should pray for the end of the Drought of 2011.  We would say “Couldn’t hurt anything,” except that in order to get to his Day of Prayer event, the simpleminded, unscientific, superstitious fools who will be doing this praying will be driving predominantly low mpg pickup trucks and SUVs, so, in fact, in can and will do harm.
For the record, cause and effect are far too complicated a set of notions to say that our current drought is “caused by” global warming and anthropogenic climate change.  But get real; we all know it is consistent with global warming and anthropogenic climate change, and that increasing droughts of increasing severity are part of the forecast model.  A few short decades from now, a year with as much rain as we have had this year will not be described as “dry” but rather as “exceptionally wet.”

For a sense of perspective, we’ve lifted the attached pictures of the Aral Sea from Wikipedia – check there if you want to see licensing info, etc.  In 1989, two years before Mr. and Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance met each other, people living on the shores of the Aral Sea were, by and large, from small fishing villages, and were living much as their parents, their grand parents, and great-, great-grandparents had lived, in generations stretching back beyond the times of the Czars and the Khans and who knows what other unnamed rulers in prehistory.

Now?  Good luck finding any fish other than, perhaps, a few petrified examples in the dry, cracked salt flats which used to be deep under water.  The Aral Sea used to be slightly bigger than Lake Michigan – imagine, though, if Lake Michigan were to shrink by 90% in just 20 years.  Apart from the Port of Chicago being shut down, it is difficult to imagine the sea of troubles such a change would make; Illinois, though, would look less like the Midwest, and more like the Middle East.

It isn’t really all that difficult to conceptualize such a scale of change actually happening – probably not in the Great Lakes, at least not any time soon, but in a variety of other watersheds around the country, where self-inflicted stupidity has closed-minded political fools praying for deus ex machina.

Here in Texas, the northern half of the state is hydrated either directly or indirectly by pumping from the Ogallala Aquifer, which is being depleted at an unsustainable rate.  This underground water reserve stretches from the High Plains in Texas all the way up to the Dakotas.  The nation’s corn belt swells precisely because farmers take water that they cannot replace out of holes in the ground.  And the Ogallala Aquifer going dry is not a question of “if” but a question of “when”.

This is almost exactly the formula followed in Central Asia, where Russia and surrounding states took too much water from the Aral Sea over decades of exploitation in the name of economic growth, until the logic of hydrological extraction tipped towards desertification.

“But Myrtle,” you’re saying, “What choices do we have?  We have to feed people something, and they have to drink water from somewhere.”

Too true.  However, if you’ve been paying attention for any amount of time at all, you can probably already guess Myrtle’s answer.  Feed people from their own back yards, front yards, porches, kitchen windows, rooftops, etc.  And provide them water from their own cisterns – and while you’re at it, provide them the water which would otherwise have gone to grow your indefensible grass lawns, which (being the nice people you are) you dug up and replaced so very long ago with more sustainable and less water-insatiable edible landscaping.

Depending on where you live, the coming age of water scarcity will take varying spans of time to truly come home to roost, but rest assured, this is an issue which will ultimately affect everyone now drawing breath in one way or another.  Some areas will likely not see overall scarcity – New England, for example, is likely to be wetter, according to many climatologists, over the next century. 

However, changing global patterns will even affect those whose water supply is increased rather than decreased.  Why?  Changing sea levels will mean that water tables will see rising salinity boundaries – New York City is a good example of a community currently drawing water from wells which may not have more than 50 years at most of viability left in them (some estimates are much shorter and gloomier, depending on polar ice melting and sea level rise).

All of which means potable water will be the real gold standard of the coming century.  The ability to collect water from what rain does fall (when it finally falls!), and then make it as productive as possible while it is under our stewardship, will be the real test of character for our species as we head into the next phase of the anthropocene.

So Governor, pray if you’d like, but it’d be more productive if you’d grab a shovel and some PVC pipe.  Judging from your collected speeches, you’re pretty handy with a shovel.

Happy farming!

Grass: Illegalize it!

On a mid-morning jog this week, Mr. Myrtle Maintenance had to choke back his outrage, upon seeing a resident of Pebble Creek – the upper-middle class enclave of College Station – watering his pristine St. Augustine grass in the middle of the day.  Now, some of you might think it was the “middle of the day” part that inspired this ire, but you'd be wrong.  It was the St. Augustine part of the story that really wrankled.

The University of Montana did a survey of grass lawns a few years ago, and came to the conclusion that the only places in the United States where grass lawns may be grown in a sustainable fashion are the Great Plains and a few locations in New England.  Everywhere else, grass lawns must be coddled in decidedly non-sustainable ways, including excessive irrigation, and chemical amendments in the form of fertilizers and herbicides to control “weeds” (the term most lawn growers use to describe native grasses).

Without these non-sustainable amendments?  Nature takes over.

One has to wonder why the cultural norm is an acceptance of this battle against Mother Nature, particularly when we must surely recognize by now Mother Nature will win this fight.  The question is not whether we can maintain our green grass yards; the question is, will we be alive or not when Mother Nature wins and the native grasses take over.

We currently consume three times as much water in this nation on the maintenance of grass lawns than we do on irrigating corn, our number one food crop.  If that number does not astound you, you aren't thinking clearly; we are already facing water shortages in much of the country, and aquifers such as the Oglalla are most assuredly not going to last much longer.  The grand irony of this last Spring was the flooding seen in Memphis where the potable water supply is diminishing at a rapid rate – an all too real example of “water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.”

Lawns, let us be clear, are an avoidable evil.  They are morally wrong everywhere but the Great Plains and some parts of New England.

A tad strong a claim, you might be saying, but we insist it is true.  When there are hungry mouths in the world not being fed, and there is perfectly arable land being put to use for something as wasteful and environmentally damaging as a grass lawn, it is worse than neglect, it is spiteful and wasteful selfishness.

So what's the alternative, you might ask, astroturf?  Cement?  No, and no.  The alternative is a reasonable mix of whatever plants are native to your area, and whatever plants go well as companions in each of the many different microclimates in your yard.  Experiment a little.  Go nuts.  Just don't do any square or even remotely linear patterns; plant brambles of berries, bunches of shrubs, fruit trees scattered willy-nilly, and mix vegetable and herb beds in haphazardly, with sandy, wood-chippy, gravel, or flagstone paths in-between.  Your land can tell you best; you just have to listen to it, that's all.

One of the basic premises of permaculture as a design philosophy is that wherever possible, native and self-sustaining stands of groundcover ought to be encouraged.  In Texas, that includes a lot of possible grasses, most of which are considered “nuisance” grasses by the typical suburbanite.  Johnson Grass, in particular, is hated by the grass lawn crowd, but one has to wonder why.  It is really a relative of sorghum, and is about as drought-tolerant as grasses come.  The green in the few patches of lawn at Myrtle's place are almost entirely comprised of Johnson Grass, and if they have received any water at all when we have given moisture to our fruits and vegetables, it has been purely accidental, let us assure you.

More to the point, this grass might be unattractive as an intruder into a monocropped lawn, but it is highly attractive as a median plant in small patches between other groupings of plants.  In addition, it attracts pests which would otherwise be attacking our vegetables – why would we want to eradicate an effective trap crop?

The same logic that leads homeowners to attack native grasses causes many local hay farmers to curse the name 'dewberry'.  Wild blackberries, you see, are classified as 'invasive weeds' by most local farmers.  Is that not the heighth of lunacy?

Around our house, we encourage the blackberries to grow like weeds.  And they oblige us, let us assure you!  Before too many years are out, we expect that our entire perimeter will be a ring of what we think of as "yardberries".  If these be weeds, let us never hear of herbicides again.  "Weed berry cobbler" tastes better than anything they've ever served in a St. Augustine house.

We will undoubtedly expand on this premise in future musings, but for now, we must go weed out some of the neighbors' St. Augustine; it's encroaching on our wild Muscadine stands, and that cannot be allowed!!  Out, out, damned weeds!!

Happy farming!

Small Farm Good, Big Farm Bad (Have we mentioned this before...?)

Non-renewable resources are, by definition, irreplaceable.  Once you have used them, they are not renewed.  The logical conclusion, therefore, is that you should not use them, but should instead opt for other resources.

In some cases, such as with fossil fuels, this is self-evident, and the solutions, though taking some effort, are obvious.  We need to take advantage of natural processes which will last as long as the planet does -- put solar panels on every home in the country, for example, and set up wind turbines, geothermal heating and cooling systems, and so on, instead of relying on oil and coal, the supplies of which are finite.

However, there are some other non-renewable resources we don’t usually think about as being non-renewable, and the solution to their overuse is not so obvious.  The best example is groundwater.

Agricultural water usage accounts for 80% of the fresh water consumption in the United States; 60% of that consumption comes from groundwater sources, with the other 40% coming from well water pumped out of aquifers.  The Ogallala Aquifer, for instance, which supports a good portion of the central and southwestern U.S., is being depleted at an annual rate anywhere from 130-160% of the rate of replenishment, meaning only about 2/3rd of what is taken out in a given year is returned via rainfall.

As industrial agricultural production becomes more intense due to population concerns, there is little reason to believe this rate of depletion will do anything but increase.  The models are not clear on how much longer the Ogallala will be able to provide water, but obviously you cannot take out more than is put in indefinitely – at some point, it will be empty.  When it is empty, the environment in which it sits dry and idle has a name:  “desert”.  That is a dry and dusty sounding moniker to hang on the breadbasket of the country.

This raises a serious question:  what do you use instead of water to water your crops?  What renewable alternative is there?

Even in areas where the primary water source is not a limited resource such as an aquifer, water use – and increasingly, water reuse – is a life-or-death question, because degradation of our water supplies due to chemical leaching from pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer runoff, in addition to runoff from industrial sites, stormwater pollution from urban centers, and phosphate pollution from untreated greywater make what water is available less attractive as an agricultural resource.

The solution to these and other tricky problems lay in rephrasing the question. 

Rather than assuming we have to find ways to support the industrial agricultural model in a scenario in which resources are limited and collateral damage is unavoidable, a dramatic change in paradigm will make the whole class of worries disappear.  Rather than attempting large scale watering of industrial monoculture – ie, miles and miles of corn fields, wheat fields, etc. – we ought to decentralize, and instead focus on renewable and reusable water supplies for polycultural small plots. 

Places like small backyard gardens, for starters, are easier to supply with clean agricultural water.  But not just extensive backyard gardens – microfarms like Millican Farms, which require more water than does Myrtle’s place can almost as easily be watered in a renewable fashion.  It just takes a little planning and a little will and a lot of elbow grease.  At Millican Farms, they use a pond to irrigate greenhouses; the tomatoes are delicious, year round.

One of the chief criticisms of the permaculture movement and its related sustainable agriculture movements is that systems of no-till polyculture make industrial agricultural methods impossible and obviate mechanization.  We argue that this is not a weakness, but is, instead, one of the principle advantages of permaculture.  The chief disadvantage lay not in the inability of permaculture to generate yields sufficient to feed the world, but rather in the lack of will to provide consumers worldwide with the resources necessary to feed themselves.  Instead of using a tractor and a combine in Nebraska to feed a peasant in Thailand, why not use a shovel and a hoe in Thailand to help that peasant grow his own food?

The “Green Revolution” of the last half-century has, in fact, produced massive gains in crop yields, but far from eliminating starvation, as is often claimed as the brass ring to be grabbed by agritechnology, these incredible – one might even say ridiculous – increases in productivity as measured by quantity have been matched by stunning and monumental declines in quality, such that people whose primary problem used to be getting enough calories are now faced with an overabundance of empty calories.  By some estimates, the typical decline in nutritional value of produce over the last 50 years is on the order of 25-50 percent.

We are draining our water supplies in order to produce food no one should be forced to eat, and we are supporting a global economy in which people who should be given start-up loans to go to work are instead forced to sit idly accepting handouts of food whose quality could be surpassed by a hunter-gatherer’s diet.

Industrial agriculture is an evolutionary dead-end.

Small scale, local, organic production, on the other hand, produces crops generally acknowledged to be more flavorful, healthier, and easier on the environment.  And – more to the point – there is nowhere in the world where this type of production cannot be implemented.  There is no need for industrial agriculture; subsidized exports of wheat and other foodstuffs are an albatross around our necks, doing no good for the rest of the world, lining the pockets of a few corporate big wigs, and depleting our natural resources in the process.

The “starving peasants of Bangladesh” would be better served by the establishment of local cooperatives in Bengali communities, learning to grow sustainable crops there, than they are by the massive exploitation of lands in Kansas and Iowa to produce foods lacking the nutritional value of “home grown”, and contributing nothing to the Bengali economy.

Critics might argue that watering a hundred small farms would deplete just as much water as the process of watering one very large farm, but that is because the critics know nothing about the methods of permaculture, nor about the innovations inherent in small-scale sustainable production.  No-till practices by their very nature require heavy use of mulches which are almost always a form of “compost in place”, and which increase the moisture-retention abilities of topsoil by orders of magnitude.

Further, small-scale productions are much better adapted to water conservation methods like rainwater collection or greywater reclamation, and they have greater incentive to invest in these alternative procedures, given their relative size.

Then, too, small farms are more likely to practice polyculture, rather than monocropping.  As the coffee farmers of Central and South America have rediscovered in the last decade or so, “shade-grown” coffee, which is part of a multi-species ecosystem, rather than a single-crop field, requires far less water.  Yes, polyculture eliminates the ability to use mechanical harvesting methods, making it more labor intensive and therefore more expensive at market, but the reduction in water costs, fertilizer costs, pesticide and herbicide costs, transportation and fossil fuel costs, and improved quality and nutritional value and the associated reduction in future health care costs more than offset the labor costs. 

Ultimately, the accretion of risks involved in taking essentially natural processes and attempting to manufacture “improvements” is simply too great to bear.  The misuse of water resources by industrial agriculture is only one of its many malfeasances. 

Engineered solutions to biological problems are rife with unknown and unknowable risks.  The best possible example lay in supplemental nutrition for cattle – some time in the late 1970s, the practice of feeding meat and bone meal to cattle resulted in the evolution of a strain of protein molecules – not even an actual organism, just protein strands – into a prion capable of causing a new variant of Creutzfeld-Jakobs disease (nvCJD) known as Bovine Spongeiform Encephalopathy (BSE), aka “Mad Cow Disease”.

The assurances given to ranchers, and passed along to the general public, that bone meal was perfectly fine for cattle, were based on the best available scientific data, which was actually fairly considerable.  These were not careless scientists and bureaucrats who made the horribly tragic mistake of feeding animal products to herbivores – this was a well thought out plan, backed up by considerable data. 

It was also completely wrong.

This particular tragedy probably could not have been predicted; however, the fact of some sort of tragic consequences definitely could have been predicted.  A diet for a whole class of animals which evolved for very specific reasons cannot and could not be engineered, no matter how clever the researchers, to be so thoroughly and completely different from the diet naturally preferred by those animals without there being a swath of unforeseen consequences.

Feed lot biochemistry is just one area where we have been thumbing our noses at Mother Nature.  As Masanobu Fukuoka put it, “When we throw Mother Nature out the window, she comes back in the front door with a pitchfork.”  For many thousands of years now we have been planting fields with just one crop, depleting the nutrients in the soil and then moving on to new fields.  We have been taking water out of natural reservoirs, drying them up, and then moving on.  We have been burning down, bulldozing, turning under, planting something alien for a few years, and then moving on.

Maybe we shouldn’t keep moving on.  The original farmers were just tribes who found a place where what they wanted to eat seemed to be growing fairly well, and they stayed and protected those naturally occurring stands of wheat and figs, until they learned all they could about tending them and caring for them and propagating them.

We joke that we never want to move again – we want to be buried in the yard.  We haven't done the research, but if the product of the cremation process is at all compatible with the making of biochar, why the heck not?  We'll reside at Myrtle's forever.

Happy farming!

Distill or not Distill, That is the Question

And thou camest forth with thy rivers, and troubledst the waters with thy feet, and fouledst their rivers.   --Ezekiel 32:2

We wouldn't have brought it up, of course, if the answer was "Not distill".  But we have a history of taking a strong opinion on subjects where science has been woefully silent.  Best compost practices are our favorite example.

Distilled water is another.  There are all sorts of pseudo-scientific claims about "potential death" from drinking distilled water, much of it (like the linked article) based on fanciful thought experiments which, even if they were true, would be easily mitigated by simple precautions.  Take the "acidity" claim, for example.  Distilled water supposedly acidifies with contact with the air.  Okay, if that's true... then maybe I should keep my distilled water in a glass container?  Hmmm?  Anybody think of that?

The real problem, of course, is that nobody has studied it.

We have a lot of anecdotal evidence of medical professionals saying there are "trace elements in tap water that you need in order to be healthy."  Really?  Which ones?  Why aren't they in my food or air?  What's so special about tap water?

On the other hand, the very "acidity" claim linked above is based on one of the most fundamental characteristics of distilled water that make it so beneficial -- stuff breaks down easier in distilled water.  Do you have any idea how much extraneous crap gets into your body?  From "trace elements" in tap water, to heavy metals poisoning, even when regulations exist, it doesn't help.

So what are we supposed to do?  Sit passively and just accept?

No.  That's not the Myrtle way.

We don't have any studies to back us; as indicated, nobody is taking the question seriously enough to do good science on it.  All we have is anecdotal evidence:

• For 10 years, we were unable to get pregnant.  Six months after starting to distill our own water at home, and one month after giving up, we conceived our son.
• Both of us have been very overweight in spite of eating well and exercising.  A year and a half after starting to distill our own water at home, and making very few other changes, we have both lost considerable amounts of body fat.
• For 20 years, we have been fighting allergies; some of that time medicated, some of that time, not.  A year and a half after starting to distill our own water at home, we don't seem to have as many allergy related problems (though, to be far, pulling up the carpet the minute we moved into our new home certainly helped as well).
• The salt crystals formed at the bottom of each container we distill are significant; frequently, for 2 1/2 gallons, we get two tablespoonfuls of "trace elements".  How much is chlorine?  How much is "other"?  We don't know; we just know it makes a good replacement for Ajax.
  

How much of that is quantifiably related to drinking water?  Your guess is as good as ours.  Commercially distilling water and storing it in glass (not plastic!) is prohibitively costly, so no company is going to do it.  There is simply no profit motive in studying the proper preparation and storage of drinking water, so expecting our profit-oriented system of university research to come up with good data on this (and many other) essential health question is just whistling dixie.

You want real health-care reform?  Start thinking about these kinds of questions, and taking matters into your own hands.

Happy farming!