Needlenose

Depleted versus rich topsoil

There have been a series of interesting articles recently regarding the future of agriculture, and it’s not what you’d think.  In fact some future trends seem rather ancient.

First let’s start with the key problem.  Today’s methods, let’s call them 2.0, aren’t sustainable.  Current methods cause major erosion and lead to loss of topsoil and exhaustion of the land.  And topsoil recovery is a slow process, growing maybe as fast as 3cm/year in wet conditions and significantly more slowly in arid conditions.

Key nutrients are lost as well due to our ‘flooding’ irrigation techniques combined with radically modified urban and suburban land use that speeds runoff water along with key nutrients towards the ocean, rather than capturing them on land.  One such ingredient is phosphorus.  Worried about ‘peak oil?”  Well you can live without oil, but the food we eat needs phosphorus, and scientists are already talking about hitting peak phosphorus in 25-75 years unless we take steps to recapture it.

Potassium, another key ingredient, is a bit more plentiful but current irrigation practices leach that from soil as well.  Ironically land’s loss is the ocean’s loss as well, as injecting large amounts of these plant nutrients leads to fish-killing algal blooms – in large amounts these are awful pollutants.

So where does agriculture need to go?  Back to the Future.  One interesting trend is ‘no-till’ agriculture.  Before there was tilling, our distant proto-urban ancestors used a pointed stick to dig a hole in the ground to plant a seed.  The benefit here is that if you don’t breakup the sod, you don’t get erosion and you don’t lose most of your key nutrients to runoff.  Read the linked article, there is a bit more tech (and less effort) involved in today’s no-till than poking holes in the ground with a pointy-stick.

The other trend, while also ‘old school’ requires a bit more high tech to achieve reasonably high yields – moving towards perennial crops and away from annual crops.  Most of our current foodstuffs are annuals as is all our cereals.  However, some cereals have perennial variants that scientists are breeding or tinkering with (thus the high tech), to bring yields up to levels closer to annual crops.

This is a complementary trend to the no-till as growing a perennial is essentially a no-till operation.  It has the added benefit though of enhancing soil nutrients throw nitrogen-fixing and further stabilizing the topsoil through complicated root structures.

You know as a kid I believed the sci-fi depictions of us eating goo from tubes and robots tending hydroponic farms, but with peak oil, peak phosphorus and all the other problems that agriculture and industry 2.0 have left us with, I’m figuring the farms of the future would be far more familiar to a time-traveling denizen of Çatal Höyük than a U.S. farm from the 1960s.

Juan Cole discusses some of the fall-out from the latest blast in Mess-o-potamia.  Given that the blast wounded some members of the Iraqi parliament, Hadi al-Ameri, a member of parliament rightly asks:

“We’ve heard a lot of brouhaha about successes on the security front,” he said. “Where are these successes?”

Good question.  Seems like things are heading South again, with increasingly brazen attacks reminiscent of the Groundhog Days of ’04 and ’05.

In the same post, Juan Cole discusses how affairs between the Kurds and the rest of Iraq are heating up around the flashpoint Kirkuk.  Those of you who aren’t afflicted with American Amnesia might remember how we called Kirkuk out as a flashpoint way back when, and how the Kurds have been continuously working to reclaim demographics and control on the ground in this oil-rich city.

I guess with Obama shifting his focus on our other failing occupation, and with our gradual troop removal the Petreus plan to stabilize the Iraqi Civil War is slowly and painfully coming off, like a band-aid on a hairy leg.

Mythbusters use golfball effect to boost fuel efficiency

Every time Congress considers boosting vehicle fuel efficiency via CAFE standards, the auto industry lobbyists descend on the Capitol to bleat about how higher mileage targets will bankrupt the industry.

I was watching a recent episode of Mythbusters where they ‘dimpled’ a car to see if the dimples would improve the laminar flow and reduce drag like they do on a golfball.

In spite of adding 800 lbs to the weight of the pictured sedan (car was coated in clay rather than denting the metal to get dimples), they were able to increase cruising fuel efficiency 11% !!  Could you imagine what the auto industry could achieve by throwing some skilled engineers and designers on this?   Hell, if they’d just produce cars with an actual streamlined design (rather than what people think is streamlined), they’d greatly increase fuel efficiency.

Scientists are beginning to suspect that world reptile populations could be as threatened as those of amphibians - uncertainty due to lack of tracking.  Of course it is bad, with all orders disappearing across the board.  And the news comes with the inevitable tag line:

“…extinction rates of animal species are much higher than had been predicted only a few years ago.”

President Obama and Iraqi president Nouri al-Maliki at the White House yesterday (via the Associated Press).

It’s becoming obvious now that the protracted drama of the Senate Finance Committee, long feared to be the beginning of the end for meaningful healthcare reform, really was just the end of the beginning.  Now that a version of the bill has been pried loose from Sen. “Max Tax” Baucus and his committee, the real negotiations — and posturing — have started.

That’s why Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh are making noises about not ruling out a filibuster — but hey, they can be bribed persuaded not to join one, too!– and why Jay Rockefeller and Chuck Schumer (and Nancy Pelosi, on the House side) are applying pressure in the media for a robust public option.  Everyone’s jockeying for position.

Jon Walker’s post at FDL Action today sums up the state of play nicely with a quote from Tom Harkin:

There are 52 solid Democrats for a public option and only about five Democrats really kind of opposed to it…. One has to ask if the 52 should give into the five or if the five should come on board with the vast majority.

And you know what?  That’s how everyone knew (or should have known) this was going to wind up back in January — with a handful of faux-centrist Senators threatening to sabotage a Democratic president for at least the third straight time, and everyone else wondering how to get around that obstacle.

But this also means that of all people, Barack Obama should have a plan for how to deal with this situation.  I’ve been more naive optimistic than many progressive bloggers, holding out hope that Obama really does want a public option in the final healthcare bill — not out of his innate progressive nature or the goodness of his heart (always a bad bet when it comes to politicians), but due to his own stated recognition that whatever passes needs to work, or he’s going to pay the political price for the resulting fiasco just as surely as if the bill had been defeated.

That’s why I’m not surprised to read that Harry Reid is reportedly working behind the scenes “for the best possible public option coming out of conference” (though those last four words are worth noting, and perhaps being alarmed over), or to see Nancy Pelosi’s forthright defense of a public option yesterday just before appearing with President Obama at two events in San Francisco (where his praise of her would seem odd if she’d just thrown his alleged secret desire to kill the public option under the bus).

But now’s the time for Obama to stop forcing us to imagine what his real intentions are. We all know how solicitous he’s been of Max Baucus’s endless delays and whatever whim Olympia Snowe chooses to express on any given day, and not openly pressuring Democratic senators who have spoken against a public option.  I’ve tried to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, figuring that he’s worked directly with these bozos colleagues in the Senate and knows what preening, obnoxious assholes they are how sensitive they are to being pressured.

At the end of the day, though, he’s got to persuade them to do the right thing.  And the end of the day is rapidly approaching.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

The Obama Honeymoon is over.  The Nobel Committee didn’t do him any favors by giving him a ‘Peace Prize’ for doing nothing other than not being Bush, because it reminded us that Obama hasn’t really done much of anything at all!  Seems to be the theme now on even Administration-friendly shows like The Daily Show and Rachel Maddow.

Seriously Mr. President, our party controls the White House, Congress, and the Repug party is in complete disarray.  The Wing-Nut Media and Repugs are sniping at each other.

What more do you fucking need to get off your ass?  It’s great that you aren’t Bush, don’t get me wrong, but the winning strategy here is a full frontal assault on all issues.  Don’t back off things because you are ‘too busy with Healthcare,’ now is the time to hit the Reactionaries with everything you’ve got, so they stay on the defensive.

And don’t put forth milquetoast proposals, go for Socialism, then let the Yellow Dogs whittle it back to something reasonable, rather than starting with reasonable and ending up with squat.

As things are going, I bet we’ll lose seats in Congress and who knows what might happen in the Senate?  Unless you take some action, you may end up like Carter – a guy who did more after he left his one term in office then he did during his term.  But at least you’ll get your Peace Prize in advance!

Malthus is alive and well and living in the 3rd World

The UN figures we’ll need to increase food production by 70% over the next 40 years to keep hundreds of millions from starving.  Looking at historical food production trends, it seems like cereal production has sort of kept pace with population growth (although seafood production has pretty much peaked if not actually declined a bit).  But historical trend analysis doesn’t take into account the projected negative impact of global warming on crop production.

Or more immediately, it doesn’t take into account the growing diversion of cereal crops into biofuels (a process actually subsidized by your tax dollars so you can pay more to fill both your tank and your tummy!), nor the challenges of worldwide water stress.

Until now the trends have supported the self-indulgent skeptics (those fortunate enough to live in the developed world at least) who have blithely scoffed the warnings of the food-security crowd.  However we’re looking at a ‘perfect storm’ of factors that will throw ever larger populations of folks in various regions into the food have-not category much earlier than that in the UN 40-year time frame.

*Update* Just to put this in perspective, UN says 1 in 6 people are facing famine today as developed countries both cut food aid and increase biofuel subsidies.

Conquistadors show Native Americans who is boss

Happy Indigenous Peoples Day:

Read historian Howard Zinn’s account of that genocidal, gold-crazed maniac Christopher Columbus, and it’s impossible to think this man deserves a holiday. Upon meeting the Indians, for example, his first thought was “They would make fine servants. … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

What he wanted was gold, and when none could be found he started wiping out the native people of the New World.

Well, it’s a start — U.S. troops may not be flowing steadily out of Iraq yet, but a lot of our stuff is. From the New York Times on Friday:

There is no more visible sign that America is putting the Iraq war behind it than the colossal operation to get its stuff out: 20,000 soldiers, nearly a sixth of the force here, assigned to a logistical effort aimed at dismantling some 300 bases and shipping out 1.5 million pieces of equipment, from tanks to coffee makers.

It is the largest movement of soldiers and matériel in more than four decades, the military said.

. . . just as the buildup in the Kuwaiti desert before the 2003 invasion made it plain that the United States was almost certain to go to war, the preparations for withdrawal just as clearly point to the end of the American military role here. Reversing the process, even if Iraq’s relative stability deteriorates into violence, becomes harder every day.

A lot of what the U.S. spent our money to build will be left behind:

Congress has limited the total value of equipment — like computers and furniture — that the military can leave to the Iraqis to roughly $15 million per base, but that amount does not include items considered part of the infrastructure, like buildings, sewerage and power facilities.

. . . Commanders say it is often simply more economical to turn over more equipment to the Iraqis because the cost of moving it is prohibitive. Last month, the military announced the end of its detention operations at Camp Bucca on the Kuwaiti border and said that $50 million worth of infrastructure and equipment would be given to the Iraqis.

But the sad truth is that not all of the items are coming home:

The military has largely identified which materials are not essential anymore and has begun to move them out of the country, in some cases to Afghanistan. For instance, lumber, ammunition and barriers used to defend against car bombs are all desperately needed in Afghanistan, and as bases are taken apart here, those are among the items sent to the fight there, commanders said.

Just goes to show that a Nobel Peace Prize winner’s work is never done, I guess. . . .

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)