War Horse and Agriculture

Just saw the movie War Horse, a very pretty film.  But Steven Spielberg is no farm boy. The first third of the movie is pre-war, when the thoroughbred Joey, the War Horse to-be, is trained both as a riding horse and a plow horse. In order to pay the rent, the father has promised the landlord to plant a field to turnips. Supposedly the field  is both virgin and stony, impossible to plow. Sure enough, it's on the side of a hill and the ground is strewn with stones (though it's not clear whether they're weathered from the bed rock, which in Devon would be sedimentary, or glacial, rounded by water). 

For dramatic purposes I can understand the decision to plow uphill, it makes the task for Joey more imposing, though it makes no sense from an erosion standpoint. When you see the first furrow plowed, and all subsequent furrows, somehow there's no stones in the soil, just good black soil.

Once the field is plowed, the father, limping from a war wound, starts sowing seed by hand. broadcasting across the furrows (no harrowing recorded). I could almost swear it was oats in the container, but I can't swear to it.  Now, through the miracle of Hollywood, all that broadcast seed turned several weeks later into neat rows! of turnips.  Unfortunately there's a big storm which somehow seems to uproot all the turnips, ruining the crop and creating another crisis for the family to face. I suppose the torrents could have eroded the dirt between the rows, but that didn't seem to be what happened.

I could go on to criticize the placement of the machine guns, but I won't.

It's a must see, if only for Emily Watson, who's always great.

Learning Self-Reliance in Scotland

The Stonehead and wife believe in self-reliance, so their sons learn cooking early.

Agriculture Is Solar-Powered

I have posted on hydroponic lettuce growing.  If you believe the advocates of organic agriculture, commercial agriculture is essentially hydroponic, in that the soil is exhausted so the plants are growing using the nutrients supplied by chemical fertilizers.  That's an exaggeration, but there's a bit of truth in it. That bit of truth means the salient fact about commercial agriculture is: it's solar-powered.

I wonder if anyone has done the calculation of the energy required to grow the crops we raise in the U.S.?  If they have, then you could do a graphic showing the sources of all the energy required to maintain our economy, presumably with solar power being a significant contributor.

Being optimistic about the power of search engines, I tried to answer the question in the previous paragraph, which didn't give an exact answer but did lead to an interesting Harpers article including this:

Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity's cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn.

The Done List, Not To-do

I've probably been doing to-do lists for 60 years, off and on.  I get a spasm of will-power, a resolve to do better than I've done in the past, a desire to be better organized: result, a to-do list.  I write this because today's paper included a discussion of a new app for maintaining a to-do list.  I used to be an early adopter, picking up new technology and new software, but no more. No iPhones or iPads for this geezer, no modern apps.

My obsolescence doesn't make a difference; my to-do lists in the past have always petered out very quickly, like water draining into the sand. The number of jobs on the list was always too long, the life of my resolve was too short, and the result was disillusionment.

Two weeks is no basis to judge, but I just may have found an approach which works better for me: the done list.  Unfortunately I can't remember where I saw this suggested, but it's definitely not my idea.  What I've done is forget the list of projects, it's not important, I know well enough the things I'd like to get done. The "done list" is simply a log of days and notifications of what I've done.  My willpower extends (so far) to spending a little time doing something each day.  By recording what I've done I get some reinforcement.  It's the same psychology as the advice manuals on how to write: they say write something each day, every day.

7 Feet Ain't What It Used To Be

Back in the days of my youth, long long ago, the 7-foot high jump was, I believe, a barrier.  It represented something like the 4 minute mile, the 16 foot pole vault, the 60 foot shot put.  Wikipedia confirms it was a barrier, which was broken in 1956.

But now it's not.  Reston's Rashaan Jones, a high school junior, cleared it this week in an invitational meet.  Congratulations to him.  From the blog post:

Jones is among only seven others in Virginia high school indoor track history to have ever successfully cleared seven feet.

Grand Promises

Secretary Vilsack said, according to the Des Moines Register: "

“We are updating our computer software, which dates from the 1980s, so that farmers will be able to do much of the application and paperwork from home rather than have to personally visit a USDA field office,” Vilsack said during a stopover in Des Moines on his return from Hawaii, where he had addressed the American Farm Bureau Federation."

 By chance this came just as I was reading Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow", and had reached the point where he recounts a story that's appropos.  Seems he was on a task force to come up with a textbook in Israel.  They'd been working for a while (maybe a year, don't have the book handy), had an outline and a couple chapters drafted.  So they were planning on when they'd finish, which they thought would be 2-2 1/2 years.  Then Kahneman asked a task force member about his experience and knowledge of other similar efforts.  The person asked, who had been in full agreement with the 2 year estimate, said that 40 percent of such efforts had never produced anything, that the rest had taken 7 years to accomplish the result, and that the task force in question was below average (in resources, etc.) compared to the other task forces he knew of.  

I.e., bottomline, the task force was not going to achieve its goal timely, and likely wouldn't do it at all. 

The members of the task force gulped, and proceeded to ignore the information.  The textbook was actually delivered in 8 years, and was never used.

Two points Kahneman made: when the meeting took place, the members were near the peak of their commitment to the effort, and had just tackled some of the big, easy pieces, so they underestimated the drain on the effort from lessening commitment and grim reality.

Ambivalence About Farming

I wonder if there's any occupation/profession where there's no ambivalence.  I felt a little ambivalence when I left the farm. And Bob at Pasture Raised... expresses his ambivalence in his most recent post (after a long absence). There might be more ambivalence among those who didn't grow up on a farm, but came to it later in life, perhaps with some rose-colored glasses.

Immigration and False Facts in NYTimes

The NY Times has an interesting op-ed article by a professor Dowell Myers, of SoCal, arguing that the immigration problem is over, because birth rates have fallen drastically, so our policies need to change.   I'd like to believe him.  Unfortunately, his facts are wrong, at least one of them:

Indeed, with millions of people retiring every week [emphasis added], America’s immigrants and their children are crucial to future economic growth: economists forecast labor-force growth to drop below 1 percent later this decade because of retiring baby boomers.

 If we have 2 million people retiring each week for 50 weeks, that's 1/3 of the nation retiring in a year. How easy it is to destroy one's credibility.

Surprising Energy Fact--Gas Prices

From the Des Moines Register, in an article discussing the adverse impact of lower natural gas prices on renewable energy:

"Natural gas prices have dipped  from $11.50 per thousand cubic feet in mid-2008 to $2.77 per thousand cubic feet this week on the Chicago Board of Trade."

Lettuce Talk of Locavores

Post has an article on locally-grown lettuce which I find interesting, mostly because it includes some statistics.

The outfit produces 4,000 heads of leaf lettuce a week, every week, apparently immune to weather variations.  There may be additional outputs; it's not particularly clear. 

The lettuce in grown in 2 fancy-smancy greenhouses, very high tech with computers and stuff, which cover 12,000 square feet, which is a tad over .25 acre.  They're planning to add another greenhouse, some 20,000 square feet, which would bring them up to .75 acre.  Although they're greenhouses, consider this quote:

A computer regulates everything: the 43 high-pressure sodium lights and heater that maintain summerlike light and temperature; the shade cloths that come down at night or when it’s too sunny outside; the pH, nutrient balance and flow of the water and the water system; and carbon dioxide emitted into the air to boost growth.

 They have 12 part-time employees (retirees and housewives paid over minimum wage, plus 3 relatives of the owner-manager.

The lettuce with roots still attached sells in a clamshell for $5 a pop!!! (I'd assume they're selling to K street lobbyists, not to poor underpaid Feds.)  Not clear how much the grower gets. 


So, if we assume 5,000 a week for 50 weeks, that is 250,000.  Assume $2 to grower is $500,00; assume $4 and it's a million.  Assume the equivalent of 6 full-time employees paid $30,000 each is $180,000, leaving $320,00 for operating expenses and profit, or more.

If a population of 1 million uses a head per person per week, then it would take 200 such operations to supply, or 50 acres. So rooftop gardens could indeed supply greens for the city, assuming the residents were very well-paid.