The true cost of a lawn

The bottleneck in nitrogen fertilizer distribution due to the issues transiting the Straits of Hormuz is already impacting the Southern Hemisphere.

This video is by an agronomist in South Africa and he points out that farmers in South Africa were already side-lining marginal production areas BEFORE the Straits of Hormuz was closed. That was due to high input costs and low prices for what they produce.

Since then, the price of diesel and nitrogen based fertilizer doubled and increased their input costs by the equivalent of $1000 an acre.

Near the end of the video, the narrator shares that South Africa produces about half of the calories eaten by the 500,000,000 Africans who live south of the equator. 500,000,000 is more than the population of the European Union which is more than the population of the US.

Once those 500,000,000 people get hungry, they are NOT going to passively starve to death in their squalid huts. Nope. They are going to bee-line to the places where there is food and demand that they be fed.

The little boy who cried wolf

"Yeah, sure. We heard that story before".

"And besides, there is nothing I can do about it."

Maybe. Maybe not.

Lawns

Lawns as grown in North America are markers of wealth. HOA have rules about how they are cared for because...well...it signals that "our kind of people" live here and is good for resale prices.

A well cared for lawn consumes 4 pounds of nitrogen per 1000 square feet per year in the North and up to twice that for Bermuda grass in the South.

Admittedly, there is a lot of lawn that doesn't get any fertilizer at all.

So, the average nitrogen application might be 2 pounds per 1000 square feet nationwide.

First-order-approximation 

Since nature is very efficient and there is little waste, the fact that maize is about 8% protein (protein is 1/6th nitrogen by weight) means that one pound of corn (which will keep a human alive for a day in terms of calories) requires 0.0133 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer. In round numbers, that is the amount of fertilizer spread on about 6 square-feet of average lawn or 3 square-feet of HOA lawn over the course of the year (in the North).

Looking at a full year's worth of food, the fertilizer used on 1200 square-feet of HOA lawn will grow an incremental amount of corn (maize) that is enough to keep one person who is starving to death alive for a year.

Running the same math for rice the number becomes 1360 square-feet of HOA lawn. That is because rice has slightly more protein than corn.

For wheat the number is 1825 square-feet. 

The paradox

The paradox is that the resources will flow to the high-bidder. And if one HOA decides to reduce or forego nitrogen fertilizer then the HOA next door will use just that much more. Fertilizer is a fungible commodity.

So, unless there is a shift in societal norms and lush, dark-green lawns because a sign of shame ("You starved a baby"), then the needle will not move very much.

And even if the HOA Karens are unmoved by pictures of babies with distended bellies, they should consider the specter of 100,000,000 Africans who cannot speak English moving the the US and camping out on their HOA lawns and eating their pets. 

You can scream that I am a xenophobe because of that argument. Whatever. If appealing to the Karens self-interests increases food production in the Southern Hemisphere when appealing to their better human nature fails, then I will risk being called a xenophobe. 

Inch-by-inch, row-by-row...

 Visitors

Three feet from my house. Note the mange spots on this woodchuck's rump. I gave this animal a stern scolding and don't expect that she will return.

This fellow was attempting to have my ducks for dinner. The mesh panel you see is the door to their enclosure. A harshly-worded memo was composed and delivered at 1240fps.

 Plants are going into the ground

Next to Southern Belle's back porch. Lovage circled in red. Tagetes minuta circled in white. Peppermint circled in yellow. Being able to step out of your kitchen door and harvest fresh herbs is priceless.

I planted a tomato plant in her garden but then the farmer started spraying 2,4-D on the field next to her house. You win some and you lose some. I will wait a few days before I attempt a replant.

More plants

I put my tomato plants into the ground today. I am only planting 12 of them which is causing me some anxiety.

I also planted four grafted plums, seven seedling chestnuts, 50 peach pits and about 12 poplar cuttings (DN170).

The next 160 inches north/south by 24 feet east/west will be sowed with oats. That space is reserved for late cabbage plants. 

Tomatoes

Assorted trees

Broccoli

 

Another Dacha video

HERE

It is springtime and things are leafing out.

Nursery stock at the local flea-market.

One characteristic of Eastern Europe and Central America is that men with "skills" migrated to stronger economies and basic maintenance like tuck-pointing mortared joints is neglected back-home.

My expert in all-things Soviet pointed out that the white, unglazed, larger-than-standard-size brick is very unusual in former Eastern-Bloc states and that there is probably a story about how it ended up where it is.

Hop vines overwhelming the fence left-foreground. Beer brewers and drinkers? It is also worth pointing out the concrete utility poles on the right side of the frame.

Raised mound in the background behind the two women is a root-cellar.

They had a huge amount of die-back on their grape arbor. Perhaps they let it over-bear and in entered winter in a depleted state. Or maybe they had a test winter.

Fish stocking After-action-Report

The trip to Grant, Michigan was uneventful.

The store is east of Grant, Michigan and is in the middle of a large expanse of muck fields. Growing and packing vegetables like celery and carrots is big business in Grant. 

I took Shotgun, my fishing buddy along.

We stayed off of the freeway except for a short stretch on US-131. I traveled through Charlotte, Woodbury, Ionia, Fenwick, Greenville, Ensley Center, Howard City, Amble, Lakeview, Six Lakes, Stanton and Sheridan, Michigan.

Shotgun rambled a great deal as a young man and gave me a running commentary on the fishing in the various lakes, streams and rivers as I drove past them.

He told a story from the dim, misty past of a troubled youth from Ensley Center who wanted to commit suicide (or so it is believed) but didn't have the courage to pull the trigger himself. So he prancing across a clearing in the woods on opening day of deer season wearing a tan coat and holding deer antlers above his head. And if his goal that day was to die, he was successful.

Large spoons were once the go-to for pike fishing. They trail a single, very large treble-hook.

I told a story of a coworker who lived near Edmore) who claimed that his brother fought in Vietnam and in one of the letters home he asked "Buckey" to buy up all of the large treble-hooks from the bait shops in Six Lakes, Edmore and Stanton and mail them to him. Buckey's brother supposedly claimed that "the gooks" shinnied up into trees near the base at night and sniped soldiers by day. The only effective way to combat them was to embed several very large treble-hooks into the trees' bark about 20' above the ground, (one hook buried in the bark the other two exposed and pointing downward)...which was about as high up as the "grunts" could reach with the pole they had jury-rigged for the task. Is the story true? Who knows, who cares. It was a story and telling stories passed the time.

The wild plums are still blooming in Montcalm County, Michigan. 

Anderson and Girls on M-66 has outstanding fruit-filled sugar cookies. They are basically sugar/butter cookies shaped like dumplings and filled with fruit preserves. Shotgun chose the black-raspberry filled ones and he gave me one to sample.

Farmers were irrigating around Howard City. I think they are still planting potatoes. It has been a dry May so far this year. 

Once we were at the target location, I changed into shorts. I waded out knee-deep into the water and released the fish. Upon being released, the fish vectored down to the bottom of the water column and then fanned out toward deeper, darker water. I think they were hungry. None of the fish went belly-up during our drive home. 

We released the fish from two different, shore-line locations.

It looks as if the bluegills are just starting to fan the beds they will use for spawning. 

I spent too many hours sitting on my butt and I ate WAY too much sugar yesterday. 

"Why not give them spoons?"

An incident which struck me at the time as quite amusing occurred not long since on North Broad street. A steam shovel at work had attracted a large number of spectators, including two Irishmen, who, judging by their appearance, were toilers temporarily out of employment.

As the big shovel at one lick scooped up a whole cartload of dirt and dumped it upon a gondola car, one of the Irishmen remarked: “What a shame, to think of them digging up dirt in that way!” “What do ye mane?” asked his companion. “Well,” said the other, “that machine is taking the bread out of the mouths of a hundred laborers who could do the work with their picks and shovels.” “Right you are, Barney,” said the other fellow.

Just then a man who had been looking on and who had overheard the conversation remarked: “See here, you fellows. If that digging would give work to a hundred men with shovels and picks, why not get a thousand men and give them teaspoons with which to dig up the dirt?” The Irishmen, to their credit, saw the force of the remark and the humor of the situation and joined heartily in the laugh that followed, and one of them added: “I guess you’re right, Captain. The scoop’s the thing after all.” —Philadelphia Public Ledger, 1901 

AI is credited with putting thousands of "information workers" out of their jobs. The wailing and gnashing-of-teeth is deafening.

One characteristic that makes those jobs vulnerable to AI is that what we now consider "knowledge work" is almost entirely visual in nature. The dominance of visual information is an artifact of the economics of printing (cheap ink on cheap paper or even cheaper pixels illuminated or not illuminated). The recursive nature of the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next repeatedly discounted what was not visual and repeatedly placed a premium on what was visual.

Over time, knowledge or information that didn't conveniently compress down to static, 2-dimensional visual reproduction became (almost) extinct. Our entire worth has been reduced to our ability to take standardized tests with multiple choices and "completely filling out the correct circle with a #2 pencil"*.

I submit that any information that could not be easily rendered as a two-dimensional visual was dismissed as "not knowledge". This continues to be reinforced by the elites who attained their power, at least in part, by their ability to prove mastery of 2-D, visual information. 

If your job is involves processing "visual" (or audio) data and sorting through a finite number of predetermined outcomes, then your extremely vulnerable to being replaced by AI. If you are a bureaucrat whose prime "deliverable" is to approve or reject requests (permits) or to push information at bored students, then you should be upgrading your skills because you are about to be replaced.

Not all knowledge is like that

I recall walking through a factory and unexpectedly feeling warmth on my right cheek. I stopped walking and held my hands up and found the specific power transfer panel that was radiating the heat. I then called an electrician on my walkie-talkie and he was able to fix the issue during the next production break.

A good auto mechanic can tell if you have a coolant leak or if your vehicle is overheating just by the way your vehicle smells.

In another case an engineer who was reviewing a crashed vehicle saw bolt threads impressed into steel chassis parts. That was enough to start an investigation into the repair history of the vehicle and the cause of the crash was ascertained to be an improperly executed repair.

I know that a couple of my readers are/were "welding engineers". They are always looking at the weld caps for signs of hard-water deposits, a sign of poor cooling. They look for wear on the paint of robots which can be a sign or robot dress rubbing against them. They look for heat-marks on the work-piece that can be a sign of unplanned current paths shunting heat away from the weld.

The point is that curious humans have the ability to incorporate unexpected information and entertain answers that are not pre-programmed. That is why people get frustrated with automated customer service phone lines. Either their problem is not pre-programmed or the path to the problem is sign-posted in jargon that is not meaningful to the customer.

Today's work-ticket

Collect 100 Channel Catfish and stock them in a pond. I will be spending a bunch of time in a vehicle today.

Quicksilver Musical Moment

Power in the Blood (requested by Quicksilver's mother). Apparently, Quicksilver likes to sing along with this song.

*OK, I realize that standardized tests are not done on the computer and many of them are interactive in the sense that the number of questions depend on where you fall in the bell-curve. If you are in the tails of the curve then you get relatively few questions. If you are between 40th percentile and 60th percentile you have to answer a LOT of questions to get the resolution needed for PASS/NOPASS decisions. 

My day in pictures

 

The main-season potatoes are starting to pop up.

Some of my grafts are showing signs of life.

Onion plants rescued from a compost pile

"You know the worth of water when the well runs dry*". The wise man knows the worth of water without having to suffer the pain of a dry well.

New York City (and LA and Seattle and Portland) are about to learn the worth of businesses.

A sunrise as seen through persimmon (left), pear (center) and bamboo (right).

Seeds planted today:

• 30 Deadon cabbage
• 10 Typhoon cabbage
• 10 Megaton cabbage
• 7 Wilson Sweet watermelon
• Replanted 50 Red Mammoth Mangels
• 100 Japanese Water Iris (Iris ensata) 

*Turk's Tavern, Nunica, Michigan. That photo was taken yesterday.

Playing with ideas

I am just playing with ideas, here.

The Progressives are against requiring picture ID to vote. They claim that it will make it impossible for many voters to successfully cast their ballot.

The Progressives claim they want fair, high-integrity elections. They claim that they want to make it very easy to vote.

So...how about biometric identification as an optional, alternative method? That is used in the Plasma Donor industry to prevent donors from donating dangerously large amounts of plasma by visiting multiple collection sites and thereby endangering their health.

If Sum Dood doesn't have an ID, he can just have his biometric data taken and used for ID.

The only issue I can see is that if somebody accidentally voted twice in different precincts there would be actionable evidence of the crime. But that shouldn't be a problem for the Progressives, right? THey say they want high-integrity elections.

Acorns and daffodils

 

Acorns in the bottom of the bucket. Those roots complicate planting them.

These are blooming in some of the local roadside ditches.

Like many white flowers, they are fragrant in a heavy, sweet way. These flowers smell like Brassavola nodosa orchids

This flower matches Narcissus poeticus. It is reputed to be one of the few daffodils that tolerates wet locations. Like all daffodils, it is fairly deer resistant.

Today's work-ticket

Today's work-ticket is to go to the west side of the state and to clean-up the grave-sites of my paternal grandfather (who died in 1936) and my paternal grandmother (1996). Then we will visit a second, more rural cemetery where many other ancestors on that side of the family are buried.

We will eat lunch at a tavern that was started in 1933 and I will eat too much.

The venture (the trip, not just the visit at the tavern) will be an all-day affair. 

Quicksilver's musical moment