Patterns of land ownership in Ukraine and eastern-Europe

It turns out that my readers have a dizzying array of skills, experiences and knowledge. I reached out to one of my readers who I suspected had first-hand knowledge of eastern Europe and asked him if he could explain how all of these Ukrainian vloggers have enough property to "homestead".

His response: 

"I was over there in the 1980's, well before the socialist states collapsed.  From the Khrushchev era on, laws allowed most citizens throughout the East Bloc to have (control, not ownership) small 1 acre to 3 acre individual parcels outside of cities to grow food on.  This was allowed to alleviate food shortages, which were terrible.  Mostly due to sorry logistics throughout the Bloc, which allowed most food to rot before it made it to market.  They grew enough food, but they could not deliver it to consumers (prior to reforms).  Their grocery stores were obscene.  Cigarettes were their only quality product! 

The laws eventually allowed building garden sheds on these smallholdings, which quickly transformed into marvelous vacation cottages.  Like everything East Bloc, they looked ramshackle on the outside, but were splendid on the inside.  Smallholders were generally allowed to pass these holdings on to their heirs, but not divide them or sell them to unrelated parties.  After 1990, the individuals who occupied these smallholdings were allowed to take legal title under a variety of laws which differed by country and republic."

 

The 500 Day Programs

The privatization of the Soviet Union actually began under Gorbachev, before the 1991 coup which destroyed the Communist Party.  The '500 Days Program' was laid out in April 1990 and set the ground rules for privatization of all assets in the Soviet Union.  It was the last gasp of the Soviet Communist Party to avoid the collapse of communist control which had occurred in the other Bloc countries.   All the former USSR republics' privatization efforts were based on the '500 Days Program'. (Note: Ukraine and most of the 'stans were republics in the former USSR) Other Warsaw Pact countries had different programs, because they had had well established private property laws and land titles prior to 1945.  The Russians did not even have intelligible private property law or titles prior to the Revolution.  Most land holdings were by order of the Czar, or simple adverse possession.  

Even today, roads in rural Ukraine are "rough".  Source

Outside of the cities, land has little value in Russia because there is so much of it.  Water, on the other hand, is quite valuable.

 

That explains the presence of all of the tiny, dug ponds scattered across the rural landscape. A pond is lower tech than a drilled well and a submersible pump. Source of image

Very large regions of Ukraine have annual precipitation of 20" or less

The '500 Days Program' was an excellent plan, but plagued by corruption.  The USSR and several Bloc countries had powerful criminal mafias which took control of their economies from the 1960's on.  This corruption was the only way Bloc citizens could get the necessities of life.  From this corruption rose oligarchs as communism collapse; oligarchs who hogged land and assets.   One reason Putin is very popular over there is his successful war on these mafias and oligarchs.  They are much more powerful today in Ukraine and the West than within Russia.

 

In many ways, the citizens of the former USSR were better prepared to endure the total collapse of their economy than we are...God forbid that it should happen. Even so:

 

The yellow highlighted region are the babies who would have been born during WWII.

The straight red lines are the babies who would have been born during the collapse of the USSR and in the chaotic decade afterward.

The region circled in blue are the "excess females". Men took the collapse with less grace than the women and there were many more deaths-of-despair (alcohol abuse, accidents, suicides...not going to the doctor).

 

My reader added in one of his emails that the Orthodox church was one of the few stable institutions and was a rock for many during those tumultuous years. It is pretty much a world-wide phenomena that women attend church at about 4X the rate of men.

 

Many thanks to my reader who wishes to remain anonymous. 

Targeting of infrastructure: Three days without water....

"Infrastructure" can mean a lot of things.

It can mean communication equipment and data-centers supporting banking and AI.

It can mean roads, rail and air-travel facilities.

It can mean oil refineries and electrical power generation plants. 

It can mean grain silos, flour-mills, bakeries and butcher shops.

It can mean hospitals and waste-water treatment plants. 

It can mean potable water conduits and desalination plants.

Destruction of some of these assets will cause little more than an inconvenience for the majority of people.

Others will cause a huge constriction in quality of life.

Still others will pose an immediate and dire threat to existing.

The Iranian Conflict proved to be a quick race to the bottom. It started with military targets but is now critical, civilian infrastructure is being targeted. You know, the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy. The first few verses in the Law of Threes.

Iran, it is claimed, is targeting the water desalination plants that sustain the mega-cities lining the Persian Gulf possible. Link

It is good to live in a place where it rains on a regular basis. 

Stabilizing the feet of step-ladders on muddy ground

It has been wet here in Eaton County.

We got 2 inches of rain in the last 48 hours and the weather-guessers assure us that we will be getting another inch in a couple more days.

Holes in the ground show the water-table is about 6" below the surface.

Pruning

Some of my pruning benefits from the use of a step ladder.

Since our local deer happily browse up to the 5'-6" or 6' line, the productive branches must be above that height even when carrying a full fruit load.

Since it is arduous to pick fruit that is higher than 10' above the ground, that results in all of the "interesting" pruning happening in that 6'-to-10' zone.

Sadly, I am a scant 5'-9" tall.

This time of year the challenge in pruning is finding ground that is firm enough to support the feet of the ladder, especially the skinny legs that stabilize the unit.

The side with the cross-pieces for the feet are much wider than the other side.

 

A leg on the stabilizing side. Taken from the same distance to give you a size comparison. When I am at the top of the ladder, most of my weight is supported by these skinny legs.

When one of the skinny legs starts to sink into the ground, the weight shifts in that direction and increases the load on that foot, further accelerating the rate of sinking. That is NOT a virtuous cycle!

Since Sunday is a day-of-rest, I cheated a little bit and did a tiny bit of carpentry.

My largest step-ladder is 24-1/4" wide on the side that stabilizes the unit.

I found a piece of 5/4" thick, 6" wide, treated, yellow-pine decking in my inventory and cut a 36" length. I added a length of 2X2 to provide a cleat to arrest the tendency of the feet to inch forward.

Why so long? Kalishnikov's Constant: Clearance is good. If 25" is good-enough when everything is perfect and 28" is good-enough when one thing goes wrong...why not aim for 6" of forgiveness on each side?

Yes, I know that I could have added side-cleats to trap the feet but then it becomes ladder-specific. This one is so simple that it will work for all of mys step-ladders. 

I climbed to the top of the ladder and wiggled a little bit. It felt really good. I should have done it years ago. It used scrap wood and took about 15 minutes.

 

Happy .308 day

Happy .308 Winchester (also known as 7.62x51mm NATO).

In a nod to everybody who is about to correct me in comments: There are different chamber and pressure specs for the two cartridges. One is a commercial cartridge that was introduced by Winchester and was "based" on the 7.62 NATO.

The NATO cartridge has a lower nominal pressure spec, perhaps to allow for the inevitable round being chambered in a very hot barrel and "cooking" for a while before being fired. The chambers are also more open so they can still function even when the outsides of the cartridge are dirty.

Today's .308 Winchester is the equivalent of Grandpa's 30-06

Today's .308 Winchester is the equivalent of Grandpa's 30-06. The original 150 grain load in the 30-06 generated 2700 fps. Today, handloaders regularly exceed 2900 fps with modern powders in the .308 Winchester.

The original 174 grain bullet generated 2600 fps in the 30-06 and modern powders can match that value in the .308.

Bullets are much better today, both in accuracy and in terminal performance. A 150 grain mono-metal bullet like a Barnes TTSX can easily out-penetrate the 180 grain cup-and-core bullets of the 1950s, break bones and it will still expand on a ribs-and-lung shot.

While it might not be the best choice for chasing wounded Brown Bears through the willow brush, the only North American mammal that it is inadequate for are Orcinus orca. That assumes that you are diligent enough to work for an ethical shot. Patient enough to pass up unethical shots. Are marksman enough to hit the target in a lethal area. And are intelligent enough to use ammo with a suitable projectile.

Senatorial candidate Talarico made a strategic error

Texas state Rep. James Talarico is the Democratic candidate for Senator for the Great State of Texas.

He made the statement "God is non-binary," which might be true in a narrow, mathematical sense since:

IF 

God > Man
God > Woman
God > Man + Woman

THEN

God cannot be (just) a man
God cannot be (just) a woman 
God does not fall into the narrow definitions of "Binary genders"

THEREFORE

God must be non-binary.

For the non-Christians

Traditional Christians believe that God revealed himself to us through three different faces or persona, the way a single, gifted actor might play three roles in a small theater production. One of those persona identifies as The Father. This persona is fully shared with the Jews. 

The Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) of the New Testament introduces and fully develops The Son and introduces The Holy Spirit. 

The books after the four Gospels goes a long way toward developing the character of The Holy Spirit.

One God. Presented as three different people (by God's choice) to make God's "face" more comprehensible to flawed and limited humans. This is vaguely like Star Trek splitting the complexity-of-command into Captain Kirk, Spock and Dr McCoy: Action, Intellect, Empathy.

However...

If you accept the Bible as the word of God, then God self-identifies in multiple verses as "Father" and "Son", both of which 100% and unambiguously identified as "male" at the time the Bible was recorded.

So Talarico, in an attempt to appease one constituency managed to offend Traditional Christians AND (if they bother to think about it) the "I am whatever I choose to identify as today" crowd.

I understand that many people today had horrible experiences with their father or their mother's boyfriends. They may have been raised by abusive, alcoholic, mentally-ill men...shortcomings which can also be shared by mothers.

I get that many people were raised in families without any "father figure".

But as some level, even they understand that when Satan is prowling around our campfire, we want Simba by our side, not the opportunistic and morally "flexible" Scar. 

Jung was onto something with his ideas about  archtypes. Archtypes might be hardwired into our brains at a DNA level. They run deeper and truer and more swiftly than intellectual parlor games.

Hot-box, germinating, callousing box update

The first flight of cuttings were moved out four days after "sticking" them.

I pulled one of the Crack Willow cuttings this morning and the bottom half-inch was swollen with callous and there were some bumps that looked like root-initials.

I placed the cell-pack into a tray which I placed on top of another warming mat which was, in turn, on top of a 1-1/2" slab of foam. Then I added water to the tray to soak the bottom 1/2" of the cells. Willows can stand a LOT of water.

After an hour, I took a temperature reading in our 58F degree basement and the top of the cells was only 64 degrees. Not good enough.

I found a clear plastic garbage bag and put it over the tops of the cuttings like a blanket. That should help hold in the heat and humidity.

The next "flight" of cuttings are elderberries.

I took elderberry extract when I had the flu and Mrs ERJ did not. I recovered more quickly. Maybe it helped. Maybe it didn't. Elderberries, like willow, can grow in very wet places and do not require hormones to root. I plan to leave them in the box for a week. 

Bonus video

This should have gone with the last post but I have many readers who don't go back.

 One of the vloggers in Ukraine fertilizing his field with manure. 20 minutes long. You can skip ahead to the 4:35 mark and not miss much.

My thoughts on fertilizer

Fertilizer can be broken down into the following parts:

• Nitrogen
• Phosphorous
• Potassium
• Calcium/Magnesium
• Trace or micronutrients
• Biologicals 

Commercial fertilizers in the US are required to list the Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium content. That is, the percent of elemental Nitrogen that is available to the plant (N2 the most common form of nitrogen is NOT available to plants). The percent Phosphorous-equivalent of the phosphate ion (H3PO4). The percent Potassium-equivalent of the potash ion (K2O). These are the Big Three of fertilizers.

Nitrogen: From the perspective of the suppliers, Nitrogen is primarily a way to turn "waste natural gas" into a salable commodity (rather than flaring it off) that is much easier to ship than compressed natural gas. It can either be turned into anhydrous ammonia which is a gas but liquifies at much lower pressures than methane. Or it can be turned into urea which is a solid. Or it can be turned into ammonium nitrate...which is very hard to purchase due to its potential as an explosive.

The United States has the capacity to make lots of "Nitrogen" fertilizers and every bushel of corn requires about one pound of Nitrogen.

Phosphorous: In North Africa, much of the natural gas is converted by way of several chemical steps into DAP, Diammonium phosphate. Morocco is the principal source of phosphorous in the world and Algeria has natural gas. DAP combines Nitrogen and Phosphorous. Shipments of DAP to Indian and China go through the Red Sea but not the Straights of Hormuz. Shipments of DAP to the US go through Straights of Gibraltar.

Potassium: Saskatchewan is notable not only for being harder to spell than Massachusetts but for have very large deposits of Potassium chloride that is economical to mine. Potassium chloride from Saskatchewan is shipped by rail to the US.

The amount of composted manure (upper-left corner of image) required to get 200 bushel/acre corn. Approximately 2-1/2 cubic yards for every 3000 square-feet or 30 cubic yards per acre

Key points: Phosphorous and Potassium are usually well retained by the soil. That is, it can be "banked". Failures due to decreasing soil levels of either of those two elements tends to be slow-motion reduction in yield. One exception to that generalization is if you seed alfalfa and have low potassium...that will be a hard-stop on establishing that crop.

Nitrogen is different. Nitrogen is highly mobile and doesn't "bank" outside of organic matter. If you stop adding Nitrogen to a corn field on a yearly basis, your next harvest will be reduced to 1/3 or 1/2 the first year and 1/3-to-1/4 thereafter. 

Cycling of nutrients

There was a time when most livestock was raised on-farm, very close to where the feed was grown. The manure and the nutrients in the manure, was returned to the fields from which those nutrients originated. Very little additional fertilizer was required to keep the farm productive because relatively small amounts were shipped off the farm.

Corn belt

That model did not scale well. Banks and economists like large farms where machines feed the animals. Grain is easier to mechanize than forage. 

Pig production

Chicken population distribution

 

Cattle per hundred acres

So you can see that the corn fed to hogs and cattle often turns into manure that falls to the ground far from where the nutrients were sucked out of the ground.

At this time, those orphaned nutrients are treated as pollution rather than as a resource. It is not economical, in most cases, to return them to the field they came from. 

This is not an issue of technology. It is an issue of economics: Cost of labor, cost of borrowed money, cost of fuel, cost of fertilizer, cost of building materials, cost of regulatory compliance (EPA).