Grab-bag

Nitrogen fertilizer restrictions

First, let me start off by saying that there are probably people who work with you and who attend your church and who claim the same political affiliations who do not have your best interests at heart.

It is easy to see when the other side gas-lights us. It is a thousand times more difficult when people we assume are part of our "tribe" are doing the same.

So when pundits and experts go hyperbolic with outrage about nitrogen fertilizer restrictions I do not automatically hop aboard that bus. I ask myself, who benefits?

Indeed, who benefits and whose ox will be gored?

Primarily, the highly capitalized, industrial agriculture community benefits from the current arrangement and are likely to be gouged by the rational responses to restricted access to nitrogen rich fertilizers.

First let me state a fundamental principle: matter is neither created or destroyed in the normal course of events. The nitrogen fertilizer that comes from a catalyst filled tower in Louisiana and is applied to a field in Iowa turns to protein in corn. The corn is shipped to Denmark or Poland or North Carolina or Oklahoma and is fed to livestock. Most of the protein passes through the animal's digestive system and ends up in the bottom of the cage or feed-lot.

The system where grain is grown in one place in massive quantities and then shipped to other places to be fed to animals which are then shipped to a third location to be slaughtered and processed is very capital intensive. It also ends up in a massive dislocation of plant nutrients. Those lagoons filled with shit are vulnerable to overflowing or the dams bursting and the release of nutrients with the attendant kill of fish.

This was not always the case. At one time, the corn that was fed to the calf or pig or chicken was grown within a mile of the animal. Sometimes the animal was raised on pasture and the supplement was fed to the animal on that pasture or the animal was turned out on a picked corn field to scavenge corn missed by the picker. The pasture was plowed and planted after a few years and the nutrients that had been collecting there ended up back in the corn.

Then the animal made a short trip to a local slaughter-house and was turned into meat.

Under that system most of the nitrogen cycles on a tight loop with little slipping away. THAT system really does not need a great deal of additional nitrogen injected into the system because very little nitrogen (protein) is shipped off the farm each year. A 1500 pound steer might have 300 pounds of protein in its body or about 45 pounds of nitrogen. Compare that to 250 bushels of corn per acre which ships 250 pounds of nitrogen off-the-farm.

So the rational response would require a decentralization of where animals are raised and (likely) where they are slaughtered. That reduces market concentration which dilutes producers ability to command prices in the marketplace. It also reduces the overwhelming advantage the current system offers to producers with easy access to capital.

I am NOT saying that I like government mandates. I am saying that there are rational responses to the mandates and it might actually increase employment opportunities through large swaths of "fly-over" country.

Trailman apple-crab

The Trailman apple-crab are ripe. Apple-crabs are bigger than crabapples but smaller than domestic apples. Roughly speaking, they are between 1.5" and 2.25" in diameter.

It is a small, easy-to-eat morsel that is most notable for the tree having withstood -65 F in "the flats" of Fairbanks, Alaska. It is also fairly resistant to fire-blight.

The deer certainly like this little treat. They have beaten the grass beneath this tree flat.

Laundry detergent

I see there are some laundry detergents that only require a half-ounce per load. My opinion of most liquid detergents are on-par with body-wash that comes in bottles. Consumers are paying extra for water and thickeners.

Another pet-peeve are the drier sheets that reduce static and make clothes smell nice. They contain a wax that clogs the screen of our drier. That is not helpful.

Comments

After I deleted a boat-load of comments in the SPAM folder I belatedly noticed that many of the comments in the SPAM folder were legitimate comments.

I screwed up.

I will review the SPAM folder on a regular basis. If your comments did not appear, it was the Blogger spam algorithm and not me that censured your comment.

Again, I apologize.