Food – “There’s Just No Cushion”
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Rapidly rising gasoline prices and food prices are creating crises already, and we Westerners are only at the beginning of this expensive new world.
International Herald Tribune: Last winter, as the full scope of the global food crisis became clear, commodity prices doubled or tripled, provoking grumbling in America, riots in two dozen countries and the specter of greatly increased malnutrition.
As the world clamors for more corn, wheat, soybeans and rice, farmers are trying to meet the challenge. Millions of acres are coming back into production in Europe. In Asia, planting two or three crops in a single year is becoming more common.
American farmers are planting 324 million acres this year, up 4 million acres from 2007. Too much of the best land is waterlogged, however. Indiana and Illinois have been the worst hit, although Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota were inundated last weekend.
[...]
“United States soybean plantings are running 16 percent behind last year. Rice is tardy in Arkansas, which produces nearly half the country’s crop. “We’re certainly not going to have as good a crop as we had hoped,” said Harvey Howington of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association. “I don’t think this is good news for anybody.”Harvests ebb and flow, of course. But with supplies of most of the key commodities at their lowest levels in decades, there is little room for error this year. American farmers are among the world’s top producers, supplying 60 percent of the corn that moves across international borders in a typical year, as well as a third of the soybeans, a quarter of the wheat and a tenth of the rice.
“If we have bad crops, it’s going to be a wild ride,” said the Agriculture Department’s chief economist, Joseph Glauber. “There’s just no cushion.”
7 Comments
June 10th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
People might want to consider turning some of their lawn into a garden. It’s incredible what a few square yards can put out. Every little bit helps.
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June 10th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
What are you growing, Anna? I’m confined to a few herbs and chiles.
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June 11th, 2008 at 11:48 am
As I noted in a blog post last October http://bothwellsblog.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/hunger-right-around-the-bend/
food security in the U.S. is a pleasant illusion.
Most urgent of all, we no longer have the grain storage system that existed up into the 1980s. We are living farm-to-mouth.
The easiest staple crop to grow, store and use at home is potatoes. (Wheat yields more nutrition per acre, but requires processing equipment.) Shell beans are another easy one to grow, and they can be easily dried and stored. Bush varieties are best, since you don’t need to build supports for vines. Greens are easy, but are for current consumption only. Still, with beans, potatoes and greens, you have a healthy basic diet.
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June 11th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Oh, and a plug for my new book is probably warranted. It will be in book stores in a few weeks.
Garden My Heart: Organic strategies for backyard sustainability, Brave Ulysses Books, 2008.
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June 11th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
As uninsured Americans in the midst of a health crisis, sustainable gardening has become hugely important to my partner and I. We have the largest garden ever this year. Beans, potatoes and greens have always been staples and provided us with many meals. This year we are growing more potatoes than we can use so that we can contribute the excess to the food bank.
I would add corn to that list. I realize that most backyards aren’t big enough to grow much corn, but if you have the space it’s indispensable. It freezes beautifully and we still have a few bags left after eating it all winter. The same is true for bell peppers. I chop and freeze a shitload of peppers. We’ve also added onion and garlic. The garlic went in last fall and seems to be doing pretty well. We’ll see. Tomatoes are problematic with the blight, but we usually manage to freeze quite a bit of diced tomato and various sauces for quickie meals.
This year we’ve added two beehives to our garden which will not only provide honey, but will hopefully help with our crop yield as well.
Thank you for the heads up on your book Cecil. It sounds like a good investment.
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June 11th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Container gardening might be a good solution for folks who are cramped for space and don’t have much available land.
Here’s an Instructables page on how to build containers out of recycled wooden pallets.
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June 11th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Hey Gordon,
Right now I have blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, a cherry and two peach trees. last spring I only tilled about a quarter of the normal garden, and put in herbs, squash, brussel sprouts, and an eggplant that didn’t make it. I’m talking a very small row of each – for example, three summer squash plants. I had squash up the yin-yang! I couldn’t eat and give it away fast enough. And I had so many brussel sprouts – these are great stir-fried in sesame oil. I wish I had thought to stagger the crops more, so they all wouldn’t be maturing at once. What floored me was that the area I had planted was quite small, and it produced that much. I’m a little behind this year, but plan on planting double the space – only this time, staggering the plantings. I have some heirloom seeds for some very old varieties that I’m starting also. I think open-pollinated plants are the way to go, so we can use the seeds from our crops.
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