Noon report....
Now at 170000 acres burned. 21 confirmed dead, over 500 missing, and averaging <3% contained across 22 fires, many at 0% in populated areas. Calistoga and surrounding areas are now being evacuated with high winds (35mph with 50 mph gusts) expected.
This is far from over.

Rome is burning....where's Nero?

Yikes.
Another 1000+ acre deadly fire now between Ukiah and Willits, on top of the 15 just south of there. 101 closed.
Our local fire, Blue Lake, only got to 30 acres yesterday before containment thanks to tanker planes and helicopters.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by oritteropo.

I lived in EPA in the late 80's, and again in the early 90's. We heard gunfire nightly, but never had a serious problem.
We went to Mountain View from there. We paid $800 for a 2 bedroom apartment for years, then left in 96, ending up in far northern California where we could afford a decent house with 2/3 of an acre in a nice neighborhood.

My advice would be to buy what you can live with and afford, then sell and move out of the city when you retire and buy someplace cheap to live with the proceeds. You'll be way better off with that money still in your pocket rather than someone else's, and have far better options when you retire. Just my opinion, but it's working for me. Real estate has been the best investment I've ever made by far, infinitely better than the stock market has done for me (sadly I invested an inheritance in the stock market in early summer '08, and lost my shirt).

you mean like every model rocket that I ever built and almost always on the first launch to the only tree in the middle of a 40 acre field?

"They modeled all 1.25 million square miles of the Mississippi River and surrounding areas on more than 200 acres with the sole purpose of understanding how it would flood and which techniques worked best and how they affected things up/down river. Years earlier, they had anassed several failed large scale prevention/levee projects."

The way you wrote this---implies to me that they either misunderstood the model or the the model gave them flawed data. Or perhaps, that they got good data and ignored it (lol). I'm curious: which was it?

Good questions. My family operates farms for wheat and corn, and I've been involved in that process, so I can take a stab at answering the last bit:

Corn stalks get quite tall -- 6 feet / 2 meters or so. Each stalk usually has 1 or 2 ears of corn. On our farm, the experience I had suggests that each plant needs quite a lot of healthy leaves for Photosynthesis as well as quite a lot of available ground water. Irrigated corn often produces 2-3 times as many bushels per acre as compared to "dryland" / non-irrigated corn.

So the issues I can see potentially clashing between corn production and vertical farming are:

1) You'd have a greater space requirement for layers of corn since you'd need probably 8-10 feet per layer, as compared to what looks like 2-3 feet per layer for leafy vegetables in the video. Approximately one story per layer wouldn't allow for the massive footprint savings like in leafy plants without getting extremely tall, which would be expensive for water pumping etc.

2) Corn root systems are pretty deep to support a tall and relatively bulky stalk. Getting that to bite into a thin layer of fabric / recycled plastic to provide structural support for the plant would be difficult. I think you'd need to have a thicker bottom layer *and* to manually place further support lines on the stalks as the plants grow, which would get very labor intensive and therefore expensive.

3) The vertical nature of a corn stalk suggests that the overhead motion of the sun might be pretty important for getting light exposure onto all of the leaves. Fixed overhead lights might mean that the top leaves get plenty of light but the ones lower on the stalk would be shaded by those above and get nothing -- which isn't a problem if the sun progresses through low angles at sunrise/set to overhead at noon throughout a day. So you might have to have lighting that hits from all sides to account for that with corn, which would again add expense.

4) To maximize the output, corn needs a LOT of water. Pumping that up the vertical expanse to get lots of levels could easily get problematic. Corn will grow without optimal / abundant watering, and their misting system would likely be more efficient than irrigating to add ground water, but the main benefit of vertical farming seems to be high output in a small land footprint on the ground. So without LOTS of water, you'd be limiting that benefit.


So basically, my guess is that vertical farms are a fantastic idea for squat, spread out plants like lettuce, but a lot of the advantages disappear when you're talking about something tall like corn. I could easily be wrong about any/all of that though.

I think I see part of the problem. The other option you wondered at is you are comparing(literally) apples to grains.

If your lucky enough to live in a climate that can support orchards and vegetables that's an entirely different story. Grain farming is a different beast and you can't farm canola and wheat the same way you'd farm apples or tomatoes.

As for out here on the prairies, the average family owned and operated farm is on the 1k acre mark. Of the 20k farms in my province, more then 90% of them will be under 2k acres and virtually none of them hire more than 2 people outside their immediate sons and daughters to work there.

As for over production, the grain vs vegetables thing still hits. Crop rotation matters with grains, over production simply doesn't. Most of the land here has been passed down from parent to child for 100 years and they've always been quick to pick up on the latest innovations from new equipment to man-made fertilizers to round-up ready crops. The only consistent theme has been greater(and more consistent) yields per acre each year and correspondingly better profits for the farmer. Your gloom and doom scenario just isn't the reality for current grain farming techniques.

There are hundreds/thousands of farms in my area. I don't think a single one is >1000 acres. Hundreds of families support themselves relatively well on the income they make from the smaller farms. True, you probably can't send 3 children to college on that money, but hardly anyone could these days...that's around $150k a year for 4+ years JUST for their base education. Be real, mom and pop store owners can't afford that either.

EDIT: Oh, I see, the AVERAGE is about 1000 acres....but that includes the 1000000 acre industrial farms. What is the average acreage for a "family farm" (by which I mean it's owned by the single family that lives and works on the land and supports itself on the product of that work)?

EDIT: Actually, there are thousands of 'family farms' in my area that produce more than enough product to send 3 kids to college on >5 acres with no industrialization at all (and many many more that do over use chemicals and have destroyed many of our watersheds with their toxic runoff)....I live in Humboldt county, it's easy to make a ton of money on a tiny 'farm' here...for now.

My idea of what's sustainable or good practice is based on long term personal (>33 years personally growing vegetables using both chemical and natural fertilizers) and multiple multi generational familial experiences (both mine and neighbors) AND all literature on the subject which is unequivocal that over use of chemical fertilizers damages the land and watersheds and requires more and more chemicals and excess water every year to mitigate that compounding soil damage, or leaving the field fallow long enough to wash it clean of excess salts (which then end up in the watershed).
Fertilizers carry salts. With excessive use, salts build up. Salt buildup harms crops and beneficial bacteria. Bacteria are necessary for healthy plant growth. If you and yours don't know that and act accordingly, it's astonishing your family can still farm the same land at all, you've been incredibly lucky. You either don't over use the normal salt laden chemical fertilizers on that land, or you're lying. There's simply no other option.

EDIT: It is possible that you are getting better yields for numerous reasons...."better" crop genes (both larger crops and more resistant to insects, drought, disease, etc.), better/more fertilizers, better/more pesticides, and seeing as you're in Canada, climate change. Warmer weather would absolutely give YOU better yields of almost any crop, that's not true farther South. Better yields does not mean you aren't destroying the land, BTW. It is possible to use chemicals and insane amounts of water to grow on land that's "dead", but it takes more and more chemicals and water to do, and those chemicals don't evaporate into nothing, they run off.
If you are getting better yields every year using the same methods and amounts of additives and growing the exact same crops, I'm incredibly interested in how you pull that off.

@newtboy,

1000 acre farms do not count as "family farms" in my eyes, even if they are owned by a single family.

Your entitled to that opinion, but you are also flat wrong. If you want to support a family of 2 or 3 children and do something as outrageous as send them off for post secondary education it isn't happening by running a subsistence farm. I'm in Manitoba, Canada and we've got about 20 thousand farms and the average size is right around 1000 acres. Those guys are in exactly the same financial class as the mom and pop corner convenience stores. They've got about the same money for raising their families and retire with about the same kind of savings. I really don't care whether you agree with me on that or not, it is a reality of farming today.

BUT....overuse of equipment either over packs the soil, making it produce far less, or over plows the soil, making it run off and blow away (see the dust bowl).
...
No, actually overproducing on a piece of land like that makes it unusable quickly and new farm land is needed to replace it while it recuperates (if it ever can). Chemical fertilizers add salts that kill beneficial bacteria, "killing" the soil, sometimes permanently. producing double or triple the amount of food on the same land is beneficial in the extreme short term, and disastrous in the barely long term.


I've got family that's been farming this same land for better then 100 years and still getting better yields per acre ever year. Your idea's about what is sustainable or good practice is disconnected from reality.

In first world countries....yes, or close to that much. Agreed. Not world wide.

Mechanized harvest is accepted in "natural" old school farming. Agreed, it would fall under the "industrial farming" methods, but is one of the least damaging.
>1000 acre farms do not count as "family farms" in my eyes, even if they are owned by a single family. So is Walmart, but it's not a mom and pop or family store.

Again, mechanization is not the same as industrialization, but does still do damage by over plowing, etc. I'm talking about monoculture crops, over application of man made fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Grain was farmed "by hand" since farming existed with few problems, but more work involved. The work it takes to rehab a river system because industrial farming runoff contaminated and killed it is FAR more work than the extra work involved in farming using old school methods (which does not mean everything is done with hands, tools and machines have been in use for eons).

Roundup doesn't "break down" completely, and doesn't break down at all if it's washed into river systems and out of the UV light.

Once again, machines aren't all of "industrial farming", they are one of the least damaging facets, and they are not unknown in old school, smaller farming techniques. BUT....overuse of heavy equipment either over packs the soil, making it produce far less, or over plows the soil, making it run off and blow away (see the dust bowl). If it was ONLY about machinery, and ONLY industrial farming used machines, you would have a point, but neither is true.

No, actually overproducing on a piece of land like that makes it unusable quickly and new farm land is needed to replace it while it recuperates (if it ever can). Chemical fertilizers add salts that kill beneficial bacteria, "killing" the soil, sometimes permanently. producing double or triple the amount of food on the same land is beneficial in the extreme short term, and disastrous in the barely long term. (See 'dust bowl')

Man power is far less damaging to the environment than fossil fuels for the same amount of energy. Also, the people would use no more resources because they're in the field than they would anywhere else, so there's NO net gain to the energy used or demand on the environment if they farm instead of sit at a desk, but machines don't use energy when idle, so there is a net loss to the energy required if you replace them with pre-existing people.

Yes, you quoted it directly, buy your characterization of what that meant was insane. You claim they said Monsanto worked on the project (and other things) because they're evil and want to do evil and harm. The video actually said they do these things without much care for the negative consequences to others, and that makes them evil. I hope you can comprehend the distinct difference in those statements, and that your portrayal of what they said is not honest.

@newtboy,
Some, (very few) still grow grain using old school methods, some even using old school grains (thank goodness, we will have them to thank for still having grains when/if the Monsanto grains fail). It's not even 99%, but it is 'most'.

If you count your numbers by production it's probably more than 99% fall under your idea of 'industrial'. If you want to count old school methods as no chemicals for pest control and harvesting by hand then you need 20 some old school farms to match the quantity of food produced on one thousand acre family farm.

Clearly, natural farming takes more effort, and costs the consumer more, but does not require major ecological mitigation, so if you count ALL costs involved, it's not that much more expensive.
Can you explain the ecological mitigation costs you imagine are associated with farming a thousand acres of grain by hand versus using modern equipment and some round-up? The round-up breaks down within days of application and the equipment doesn't impact the land any more than having 20 some people marching through on foot. For bonus points include the ecological foot print of everybody required to work the land in both scenarios. Including that makes it glaringly obvious that the efficiency of what you class 'industrial' farming techniques is on the whole much better on the planet. Of course, it shouldn't be a surprise producing double and triple the amount of food from the same land with a fraction of the manpower means less overall demand on the environment.

As for the propaganda in the vid, you claimed I misrepresented the Manhattan presentation, I quoted the video verbatim. I'm not interested in doing the same for every point they ran. The video is propaganda of the purest form and I stand by that.

Twice what my family eats...but yes, a small subsistence farm could also be called a garden, just as my orchard of 30+ apple trees could be called a back yard. That doesn't make it produce any less.

Not true. Some, (very few) still grow grain using old school methods, some even using old school grains (thank goodness, we will have them to thank for still having grains when/if the Monsanto grains fail). It's not even 99%, but it is 'most'.

Industrial farming describes a methodology, not a size, not an incorporation. The fact that a single person or two might farm thousands of acres means they are using the same industrial methods, because non industrial farming takes more people.

Clearly, natural farming takes more effort, and costs the consumer more, but does not require major ecological mitigation, so if you count ALL costs involved, it's not that much more expensive. You act like it's impossible, but it's how ALL farms operated prior to the mid century. If it wouldn't scale, please explain how it worked for thousands of years before industrial agriculture started, or how it continues to work in other countries.

It may not work for WEAK shallow root grain crops that can't compete for water and nutrients, like the one's Monsanto sells. It worked fine for thousands of years with more natural, long root crops that also held the soil together.

I didn't hear that in the video, but fine. Don't just repeat known BS and lies then. Roundup is only a pesticide in that it allows GMO crops that have modified genes to be pesticides themselves to grow without competition....and that doesn't count, and I think you know it.

No, I'm not trying to say the video is perfectly honest, it's clearly highly biased...I didn't say that. They do HINT that Monsanto's actions are "evil", but extrapolating and exaggerating from their already somewhat overboard, clearly biased but careful statements to make them insanely more overboard and biased is not helpful to anyone.

You mean this characterization..."You know, on account of them being evil and wanting to see millions of people dead because it gives their corporate heads joy. Just like it wanted to invent pesticides as a means of convincing the public to poison each other for giggles, and getting the state department to experiment on people."
Um...yeah....that's completely insane. I already explained why it's wrong in so many ways, and defy you to show where they said anything resembling that. You have to listen with quite a biased ear to hear that in between the lines of what they actually said, and one must be incredibly, clinically paranoid to believe any public company does things just to be evil rather than purely for profit. The evil they do is an accepted result of their business methods, not the intent of their business, and I think the video was fairly clear about that.

You may stand by that, as I stand by my summation of your comment...that it's insane and exaggerated hyperbole that ridicules an extreme paranoid stance no one actually took.

@newtboy

If you are only growing twice what you can eat yourself, you are describing a large garden, not a farm.

More over, what you class as 'industrial' farming is in fact the entirety of all grain farming. If there is a place in farming for wheat, corn, soy, canola and so on, 99% of it is done on what you class 'industrial' farming.

Your typical family farm is over a thousand acres today. If I go out and start naming the family farms of just friends and family I know, I can come up with 30-40+. They all farm over a thousand acres, they use tractors and combines and they make a fair bit more food than twice what they can eat. They aren't the ultra rich land barons that your 'industrial' moniker would imply either, at most they have a singular hired hand to help out with the work. The ones with children interested in taking over often don't need to hire anyone at all.

If you want to abandon that agricultural production and the methods used you mean raising the cost of production more than 100 times over. I can't even fathom the cost of weeding a thousand acres of wheat by hand, let alone removing grasshoppers from a corn crop that way. I'm sorry, but what works for your garden doesn't scale to grain crops.

Oh, and the conflation of herbicide and pesticide was done by the fear monger crowd. Listing round-up as a chemical that only kills plants and not insects and animals didn't fit their agenda so now everything is supposed to be called a pesticide across the board. Maybe that's just a Canadian thing, but the bottom line is that if you had a crop completely over run with insects you could spray it once a day with stupidly high concentrations of round-up and the water in the sprayer would do about the same damage to the insects as would the round up.


As for the video's other claims, I stand by my characterisation. You can't honestly tell me the video is trying to put forward on open and honest picture of Monsanto's actions and history. For example, the Manhattan Project, here's a transcription for clarity:
"Monsanto head Charles Allen Thomas was called to the pentagon not only asked to join the Manhattan project, but to lead it as it's co-director. Thomas put Monsanto's central research department hard to work building the atomic bomb.Fully aware of the implications of the task the budding empire sealed it's relationship with the inner cicrcles of washington with two fateful days in Japan.
"
- queue clip of nuclear blasts-

I think I stand by my summation.