Late spring at the farm

Gardens, piglets, visitors, the trip to the Cranberry Isles, and the finished front porch

Pics of the day from her Aimee-ness

An excellent collection. Lambs up a tree, the new baby with his mom, seedlings in the hoophouse, and a close up of our tomato sprouts.

Spring seems to be in full force, with all the growth and green vigor. Ewes-a-lambing, hens-a-laying, sprouts-a-sprouting, peeps-a-peeping, and a partridge in a pear tree ...

No, no partridges, nor pear trees. But a dozen apple trees about ready to blossom.

Sometimes it's just good to be a human, on what Ed Abbey always called the best darn planet in the solar system. And it's good to be a homesteader when your homestead is steadily producing.

Just in case you thought of giving it all up for the good life, did I mention the blackflies?

Spring peep-ers...

Went to get our chicks yesterday. Also some take out dinner. Aimee made the possible mistake of telling the guy behind the bar in the Mexican restaurant in Newport that she would be back for dinner after she "picked up some chicks."

I didn't know she was like that when I married her...

Some of these 15 small birds are not ours, but there's a minimum purchase, so Aimee cooked up a scheme with some other hen-keepers at Unity College. They'll be needing to come get theirs soon, but we will keep them until then, under a heat lamp in my den, because the chicks are happier if they can snuggle together a bit for warmth. They're peeping away as I type this.

Here's the chick-pics. Enjoy.

Molly pops out a lamb...

... and surprises us all, particularly Aimee, who believed she was not pregnant. Molly waited, of course, until I was away for an SAR training before dropping the baby Saturday, making life a little interesting for Aimee. Thanks to Joe and Amy for helping with the ewe-mergency.

Funnily enough, Molly seems to be a superb mother even though this is her first. She has good genes, from her mother Tillie. We won't mention her father, Abraram, because he's also her mate, sheep having little or no incest taboo.

The new kids name is "Oliver." He has huge, very silly ears. Pictures to come.

Build with straw bale in Maine?

HI there Mick


I found your name on the web while doing a search for straw bale construction in Maine.

My partner, XXXX and I are getting ready to build again yes at the ages of 60 and 66! We have a bit of land in XXXX and want to build as off the grid as we can We also love straw bale, but haven’t been able to find out where to get straw bales anywhere near here We thought perhaps you could give us some leads Do you know of any local farmers who grow and bale straw and will sell it ?? any hints you can give us will be much appreciated!

Meanwhile Happy Spring!

_____________________________________________________________________

Hi XXXX:

I should start off by noting that Aimee and I are both scientists, not straw bale advocates, so we do objective reporting on our work, including domestic experiments. We have been gently advising homebuilders against building with straw in Maine now since we got done with our bale house experiment. The main reason is the lack of suitable cheap bales, and the fact that you will almost certainly have to build a straw-wrap house, rather than a "Nebraska style." Because you will have to build some kind of timber frame to support the roof, and because straw is expensive and has to be trucked far in Maine, there is no great cost savings and there are increased climate emissions. In particular, we paid up to $7 a bale, and the lowest price we got, at $2, was for very few bales. I would expect to pay an average of $3.5 for a 40-50 pound bale.

To my mind, these facts negate the whole argument for straw -- that it's a cheap locally-produced product for both structure and insulation that would otherwise go to waste. Straw is neither particularly cheap nor locally produced in Maine. It's also labor intensive, particularly at the plastering stage, and labor is not cheap, while plastering skill is hard to come by.

You will discover additional difficulties with insurance and possibly building codes enforcement, none of which are necessarily insurmountable, but it makes little sense to take them on considering the above. There will also very likely be difficulties later with critters in your walls.

If instead you used cellulose (a fully recycled product) or recycled foam board insulation, or both (see below) you would get the insulation benefits, reduce costs, avoid critters and codes-enforcement officers, and be able to insure your home for less.

Cellulose is R3.8 per inch. An 8-inch stud wall cavity (really 7.5 inches) filled with cellulose (on 24-inch center) is R28.5. Two inches of recycled polyisocyanate or urea formaldehyde foam board on the outside of the sheathing adds around R24, providing R52.5, enough insulation for a passive solar house. These specifications, carried out by a proper contractor, are suitable to pass muster as a "normal" home with insurance companies. If you home build, you may have to use "surplus lines" insurance, but the costs per unit coverage will still be less than for a bale home.

Some natural builders balk at using either kind of insulation, worried about venting of toxic chemicals contaminating room air. The fire retardent in cellulose is borax, which is toxic, but doesn't actively vent in any toxic form, and will in any case be behind drywall. The recycled foam board will be fairly stable, because it is old, and any venting will be to the outside, not inside.

Having noted all this, I will mention that our advice generally has little effect on prospective home-builders who are already commited to straw bale. This seems to be one of those cases of advocacy or possibly religion defeating science.

If this is the case, straw bale vendors can be found, and with luck you may get a good price. The best chances are found with hay dealers who make a living trucking hay from regions where it is in surplus, such as Aroostook County, to places where it is in shortage, such as the suburban Boston/Portland region. Hay dealers can usually find straw bales too, and a tractor-trailer load can be easily arranged in season.

The dealer I use is Mr Beem of Beem Farm in Newport, Maine.

I have written this information out several times in the past few years. I hope you don't mind if I post this email to my blog so I don't need to do so again.

Regards,

Mick

Why we farm....

The methane hydrate feedback has long been the most fearsome and worrisome of all possible climate feedbacks. Since the average person can't yet fully comprehend the ordinary climate change we are expecting, the IPCC BAU or similar, and its causes and intricacies, talking to climate beginners or skeptics from a cold start about hydrates is not advisable. Like moving from an explanation of how to put air in the tires to a full-on discussion of the tolerances required for a bearing rebuild; the shift in topic is slight, but the shift in assumed knowledge needed to understand the material is huge. You pretty much need at least a week of basic climate teaching before you can begin to discuss the most worrisome feedbacks.

So far our journalist friends seem to help rather than hinder. Below is a fairly poorly worded, poorly imagined article from Germany's Der Speigel, in which the author manages to "balance" discussion of a methane hydrate emissions crisis with notions of how we might use them for fuel in the same breath. That anyone in today's world can imagine using methane hydrates as a fossil fuel astounds me.

(This journalistic "balance", and it's equivocating political equivalent, is beginning to physically nauseate me. It's "balancing" the discussion of deck chairs on the Titanic, and increasingly incoherent and cognitively dissonant. I can imagine a day when what is left of civilization puts journalists like this one, and the editors, and the politicians, on trial for their irresponsibility and fecklessness.)

It's because climate change, particularly drastic feedbacks, is is so hard to explain, and because we are so actively delaying political climate action, filibustering even a minor deck-chair shuffle, that as early as several years ago I began to play out the resultant civil emergencies in my head, so I might have an idea of what would be needed.

Now we do have quite a bit of experience with civil emergencies in this country, and perhaps yet more in my home country, the UK. Although few climate scientists and mitigation folks have studied emergency management, and few politicians and ordinary climate activists have enough grasp of 20th century history to have an understanding of what to do in the event of something like a runaway climate warming feedback crisis occurring in the context of a heavily populated industrial civilization, there is a historical record of events of similar magnitude in terms of civil disruption, a record that runs the length of the 20th century, and includes things like the 1940s food crisis resulting in the UK from the Battle of the Atlantic, the concurrent 1940s Blitz in Britain and the equivalent response to the heavy British and American bombing of Germany, the civil restoration of Germany and Europe in general after WW2, and, possibly for examples of what not to do if you intend to keep democracy, the immediate post war Soviet experience and the Cultural Revolution in China. Hurricane Katrina, the San Diego wildfires, the 2007 UK flooding: there are many other examples.

(This history is particularly on my mind right now because my RAFMRS colleague "Heavy" Whalley, senior team leader at the Lockerbie disaster, is visiting here at Unityt College with us as Rescue Expert in residence for a few more days, and due to talk in Tim's Introduction to Criminal Justice class on the subject of Lockerbie tomorrow. Heavy received several medals and commendations for the work he did in the aftermath of that disaster, and his cool thinking on how to structure the response in that burning hell-hole was crucial to the disaster, and by extension to reestablishing civil order and stability.)

How to begin applying this kind of knowledge?

Well for one, we have to be capable of imagining the scale and direction of trends likely to result in civil emergencies:

We can currently envisage two possible emergencies, a runaway warming feedback, or a runaway cooling feedback. Right now, based on the emerging data from scientific study of specific feedback loops like the undersea methane hydrates or the arctic albedo feedback, a runaway warming feedback seems most likely, perhaps an order or so of magnitude more likely than a cooling feedback.

A runaway warming feedback sufficient to create civil emergency might occur over a timescale of a couple of years, some tens of years, or even a couple hundred years and still be rapid enough as to overwhelm ordinary provision for food, housing and shelter. The most obvious drivers of emergency and instability are food system failure and destruction of housing. Another, secondary driver is civil unrest which can result from either of the above.

Crop failure is already occurring patchily around the world from drought and other strange weather, particularly important being the failure of Australia's wheat harvest last year. Crop failure, with high fuel prices impacting food systems, has been one cause of the food crisis in the developing world. If transport systems remain intact, crop failure is a temporary regional phenomenon alleviated by food aid. If they don't, it may produce chronic, long-term starvation.

Housing destruction may become driven by rising sea level, but is already driven by floods, storms and wildfires, and of course we already have experience with these in the USA, the UK, as well as countries like Bangladesh and elsewhere.

Civil unrest calls for a policing or a military response in which force is used or threatened to prevent populations from fighting among themselves for food or housing resources that remain. It is also possible to envision a crisis so widespread that civil unrest takes on the likeness of a war or civil war between populations excluded from resources, but that are armed, and those who still have resources. One such situation smolders currently in Haiti.

Society can respond to all of the above using ordinary market or social provision if the scale and pace of events does not outpace markets and social aid. The nature, form and actual development of an emergency, as such, is related to the capabilities and resilience of ordinary provision for housing and food and policing. So in the aftermath of Katrina, the civil emergency in which extraordinary government response was needed was a few months long, after which insurance companies, construction companies, commercial food systems, and other more regularized social housing and feeding were established or reestablished, and, essentially, civilization was slowly restored.

There are also geographic and ecological concerns to consider because food system and housing failure will occur patchily. Some current food supply and housing resources may prove ecologically resilient. Others will not. Fast action on the part of a government, such as moving, say, agricultural equipment and fertilizer and seed from one area to another so that crops can be grown according to some emergency plan, may proved crucial. Planning out contingencies for such events might be helpful. A general preemptive policy of adding to food stock storage and supporting resilient agriculture and resilient housing before a crisis hits could literally save civilization.

What would be resilient agriculture? We don't really know, since we don't know which ecological regions areas might still be productive in the event of a runaway climate warming, but we obviously must begin to imagine it. In Britain during WW2, resilience was sought and found using small scale decentralized production, adding gardens and livestock to small patches of useful land. Labor was added to agriculture without taking troops from fighting, using programs like the Women's Land Army. Mobility might be key: In WW2 Britain, the ecosystem at least was stable. In the future, we may find we can have ecologically productive homesteads and farms on northern and high altitude land currently under-utilized, such as that which surrounds us here in Maine. A government program to purchase by eminent domain and distribute such land to qualified farmers might be key, as might the training of such people. Shared equipment for clearing and planting, shared seed stock and breeding stock resources, imaginative use of animals and crops such as using sheep and goats to help clear land for future arable production, or using cover crops to sponsor nitrogen production without fossil fuels, all these might prove helpful. A few thousand tonnes of concentrated fertilizer and a few tonnes of seed stored in decentralized buildings in each ecoregion would save, literally, millions.

Resilient housing might prove to be that housing that can either survive the crisis and still be useful, based on location or physical resilience. It might also be prefabricated emergency housing, or housing that can be moved relatively easily from one place to another, or housing that people can build for themselves with or without government help. People may also need to be moved, as after Katrina, to safe places where they may be temporarily or permanently rehoused. And as the immediate crisis after an extreme weather event winds down, emergency feeding and social welfare/job schemes that allow householders to work on their own homes and those of their neighbors might prove useful. Retraining may be needed.

Resilient police and military forces, and health care services, controlled by resilient democratic government structures, will be key to surviving such a crisis with some semblance of civilization intact. Again, decentralization and scale are important, because opportunities for safe food and housing provision will be patchy and ecologically scattered. If sea level began to rise by a foot or two or three per year, for instance, moving people and housing and farming to higher and more northerly ground while maintaining social order, would be driven by consideration of where that higher ground or northern land suitable for housing and agriculture was, who was in charge of it, and what islands and peninsulae might result after Greenland and Antarctica are done melting. Canada will be a very popular country. And state legislatures and state governors, congressmen and women, Presidents and their staffs, government agency heads, all, unfortunately, will need to be protected.

(Whether they will actually deserve such protection after letting such events occur is a purely moral question. As an expedient, for once, I would say, we shouldn't "throw the bums out." We will need every scrap of government we can get, and we may not have time for politics in any case. The UK national government headed by Winston Churchill suspended elections for the duration of WW2.)

In general, in any ecological crisis driven by warming, north is obviously better than south and higher better than lower. The US and the UK are both lucky to have large areas of relatively unpopulated land in their respective norths. The Highlands of Scotland, Maine, Montana's great plains, places I've spent my own life in the wilderness, these may be the refuges we will seek. There's no surprise that my farm is at 500 feet. And I've always wanted to live on an island.

I don't want to have to imagine these things but I think we must. I'm not a ghoul who likes to imagine death and destruction in his spare time, nor am I a conspiracy theorist nut-job who keeps several years of food supply in his basement. But I am an Englishman whose grandfathers and grandmothers fed their families with Victory Gardens, rabbit hutches, and chicken coops during WW2, whose father was bombed out of his house, all of whose male relatives over 50 have served in the armed forces, and who has himself been on the scene of dozens of aircraft crashes and served at several civilian emergencies, responded to hundreds of casualties in first aid situations, and who, with his wife, produces food fuel and shelter on a small but hopefully resilient farm in Maine. My wife Aimee, on the other hand, comes from the German-American Peace Church tradition, and raises and puts up food almost instinctively, while giving it away with even less thought.

Actually, with that kind of history, we really can't help but think this stuff through.




MELTING METHANE
A Storehouse of Greenhouse Gases Is Opening in Siberia

By Volker Mrasek

Researchers have found alarming evidence that the frozen Arctic floor has started to thaw and release long-stored methane gas. The results could be a catastrophic warming of the earth, since methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But can the methane also be used as fuel?


The Lena River flowing through Russian Siberia and empties into the Arctic Ocean. This satellite image shows the river delta, where methane concentrations are unexpectedly high.

It's always been a disturbing what-if scenario for climate researchers: Gas hydrates stored in the Arctic ocean floor -- hard clumps of ice and methane, conserved by freezing temperatures and high pressure -- could grow unstable and release massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Since methane is a potent greenhouse gas, more worrisome than carbon dioxide, the result would be a drastic acceleration of global warming. Until now this idea was mostly academic; scientists had warned that such a thing could happen. Now it seems more likely that it will.

Russian polar scientists have strong evidence that the first stages of melting are underway. They've studied largest shelf sea in the world, off the coast of Siberia, where the Asian continental shelf stretches across an underwater area six times the size of Germany, before falling off gently into the Arctic Ocean. The scientists are presenting their data from this remote, thinly-investigated region at the annual conference of the European Geosciences Union this week in Vienna.

In the permafrost bottom of the 200-meter-deep sea, enormous stores of gas hydrates lie dormant in mighty frozen layers of sediment. The carbon content of the ice-and-methane mixture here is estimated at 540 billion tons. "This submarine hydrate was considered stable until now," says the Russian biogeochemist Natalia Shakhova, currently a guest scientist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks who is also a member of the Pacific Institute of Geography at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Vladivostok.

The permafrost has grown porous, says Shakhova, and already the shelf sea has become "a source of methane passing into the atmosphere." The Russian scientists have estimated what might happen when this Siberian permafrost-seal thaws completely and all the stored gas escapes. They believe the methane content of the planet's atmosphere would increase twelvefold. "The result would be catastrophic global warming," say the scientists. The greenhouse-gas potential of methane is 20 times that of carbon dioxide, as measured by the effects of a single molecule.

Shakhova and her colleagues gathered evidence for the loss of rigor in the frozen sea floor in a measuring campaign during the Siberian summer. The seawater proved to be "highly oversaturated with solute methane," reports Shakhova. In the air over the sea, greenhouse-gas content was measured in some places at five times normal values. "In helicopter flights over the delta of the Lena River, higher methane concentrations have been measured at altitudes as high as 1,800 meters," she says.

The methane climate bomb is also ticking on land: A few years ago researchers noticed higher concentrations of methane in northern Siberia. The Siberian permafrost is known as one of the tipping points for the earth's climate, since the potent greenhouse gas develops wherever microorganisms decompose the huge masses of organic material from warmer eras that has been frozen here for thousands of years.

"A Wake-Up Call for Science"

Data from offshore drilling in the region, studied by experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), also suggest that the situation has grown critical. AWI's results show that permafrost in the flat shelf is perilously close to thawing. Three to 12 kilometers from the coast, the temperature of sea sediment was -1 to -1.5 degrees Celsius, just below freezing. Permafrost on land, though, was as cold as -12.4 degrees Celsius. "That's a drastic difference and the best proof of a critical thermal status of the submarine permafrost," said Shakhova.

Paul Overduin, a geophysicist at AWI, agreed. "She's right," he said. "Changes are far more likely to occur on the sea shelf than on land."

Climate change could give an additional push to these trends. "If the Arctic Sea ice continues to recede and the shelf becomes ice-free for extended periods, then the water in these flat areas will get much warmer," said Overduin. That could lead to a situation in which the temperature of the sea sediment rises above freezing, which would thaw the permafrost.

"We don't have any data on that -- those are just suspicions," the Canadian scientist said. Natalia Shakhova also passed on the question of whether to expect a gradual gas emission or an abrupt burst of large quantities of methane. "No one can say right now whether that will take years, decades or hundreds of years," she said. But one cannot rule out sudden methane emissions. They could happen at "any time."

One thing is clear, though: The thawing of the Arctic sea floor will create "new potential sources for methane ... which no one had reckoned with until now," said Laurence Smith, a professor for geography at the University of California in Los Angeles. Smith is researching North Pole frost zones and expects that a thawing of the permafrost will "supply fuel for methane engines."

The first methane rocket thruster was tested by the US's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 2007, and methane from manure has been collected as "biogas" to heat and power homes in experimental German towns.

In any case, the team taking part in the Siberian study installed a number of probes in the Laptev Sea, a central part of the broad Siberian shelf sea. These probes are measuring the temperature on the upper edge of the submarine permafrost. Overduin wants to pull up the probes in August. Then, for the first time, scientists will have access to a full year's worth of data on the conditions of the sea floor.

For her part, Shakhova thinks researchers should be doing a lot more. She says too little is known about the fragile shelf sediment and the methane it stores, which could be explosive for the environment. "Actually," she says, "this is a wake-up call for science."

The Bonnie Broom

An old song I always loved, but never quite learned all the words to, just the chorus, which in Yorkshire (I thought) we always sang "Oh the broom, the bonnie bonnie broom/ the broom of the golden aura/Fain would I be in my north country" etc. I probably had it wrong. We were usually drunk when we sang.

Blooming broom is a springtime thing. Which is why I posted it here. And so I might finally learn it.

Broom Of The Cowdenknowes

How blithe each morn was I tae see
My lass came o'er the hill
She tripped the burn and ran tae me
I met her wi' good will

CHORUS

Oh the broom, the bonnie, bonnie broom
The broom o' the cowdenknowes
Fain would I be in my own country
Herding my father's ewes

Hard fate that I should banished be
Gone way o'er hill and moor
Because I loved the fairest lass
That ever yet was born

CHORUS

Oh the broom, the bonnie, bonnie broom
The broom o' the cowdenknowes
Fain would I be in my own country
Herding my father's ewes

Farewell, ye cowdenknowes, farewell
Farewell all pleasures there
To wander by her side again
Is all I crave or care

CHORUS

Oh the broom, the bonnie, bonnie broom
The broom o' the cowdenknowes
Fain would I be in my own country
Herding my father's ewes