Thoughts On The Glasshouse

Thinking that we'd make better use of the solar radiation around-about we took the shadecloth cover off of the glasshouse last week. Not sure if it was the cover providing a little extra insulation that has saved us to date, or just the strength of the frost, but last night we had something of a disaster in the glasshouse. It looks like most of the cotton plants have been badly hit, and a few of the chilli plants, which we've had growing for about 3 years now, also copped a hiding. The tea plant and avocados seem okay, but they may take a bit longer to show the effects.

At the moment the glasshouse is just, well, a house made of glass. Nothing in the way of thermal mass to store heat, and enough loose joints to make sure it doesn't quite work properly. Over the last few weeks, reading along with John Michael Greer's series of posts about Green Wizardry I've toyed with a few ideas about how to make it more useful, or more correctly, how to make it do what I think it should do.

The first of these plans was a great little home made solar hot water panel along with a series of drums containing water. Excellent thermal mass, and should do a good job, it could even be supplemented with a wood/biomass system if needed. In considering how well it would work I got to thinking about the basic design of the glasshouse itself. It's a prefabricated unit of aluminium framing with thin single layer glazing. It's glazed all around, even the roof.

For a start, this is not the most ideal structure, given that the sun only shines from the east, north and west here, south of the Tropics. Why have glass, which is not the best insulator, on the south side of such a building? Why have it on the south plane of the roof, when it's usually so hot in there by summer time that it needs to be cleared of all plants anyway?

I toyed with the idea of covering the back and top with fibro panel or similar, which would allow for the inclusion of insulation, but that still leaves the front faces to lose heat, not to mention the question of whether the frame would support that extra loading.

Having given it more thought I am leaning towards reconstructing completely. It's current location is next to a four foot and more high rock and earthen wall. With a little planning this could be extended and expanded to form three sides of a new structure. By glazing just the northern facing aspects there would be as much light, and not nearly as much heat loss. If the design is clever enough then the glazing will be removable during summer to allow it to function as a greenhouse, eliminating the need to have plants migrating in and out as the seasons progress. And if I try to be really tricky I could build in water storage to act as thermal mass, and that thermal mass might even be able to double as place to grow up a few water plants and fish, allowing the glasshouse structure to fulfill more than one role, and provide for more than one system.

Obviously heating the water with a solar panel might not be such a good idea if one was growing fish in it, but there's nothing to say we can't have two water storages, one heated, one ambient, or even use a different form of thermal mass for the heat providing side of the equation.

In other news, all is going along in it's wintery fashion here, we've had some beautiful days, and some awfully frosty nights. Half the pruning has been done, and work is progressing (only slowly) on the vege garden renovations, primarily due to a hectic social schedule, including birthdays, lawn bowls, and even a trip to Abercrombie Caves (well worth a visit if you ever get the chance) to fill in those two days that separate work time.

There is also the fact that most jobs I do tend to turn into an experimental or creative endeavour well outside their original scope. Cleaning the chicken house out a couple of weeks back, which would normally take about an hour, if not less, turned into a three hour job. I'd often longed for a long-handled scraper to assist in pulling the muck out from underneath the raised house. This time I succumbed to the urge and built one using the steel sheet from an old computer case, a couple of bits of angle iron and tube and a hoe handle I'd purchased but not yet fitted. It works wonderfully, and the DW only rolled her eyes a little to find that the cleaning operation had taken so long and gotten so sidetracked. I imagine that next time it wont even take 15 minutes to get the whole job done!

Do you know where you're going to?

"Do you like the things that life is showing you?"
 Diana Ross - Theme From Mahogany.

Talk about slack blogging! I'd almost forgotten how it works...

Having been so slack there is certainly plenty to talk about now, though the primary reason for the absence, work, will not be discussed except to say there has been plenty of it, and making time for blogging has sadly been low on the list of priorities. After a long day in front of the computer, more time there to blog just doesn't seem so appealing.

Things are starting to quiet down now, marginally, so the time and inclination to gather thoughts and put keys to electrons has arrived!

The farmlet has been cruising along in winter mode, though I guess it was barely Autumn last time we spoke. We've lost two of the older chooks (6+ years old) but all the other creatures are doing well. The vegetable gardens have been planted out for winter production, and are currently (slowly) undergoing a makeover, as time permits. Recycled hardwood timbers are forming the surrounds, with crushed granite for the paths. Getting rid of the grass paths should go a long way toward making managing the weeding easier, and the proper raised beds will provide better drainage and growing conditions, hopefully. We've also made a new space for a perennial bed, currently with our new rhubarb patch, mints and horseradish, which has cleaned up what was a dauntingly disappointing corner of the patch previously.

So where are we at the moment? The last few posts we were in a quandary about where we were headed. We were off to Victoria or Tasmania, but weren't really sure.

The last couple of months have included a development that helped provide a bit of external impetus and a good dose of clarity. The development is more of an un-development, being that we've discovered a happy family of termites munching away at our house. This is not so surprising for an Australian house, but it is concerning if you're trying to sell the place. The inspector reckons they've done a fair bit of damage to the place, but without pulling plasterboard off we can't know for sure.

So we were faced with reducing the price we had put on the place in order to secure a sale, either that or doing some reconstruction to repair whatever damage there was. Combining this with our uncertainty over the idea of moving and we were seriously doubting the sensibility of the idea.

In the first case, we were torn about moving away from here. We've got a lot of good friends, and it's a great community. Whilst the climate is not ideal, and it's a long way from the beach, the community advantages (among others) outweigh the disadvantages as far as considering it from a post-peak oil survival situation.

After a fair bit of soul-searching and considering various scenarios we've decided we're going to stay on here, at the very least until the kids finish their schooling. Stability during those years of life is just as important as any other considerations. And beside that, the Permaculture Designer's Manual has a very good section on designing for deserts if things get really bad here :-)

So where to now? We've started re-assessing the place in terms of layout and planning, re-considering things so that we can attempt to fit even more producing plants in. There's certainly plenty of space here.

We will need to work on the water situation a bit, but there's nothing out of the ordinary that needs to be done there.

The main issue is going to be the house. Our two storey architectural monstrosity is not the best construction to start with, throw in some termite damage and I'm going to sleep daily wondering whether I'll be waking up downstairs in the kids room...

There's a nice spot in the front paddock that can fit a house in, and we've had a brief discussion with Council about it and they can't see any problems with building a new place and then demolishing this one. We've played around with some basic designs and think we can fit a complete single-storey house of equivalent usable size to the current one, into the same footprint as this one (yep, that's how badly this one is laid out!) Given that we already have a livable, if not enjoyable, house on-site considering owner building isn't so far fetched either, though I know DW will want it to be complete within a reasonable period.

All that remains is to sell off the farm block to free up some cash flows, though we can begin certain elements out of our normal budgets with a bit of saving. Planning our own house will be a new experience, and we'll need to figure out things like whether we see a draughtsperson first or an engineer, but all of that sort of stuff should be exciting enough, and keep us occupied while we wait to sell the block. And if it never sells at least our neighbour out there has a nice extra piece of land to use, and we've got a good, if distant, supply of firewood, while ever we've got fuel to get there.

It's funny, but when you're thinking of leaving a place you see it in an entirely different light to when you're thinking of staying. For one thing my shed is much better organised and a lot tidier now (lol) and we've planted a many more trees already. All the other projects that I'd been putting off for a long time, expecting to commence them when we moved to a new place, have also had another look over, things like forges, furnaces, potting sheds, cellars, biogas systems, a pumping system for the pond, the list goes on. Not going elsewhere gives me plenty of time to concentrate on being here, so there should be plenty of activity to report on in the future!

The Political Indigestability Of Peak Everything

Peak Everything is a unique problem, in that it doesn't have a solution, it's not something we can resolve through this or that course of action. It is, as has been pointed out by John Michael Greer, a predicament, something that must be adapted to.

It therefore stands to reason that whenever we're engaged in debate over responses to Peak Everything we will only ever be discussing politically unpalatable "solutions". Politicians like to have clean cut problems that can be addressed by throwing money (variously transformed into resources) at them. The whole notion of palatability resides in how the voters will perceive the response and what impact that will have on said politician's chances of being re-elected.

Peak Everything has only unpalatable responses, which is one of the primary reasons it is not brought to the attention of the public. One of the greatest, if not the greatest, crises to face humankind is swept under the rug as it is not an issue that a politician can address. It's not something they can come riding to the rescue over, they can obtain no glory from it, so they find themselves in a situation where they are better off ignoring it totally, or lying outright about it.

The nuts and bolts and tiny grinding gears of any society are rarely brought to the attention of the masses when a politician is standing before the crowd. They're only interested in addressing the big ticket, high value items that have a lot of political gravity associated with them. Whilst it would be in the best interests of the working person to be familiar with the drudgery and dull numbers of running a society, it is rarely brought to our attention primarily because a politician's job is not to inform about the state of things, but to offer dreams and visions of what could be. It's only via promises of a different, inevitably better, future that a politician can keep themselves in a job.

Therefore humanity is now faced with a crisis that the politicians will never address in a wholistic sense. They're never going to consider the broad scope of the predicament and come up with responses to address it. What they will do is address individual crises, one at a time, in isolation, and in proportion to the number of voters affected.

Addressing crises on such an ad hoc basis is invariably going to be counter-productive. A program that spends resource A solving problem X is fair enough in a world without the resource constraints of Peak Everything. In a world of Peak Everything, such a program is going to cause knock on effects, where solving X leads to shortages in resource A that cause problems Y and Z. If Y and Z are problems with little political visibility then they can safely be ignored until such time as they cause further problems that are politically visible. If, on the other hand, Y and/or Z are already politically visible then the politicians are immediately going to find themselves scrambling to solve the next round of problems, and so on down the line.

That in itself is a valuable indicator of the state of world affairs. Admittedly politicians always seem to be running from one crisis to the next, which is how politics (or at least the media circus that surrounds politics) works. An invisible politician is good to no-one, so it makes sense to have them always running around solving problems. The true indicator will be when every solution they propose and implement immediately leads to a slew of greater problems, and they seem ever more frantic due to their inability to do anything about the majority of them.

Waiting for a politician to do something about Peak Everything is a fool's game.

Take the simple scenario of food supply. In order to preserve votes politicians are inevitably going to provide emergency food relief, but only to larger population centres, in times of food crisis. It's extremely doubtful that they would go door to door delivering such food, and more likely that they would set up distribution centres in central locations. This would, in the event of a long terms crisis, cause the population to crowd about these centres, shifting population densities from locations that could conceivably be turned over to provide basic levels of food subsistence style, into shanty towns that have little hope of looking after themselves. How would they then deal with the myriad problems of shanty towns? Or the influx of refugees from those unprepared regions that aren't receiving food aid?

Whilst population centres do offer a number of advantages, it must always be kept in mind that those advantages come with a price and a risk.

The price is lower autonomy and the prospect of not being able to look after yourself to the best of your ability. For example, even though you might be an excellent vegetable gardener, you may forced to work on a farm for ten hours a day growing broad beans and only get minimal rations in return, in contrast to being more isolated and voluntarily working on your own farm and receiving a hearty meal containing a variety of foods.

The risk? Simply that everything is dependent on the sense, fortitude and goodwill of others, most importantly politicians. Solving X that doesn't really affect you might lead to Y and Z, which both do affect you, but not the majority of voters. You've then got twice as many problems, and you're largely reliant on others to solve them for you. If they decide they cannot run the pumps to get water to your part of the city because they need that water to irrigate the fields in another part of the city you've now got to make alternative arrangements, most likely packing up and moving to where the water is.

Life is going to be uncertain as we head into the age of Peak Everything, the trick is determining where the risks are going to be minimised. Making that analysis depends on examining as many scenarios as possible, covering as many factors as possible.

Religio-Industrial Vegetarianism And Peak Oil

We are currently seeing something of a push by the various vegetarian lobbies to make their diet the official methodology for saving the world from climate change, among other scourges. Everywhere I look these days it seems there are various bits of media chaff designed to convince meat-eaters to give up our evil ways and jump on the bandwagon to save the earth. If only we would all stop eating meat then we would have nothing to worry about, all the plastic consumer crap that pollutes the earth would implode and leave us once more inhabiting a pristine wilderness with clear skies.

Once again we are plagued with a religious radicalism, forced to endure half-truths and strawmen set up to direct people along a narrow road toward a mis-Utopia masquerading as a logical solution to our woes.

Sure, everyone should choose a path that fulfills their ethical goals and lies in line with their moral compass, and many of our problems today stem from the fact that people neglect the re-assessment and re-evaluation needed to chart such a course. There are a lot of problems in the world, but it's certain that none of them can be solved with vegetarianism as a blanket prescription.

Where does the food that vegetarian's consume come from? Sadly, it generally comes from farmland, and may pause on it's journey to the consumer in a factory for further (no doubt energy intensive) processing, typically to be massaged from it's native state into something more closely resembling meat (eh?)

Isn't vegetarian food grown on the same farms where the plough tears through the field, spewing the denizens of that dark and earthy realm out into the harsh sunlight, killing them indiscriminately? Who actively takes on the karma begotten through this slaughter? What about the effects of the pesticides and fertilisers that the earth is salted with in order to raise yields to economical levels? What about the displaced fauna, the birds, rodents and other mammals small and large?

I don't read of many vegetarians that give these issues much deep thought, and any I've pointed it out to stridently insist that what I do is so much worse. Microbes don't have souls, so it's all good from a vegetarian perspective.

Is it? Any thinking person will agree that grain-fed meat must have a cumulative impact, with the burden of both grain growing and raising animals, but there is nothing natural about this kind of meat production, and certainly nothing redeeming, so I would never think to promote it.

What if one were to eat only pasture fed animals? We have a situation where the animal grazes, the worms and other soil organisms are not killed off, and, to an extent, other mammals can live side-by-side with the stock, and birds are only minimally disturbed, usually when the animal they are perching upon decides to take off across the paddock. It's not always an ideal relationship, the farmer still has to ensure the pastures aren't being consumed more by natives than by our introduced food-on-four-legs, but it's a start.

Let's consider it from a basic energetic perspective.

Let's imagine a field, say 2 hectares, with a DSE (Dry Sheep Equivalent) of 3. A DSE of 3 means that each hectare could support one ewe with lamb. A sensible farmer might run two ewes on this land, each bearing one lamb. As the lambs grow, the ewes drop back to requiring 1 DSE each (for a total of 2) and the lambs might require 1 each as they grow, for a total of 4 DSE, leaving 2 DSE, so effectively this small flock could survive on that land.

This gives us 2 sheep for meat each year. Let's say we grow them up to 36kg to try and make the most meat out of our land. This will give us a cold carcass in the area of 15kg, for a total of 30kg of meat for the year.

Lamb, depending on the cut, might give us about 800kJ of energy per 100g, or 240,000kJ (see note below) 60,000kJ of energy in total. To get this energy we don't need to waste buckets of fossil fuels ploughing, harrowing, sowing, spraying and harvesting our crop either. And considering our interest in all things "Peak" animal farming is a valid possibility for a small family.

Note It's been rightly pointed out that I've failed to take into account the muscle to bone ratio in the above calculation. 19% was suggested as a reasonable figure, which would reduce our energy to 48,000kJ. But, but, but! We must also consider that the 800kJ of energy is for lean meat, and in a normal diet (mine :-) ) none of the fat escapes the dinner table. Finding nutritional figures for full-fat meat is difficult, but http://www.nal.usda.gov/ tells me that even with 1/8" of fat left on the lamb chop has an energy of 983kJ/100g for 58,980kJ. We're also leaving out a lot of other useful sources of nutrition such as offal and bones so we could reasonably expect a total energy in excess of 100,000kJ when all is said and done. I'll provide a figure of 60,000 above to be mean to my cause.

How would we go if we put this land down to soybeans? With a yield of about 3 tonnes per hectare we would harvest 6 tonnes from this land. Soybeans have an energy content of 1.25kJ per 172g for cooked mature beans. Total energy returned: 43,604kJ! We would exhaust ourselves trying to grow and harvest this crop manually, especially if we had to live only on the energy it provided.

So we get 5.5 times more energy off the land by growing sheep! And that's before we even begin to consider the energy costs of production, and the fact that we haven't had to sterilise the earth to grow our sheep. Let me tell you, if we were doing it all by hand (as we well might be once peak everything kicks in) rounding up a couple of sheep is a lot less energy intensive that harvesting an hectare of grain...


Further to these typical production practices, we can envisage a more advanced system drawing on the practices of permaculture to inform a better way. As far as the smallholder is concerned he or she wants to maximise production of food for family and friends in the face of an uncertain future, one where the spectre of Peak Oil, even Peak Everything, and climate change looms above all plans.

Such a smallholder will not be interested in hand ploughing a field, broadcasting the seed and then scything, gathering and winnowing the crop. Far too much energy would be expended, to the extent that the farmers would starve trying to feed themselves.

Far better to build up an integrated pasture and forest system, whereby various animals can graze (sheep, goats, ducks, chickens) in harmony, maximising meat production beyond the numbers supplied above, as well as providing sideline benefits of vegetative produce.

In essence, grain production is a dead-end path. Once yields come close to the theoretical maximum there is very little that can be done to increase them further, without building your own genetic engineering lab and releasing all kinds of virulent filth upon the earth. Fundamentally, each additional species you introduce to a grain field reduces the overall productivity of your main crop.

Only through a synthesis of animal and plant within the growing area can increased yields be realised. While ever we are stuck in the two dimensional realm of the grain crop true productivity gains cannot be made, and so we cannot hope to live well in an uncertain future. It would seem, given this amateurish analysis, that suggestions we will find humanity's salvation via vegetarianism are misplaced. It's doubtful we'd even find the salvation of a single post-peak oil family. In fact, turning the earth over to grain fields might just make all our problems worse.

If you're hoping to survive peak oil, my advice would be to stick with the mixed agricultural systems that are emblematic of most "primitive" societies, and then whenever you meet someone claiming to have discovered the means to salve all of humanity's ills in one convenient spiritual package you will at least have the energy to run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.