they're great!

"we allowed ourselves to become so numerous that we could not really grow the food we needed without enormous 'energy subsidies,' augmenting sunlight and muscle power in agriculture with industrially produced chemical fertilizers and fuel burning machinery for planting, harvesting, shipping, and processing. americans thus were farming not only the great plains of iowa and nebraska but also the gas wells of texas and alaska and the oil wells of the continental shelf offshore. even agriculture, the ultimate achievement in man's development of the takeover method of carrying capacity expansion, had become converted to drawdown methods. the most 'prosperous' nations were living on phantom carrying capacity but had not learned the concept." from "overshoot: the ecological basis for revolutionary change " by william r. catton, jr.___________________and industrial agriculture is how we live since there is " no post-agricultural society" [weiskel]...there is considerable irony in an industrial cornfield next to a supermarket and that irony has grown some since my last visit...not so much so in height...that seems to have topped out...but the ears are bigger and they are packed into a dense growth of cornstalks...some of these stalks are producing two ears instead of the usual one and that is new to me...and some of these plants are situated much closer than the usual one foot spacing ( and it could be two if the mechanical planter skipped, that was where i would traditionally see a stalk with two ears...more space = more corn in those days )...not so in this field...some of these plants seem to be about four inches apart...no wonder it looks like a jungle...a lot of the genetic engineering in corn has been aimed at getting it to tolerate being grown closer together ( even the recommended spacing for the sweet corn in the community garden was one foot...not so the heirloom hopi blue which doesn't like to have its leaves touch another plant ) and this stuff is crammed into this field and will produce a lot of feedstock for the processors...as an added bit of irony i found an abandoned portrait of tony the tiger at the margins of the parking lot so i took a photo of, if not a mother and child reunion, then a generational portrait...next week an update on the no till bean field ( still haven't located a farmer to talk to yet ) behind the big box stores...food production takes some odd turns.