cereal grain prices

so what's going on here? i've been noticing food prices rising a bit over the last six or seven months...milk, bread, butter, cheese...staples in my house...even macdonald's is mulling a price hike...you know when fast food raises its prices somethig must be going on...but what? have a look at cereal grain prices and many things may become clearer...let's just look at price rises in the last seven months since july of 2010 ( and here's where i got the data
http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=wheat )
barley went from $156.36 a tonne to $189.60...okay barley is not a big time staple so who's going to notice except, maybe, beer drinkers or those who like barley in their soups ( which is what it gets used for here)...maize was $163.92 and is now $284.06 ( all these are prices per tonne) wheat went from $195.82 to $348.69 ( that explains the cost of a bunch of things at the local supermarket).. rice was $470.68 and is now $536.98 ( clearly the most expensive of all the cereals...for want of a better explanation[and i am open to hearing better ones] i have to think demand is the key here...more people eat rice as a staple so the demand keeps prices up) finally sorghum went from $132.40 to $221.58...not the steepest price rise, but it is the fifth most important cereal grain grown in the world and feeds the poorest of the poor in south america and especially in africa...any increase in its price is going to financially squeeze those who can least afford it and who already expend most of their income on food...so why the spike in prices? well...the hacks at the national corn growers association are for ever gushing about the wonders of ethanol and biofuels and how corn is great raw material for those processes...which it may be...but in the food system we live in corn is feedstock for the processd and fast food industries...from high fructose corn syrup to feed for beef it is the raw material that makes fast food work...every kernel of corn that goes into the fuel tank doesn't go into hot pockets or big macs...just competes with them...so the dollar menu is up for inflation...wheat? well some big wheat producers like russia and australia have been having some climate issues that have impacted their crops ( brazil too)...climate change..la nina...wild fires...just bad luck...whatever you want to put down as the cause the fact is the price is up because supply is down and demand is probably steady...you might want to ascribe sorghum prices as being subject to poor production methods, bad transport systems, corrupt governments, and a host of other third world ills..and that could be part of it...globalitarian export model economics and austrerity measures crammed down the throats of debtor nations ( debtor nations without thermonuclear weapons and advanced militaries, that is )by the world bank, imf, and archer daniels midaland, doing their part to destroy tarditional cultures and their agricultural systems may play a less than minor part as well...things are a bit unsettled around the world right now...people are unhappy with many facets of life and they are disinclined to be quietist any longer...lots of people in the streets...mostly in the, to use unforunately industriocentric definitions, "developing" and "underdeveloped" world...i have to wonder how much of that unrest is the result of an ominous rise in food prices...whatever the cause of that increase might be...to paraphrase orwell..."if you want to eat your christmas dinner in peace you'd do well to insure everyone else has one too." we need to take a close look at how we do business and how we treat the ecosystems we are a part of ( despite our human exceptionalism that tells us we just happen to live on the planet and don't have to take it seriously) before the ecosystems show us exactly how dependent we are on them.

the photos, incidently, are of hard red winter wheat in the half barrel ( and a few beds) in my back yard, and in the garden on campus...i will be planting spring wheat at home and on campus as well, and, if we can keep the starlings off it ( i am told the bird tape will do the trick...and it won't harm the starlings...just distract and unsettle them) we'll see how it does...it is such a small crop that i can water it so the vagaries of climate should not be an issue for it...but who knows what will go on between now and harvest.

if something of a tedious pattern is emerging...

....you could, i suppose. blame me for continuing to post when not a lot is going on...then again i'm doing the apple trees precisiely because there's not alot of anything else to do at the moment...there's about a foot-and-a-half of snow in my backyard...the beds are buried...and my storage experiment is in obvious need of a substantial adjustment...an embarassment i know...but i am learning as i go so bear with me...there is research going on into that and i wll be writing more about my thoughts on how to make next year's harvest of jerusalem artichokes more readily accessable through the winter as the thoughts and information coalesce into a plan...meanwhile there are a dozen apple trees in various stages of development under the light ( the original two are no longer unfortunately...these are sprouted form apples grown in michigan and i am hopeful of a better success rate)...the first photo is of one that hasn't fully ejected its seedcase yet...it is greening up nicely and will free itself soon enough...the second photo is of a seedling that escaped form its case yesterday and is preparing to turn towards the light and open ( i know this is self-evident...pardon my geekieness at it all)...and the last photo is of a tree that has been loose for a week...i have more seeds but i have not started the germinating process yet because 1) i want to see how this set does and, 2) there is a dearth of room for any more plants right now and i will be starting tomatoes at the end of this month...unless i scrounge up a third table, more apple trees will have to wait...it's winter and everything is out of season...be patient please...more variety in plants and subject matter ( storage, water use, erosion, photos of seedling corn to compare morphology with teosinte, the official opening of the garden on campus for its second season, winter wheat, spring wheat, wheat grass, gamagrass, yams, etc.) is forthcoming as it finds its time.

fecundity

well...i've got a dozen apple tree seedlings up and running....four of the batch of seeds i put in to germinate on the seventh of this month have come along far enough to find their way into pots ( i still haven't located any peat pots in the area and my mail order bulk shipment isn't here yet...so i used plastic again...eco-sin i know...but these trees weren't going to wait alot longer...when it's time, it's time) so i spent a few minutes in the basement this evening and there they are...since the apples i'm eating for breakfast are rendering up so many seeds i feel obligated to try to use at least some of them...i have no idea what the success rate will be...the first two that i germinated from that mealy washington state apple did not survive more than a month...i've gone back over the research i did on raising apple trees from seeds and i don't think i did anything inapropriate, but that doesn't seem to have made a difference...we'll see if the more locally produced seeds have a better average...i have spots for half of this batch...if they all prosper i may have fruit trees to give away later this year...stay tuned

seeds

"the story of seeds, in a nutshell, is a tale of evolution bursting with questions. its earliest episode concerns how and when the first seed plant evolved rfom its fern-like ancestors, with other episodes about why seeds have dormancy and what mmakes them germinate; why some seeds are rich in oil and others in starch; why some seeds are big and others small; why some ar poisonous and some are palitable."
from " an orchard invisible: a natural history of seeds." by jonathan silvertown.p 4

"to see things in the seed, that is genius."
laozi

i am not completely sure what makes seeds germinate...what the exact mechanism is...moisture and dark seem to be key elements...warmth also seems to help some...but not others...nothing is universal i suppose...not many categorical absolutes to give reassurance...the eight apple tree seeds i put into damp paper towels on the last day of 2010 certainly weren't waiting around for things to warm up...twenty-eight days later and they're all out of the baggie and into some sort of pot( i don't seem to be able to find peat pots in the lawn and garden sections of any big box or home improvemnent store so i improvised with some plastic containers...time to go online to johnny's select seeds and order some in bulk i suppose)...i'll be starting tomatos soon...the rest of the seeds on campus and at home are going straight into the gorund...most before the last frost because they want a cycle of cold to stimualte germination...the gamagrass needed that and its what the teosinte is in for...the spinach and arugula too...not the cowpeas though...they like the soil to be warm before they will sprout....bulbs, seeds. spores, tubers, rhyzomes...so many strategies for plants to reproduce and spread themselves...so much energy put into the next generation...dna is tenacious stuff.

it is still too cold and the ground too frozen to dig any tubers to fry...some adjustments will have to be made in my storage technology for the next fall's harvest...if i were relying on these for subsistence i'd be in pretty bad shape about now...it's been two weeks since i retrieved any and that was a very marginal haul...i've been checking the ground underneath the mulch in the yard and it seems to be a bit more workable...but i am not convinced that it will be the answer to accessability...it's worth looking into from an ease of execution standpoint, but i am researching root cellars just in case...i wonder if i would need a city permit to dig one? the idea of using the ground as storage is so appealing that i will have some difficulty in letting that go...refirigeration and consunerism have blinded us to the ingenuity of our ancestors...the idea of using my great-grandfather's technology to thumb my nose at the utility company and "free market' precepts is just about irresistable...sounds like a long term project to me.

new plantings

it's been a long day for a multitude of reasons, so pardon me if i am brief...some of the seeds from the bag of michigan apples have progressed to the point of planting ( three to be exact) more areapproaching that time...but not yet...by the end of the week i imagine...enough time to run to the garden store and invest in some more peat pots...i prepared a soil mixture using regular potting mix along with some of my home-made compost and some spahgmum moss to retain some moisture in the pots...i watered the mix down thoroughly and in went the seedlings, covering the nacent root up to the seedcoat and i put them under the grow light...the second of the original trees has me a bit worried about its continued survival...it doesn't show up well in th ephoto but the large leaves (leafs?) are beginning ot discolor around the edges much as the other one did before it keeled over...distressing, but as i think about it, one of the reasons plants produce so many seeds ( or bulbs or tubers...once again, odd how the ammount of sugars or starches we utilize a sfoods form any given plant depends on how it reproduces...tuberous perennial, lots of starch, rhyzocarpous perennial, nor so much...think jerusalem artichokes versus chinese yams) is because not all of them are going to make it...safety in numbers for a new generation...imagine if every acorn grew to an adult oak...no lumber shortage...so if my original trees don't survive i have dozens of apple seeds, a box of baggies, many paper towels ( although i had to go to a janitorial supply store to find unbleached ones)water, and patience ( if i don't run the batteries down on other things) i will plant and try to nurtue until there are ( more) trees in the yard no matter how many apples i have to eat...it seems to be the way biology works...i will not panic...just regroup.

origins?

"...between about 9000 and 2000 b.p. populations throughout the world, already using very nearly the full range of available palatable foods, were forced to ajust to further increases in population by artificially increasing, not those resources they preferd to eat, but those which responded well to human attention and could be made to produce the greatest number of edible claories per unit of land."
from "The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture. by mark nathan cohen. p.15

"in aggregate we humans have shown no more restraint in contolling our numbers and appetites than bacteria on a perti dish of sugar or fruit flies on bananas in a flask or a deer population without predators."
from "Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture." by we jackson. p.247

william s. burroughs saw human behavior in terms of viruses...word virus was what he called his compulsion to write...events in my past have led me to think of them in terms of addiction...to me people seem hard-wired to procure and use ( or hoard) whatever it is that presses the "more!" button in their psychological or physiological make up...or both...mark cohen mnay be correct about the origins of agriculture...an expanding population in need of greater ammounts of food to sustain itself and a primal fear of starvation may have been driven to intervene in the lives of plants to quell that dread...when they began to see how much food they could produce the "more!" button got stuck in overdrive and the process of making a living by manipulating the lives of plants and the structure of the soil became a positive feedback loop...larger harvests=more people=more need pressed the "more!" button deeper and more land with fewer species ( those that produced the most) was brought into production and the philosophy of extraction gained creedance...humans ceased to be part of the natural world and instead became its "stewards"...coaxing cajoling, and bludgeoning it to meet our desire for "more!"...somewhere around two hundred and fifty years ago industrial manufacturing was born ( there were probably industries around as long as there have been humans, but it took machine tools to make the concept of extraction truly perilous) and the people with their hands on the control levers realized fairly early that they could artificially create a desire for "more!" with a combination of glitz and novelty...advertizing sent the "more!" button form overdrive to warp drive...so now we have fields of inedible crops that are feedstock for the packaged and processed foods we've been told we want and desire because they are an "improvement on nature"...along with legions of x-boxes, i-phones, computers, automobiles, air conditioners, televisions, microwaves, refirgerators, i-pods, digital camersa, dvr's,and play stations...all neatly packaged in dead, pulped trees and petrochemicals and with no end in sight...each one extracting its own share of resources and energy from the finite ammount the planet has to offer...how long can this go on?

it was about twelve degrees fahrenheit outside when i took the photos of the beds in the back yard...way too cold to dig tubers...so i spent the day perusing a number of books and ruminating on the state of the human race...i am profoundly disenchanted with anyone who holds themselves in a role of political or economic leadrship but i am encouraged by the number of people who have ceased to take them at their word and are preparing to move in much different directions economically and in the nature of social structures...hopefully the weather will begin to co-operate over the course of the next month or so and i can get back to the practical matters involved in parts of pursuing a different path...the apple seeds are coming along and it looks like at least another half dozen trees will be ready for potting in the next few weeks...more on that in the monday update...i ordered heirloom tomato seeds form baker creek seeds today and will be going through the process of starting them and using the grow light for more than just trees...the next season of the garden is almost on us and work will begin in that direction very soon...if those proceses interest you stay tuned.

just taking a look

i was on campus this evening for a class and since i had some time beforehand i went by the garden...the temperatures have been alternating between points above and below freezing and i wanted to see if the landscaping staples i have used to hold the fabric down were being heaved up...things look fine...the technique worked out well last year and is doing so again...no loose ends flapping or straw blowing around...the eastern gamagrass needed to be at least eigth inches tall to store enough carbohyrates for spring growth ( that's what the university of missouri extention tells me anyway) so though it looks pretty dead it should be fine for spring ( i certainly hope so...out of the thirty seeds i planted in the fall of 2009 only those three germinated...i am told [u of m again] that once started gamagrass is alot like jerusalem artichokes in its tenacity...starting is the difficult part...the rest is apparently natural)...winter wheat is poking up through the snow...we'll be using some bird tape in an an effort to keep the starlings off our grain...we'll see how that works out...things in the garden seem about right for the eighteenth of january...supposedly colder weather is on the way towards the weekend...if things stay halfway moderate until friday i may try to dig some tubers up and eat them...stay tuned.