Zoom w a View: Corn (and fuel?) is disappearing from the fields

I motorcycled to Ports Burwell and Bruce yesterday and could have stopped twenty times to snap photos of soy and cornfields carved in straight lines.

Soybeans will occasionally shoot like hard bullets against my windshield.


Thankfully, cobs of corn don’t stray as far as the road.

The sight of vast fields caused me to stop more than once and as I walked across an open stretch I was amazed at the amount of debris left behind.


It crunched underfoot and I wondered if it could be used as fuel of some sort.

Could it be compressed and burned in small stoves for example?

I’ve planned a few winter projects using wood from the Dorchester dump and I’d enjoy using dry stalks and cobs to heat my shed.

***

Can corn debris be used as fuel?

Aren’t there such things as corn (kernel) stoves?

Wouldn’t annual plant debris be measured in millions of tonnes?

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Book Review: Like to Eat? The Omnivore’s Dilemma a ‘must read’

I’m reading three books at the same time, four if I count the one I peek at during TV commercials that concerns Bob Dylan’s big song, Like a Rolling Stone, and though The Little Green Handbook by R. Neilsen is loaded with amazing facts, figures and charts [U.S. military budget is 42 % of gov’t spending and rising, education is less than 7%] I spend most of my time with my nose in The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

I’m on page 219, slightly over halfway through the very readable text, and getting an alarming and long-overdue education about our continent’s over-reliance on corn and industrial-sized, fossil-fuel-driven farming practices that debase humans, animals and our ecological surroundings. [And it’s true. If factory farms had glass walls many of us would never eat beef, pork or chicken again.]

But I’m also learning about how farming can be a very innovative, rewarding and environmentally friendly vocation or life.


For example, author Michael Pollan spends time on a family farm that cultivates grasses, mainly dependent on free sunlight, that in turn support the healthy growth of a wide variety of animals and by-products.

Chickens team up with cows to manage the grass and replenish the soil, chickens and rabbits team up to provide a unique cash crop, turkeys keep grape vines in tip-top shape, pigs turn cow patties and grass into free, rich compost, and together with a farmer who knows more about plants and animals than 20 factory farmers put together forms an enterprise that rewards the land rather than kills it.

Read the following quote and tell me where the author was at the time - a factory farm or grass farm.

“Unfolding here before us, I realized, was a most impressive form of alchemy: cow patties in the process of being transformed into exceptionally tasty eggs.”

I recommend the book highly to anyone who wants to eat healthy food and leave the air, water and land in good condition for future generations.

[Check Recommended Reading in the right hand panel for a link to an even better book review and go to Motorcycle Miles to read a bit about my next adventure.]

Really, I’m not 100% juiced but I wanna be

Ever since reading Sugar Blues by William Dufty several years ago I banned soda pop from my diet.

Get offa my porch, stop your knockin’, I say. Thou shalt not cross my lips.

I don’t drink Coca-Cola, Pepsi or Dr. What’s-his-name because even though I run on a treadmill and ride a recumbent bike 3 - 4 times per week I have trouble keeping my love handles down to the size of small pillows.

Besides, one beer or can or Guinness before supper is surely enough sugary drink for one day.


[I repeat: This is not me. It's definitely some other guy.]

“Since 1985, an American’s annual consumption of high-fructose-corn-syrup has gone from 45 to 66 pounds. You might think that this growth would have been offset by a decline in sugar consumption, since HFCS often replaces sugar, but that didn’t happen: During the same period our consumption of refined sugar actually went up by five pounds.”

“What this means is that we’re eating and drinking all that HFCS on top of the sugars we were already consuming. In fact, since 1985 our consumption of all added sugars - cane, beet, HFCS, honey, maple syrup, whatever - has climbed from 128 pounds to 158 pounds per person.” pg. 104, The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Now, I do like to drink real fruit juices but they’re getting squeezed off grocery store shelves by cocktails and blends and stuff that is a very poor excuse to cram more HFCS down my throat. (We’re buried in cheap corn, so get used to HFCS being added to just about everything we eat and drink.)

So, help. What’s a poor boy to do?

I want good juice in the fridge. What’s best?

More meaty quotes from The Omnivore’s Dilemma

I generally do my best reading while riding a recumbent bicycle in the basement.

My concentration is deep, pages fly by, I underline with jiggly lines many world famous quotes (well, they will be once everyone reads the same book and sees things the way I do), calories fall to the floor, beads of sweat form on my brow.

Not all of the beads are produced by the much-needed exercise.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma Michael Pollan writes:

“When humankind acquired the power to fix nitrogen (make fertilizer from mountains of ammonium nitrate left over from WWll munition production in the U.S.), the basis of soil fertility shifted from a total reliance on the energy of the sun to a new reliance on fossil fuel.” (pg. 44)

Of course, being self-reliant is commendable in many ways but we supplant the sun at great personal and environmental cost.

The personal: Mountains of fertilizer turn into mountains of corn which, along with a mountain of antibiotics and truckloads of fat, feed millions of cows that become the meal of the day (in North America we eat a fifth of our meals in cars and feed a third of our children at a fast-food outlet every day) for an obese population.


The environmental: “The ultimate fate of the nitrates spread on cornfields (e.g. in Iowa) is to flow down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where their deadly fertility poisons the marine ecosystem... creating a dead zone as big as the state of new Jersey”. (pg. 47)

I’ve finished only 20 per cent of the book so I’ve many miles to pedal before more important lessons have been learned.

But I can almost guarantee I’ll be less beefy by the time I reach the last page.

Quotes from ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ keep beef off my plate

I should take a few steps back from the line re meatloaf in my last post because, I’m not kidding, I have been eating a lot less meat for quite some time.

Though I do eat meat on occasion (yup, I’m a flexitarian) it is hardly ever beef - due to the influence of several books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen and informative comments from friends.

Good ideas in some books and great ideas in others usually find a home inside my little round head.

For example, I will never forget the sardonic Scaramouche (from the book of the same name by Rafael Sabatini) who was "born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

I read the book twice while in my teens (all the way through too) and feel I am still much like him, though rather than mad I think the world is just a bit out of whack, slightly off kilter and in need of an extensive tune up. Now.

One of the three books I have on the go right now is affecting how I look at every meal I eat, and I eat a lot of them.


In The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan I am learning about the unsettling connections between oil, fertilizer, dead land, cheap corn, unnaturally fat cows, tons of antibiotics, truck loads of fat and doctors on factory farms who say things like:

“Hell, if you gave them (cattle) lots of grass and space, I wouldn’t have a job.”

It’s enough to make me take several more steps back from meatloaf.