Green Group discussion

Pat Brown wants every piece of meat consumed in the world to be made entirely from plants.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovati...

I love this idea. I hope it can break through. But I think the companies who raise animals for meat may not cooperate. I think the answer may be in having those companies switch themselves to get a share of the profits from selling plant-based "meats."

I think that the plant food idea might be able to get a solid foothold if they forget about excessive profits and instead put everything into getting a big market share. Cheaper prices for the best made goods are the biggest driver of practical innovation, not finding the cheapest way of manufacturing something without passing along the savings to the users.

Change comes by innovation, accident, perseverance and probably most of the time it is caused by the changing a environment that a company finds itself in. Because the changes are becoming more severe on a daily basis the companies that do not move fast enough might just become relics of the past, like the dinosaurs who couldn't get out of the way of whatever it was that pushed them off the planet.

The electric companies are still fighting alternative power systems. Hooking up mass storage systems to stabilize the power grids output would mimic how smaller power supplies are built using capacitors, which are small storage devices and have been around since Benjamin Franklin's time.

RCA was a leading corporation in electronics and yet they did not pick up on the flat screen but instead continued to produce the big glass picture tube type displays.

The nuclear industry is probably the biggest industry still using steam and yet they have nothing to do with geothermal power.

It probably all goes back to people wanting stability in their lives and think that keeping their manufacturing efforts in a rut, their lives will remain stable.

Automobile manufacturers were slow to adopt the electric car model. And yet they have jumped on the idea of self driving taxis as a way of boosting their current style of manufacturing output. One has to wonder if all the driverless taxis will be electric vehicles. Perhaps the car manufacturers that become taxi companies that haul freight and people are on the right track for their own survival.

Plants are usually grown using pesticides. Just when you thought it was safer... now there is pesticide rain. Mentioned in this article on growing plants for beer and wine.
https://www.ecowatch.com/glyphosate-w...

That is an interesting article. But pesticide rains are not new as the article suggests. I would say that they only got around to figuring it out just now. People just don't want to think that they have been eating all this junk all this time. Actually we have been eating it since time began. Even if we ban gylpho, whatever is used to replace it, will also replace it in the rain, the runoff, the drift of particles that go airborne long after it is applied. Probably the only thing that would work would be something that broke down immediately into harmless components. But then, you would have to apply more often.

I also don't believe that just because it says it is organic automatically means that it is free of unwanted materials. That's simply not true. Unless it is grown completely indoors, completely free of outside connections. Then you are faced with everything that was used to make it grow because it is in an unnatural environment. Safe materials can be combined with other materials so that they can be delivered to the plant. The binding material itself can be toxic. The tests are very specific and do not take in account all the substances that are present, nor do they test the combinations that naturally result when the independent substances are naturally combined in the plant.

A long time ago I used to think rainwater was water, that it was clean water, evaporating by itself forming clouds of clean water. Then acid rains came. That was 50 years ago. The acid rain people did a phenomenal amount of research and still are doing it. But it's subject to the human equation at work. They are not looking for anything but acid rain. The other things in the water are some one else's job. By compartmentalizing everything we know, knowledge gaps are created, knowingly or unknowingly, and can exist for decades.

Specialization is great except that it misses far more that it finds. Like pay to play education that educates far fewer people than free education. It looks good on paper but is a massive failure in the real world right outside our windows.

What got me thinking about rainwater and what else was in it 10 years ago was an article that said that bacteria were not only present in the clouds, it was found far up in the atmosphere and rode the water cycle, from Earth to sky and back down again. People are still trying to figure out if bacteria effect the way the water cycle operates.

It was only 15 years ago that people got to thinking that the African dust that was forming rain storms and clouds in Africa could be traveling across oceans to other continents. Not to mention dropping down anywhere, such as the Caribbean where it is not good for the coral there. The dust had been blowing round the world for a couple of billion years. But it was only now having a bad effect on coral around the world. One possibility was that there was more dust in air.

A much stronger possibility was that the dust was now transporting all kinds of substances we now put into the dust. And the fact that there was more dust meant that there was more of what we added to the dust being transported to far off places. The water is polluted globally. They tell us small exposures are safe. But does anyone know if small exposures over a lifetime are as safe? How about small exposures of so much crap and garbage that when the small amounts of everything is piled up in front of you, its not such a small amount anymore. The sum of the individual parts is greater than the individual parts themselves.

If we knew all this stuff was happening in the rain water all this time, why are we know wondering how other things we never checked for could be in the rainwater? Because all the knowledge was compartmentalized and an additional layer of insulation was added called intellectual property which only protects profits and senility and does far more damage than it prevents. That's the I thought of it first [translation: patented or copyrighted it first] and I want everyone to pay me for my discovery for something that was probably already known somewhere else.

Ironically most of the patents given out for genetic engineering are for processes that Mother Nature does every second of everyday that the world exists. How can a person get a patent for something the Earth does naturally? One offshoot of this practice is that the word organic doesn't mean mean safe, or clean, or healthy, it just means probably could be safe, clean, and healthy. That's a big price to pay so a few people can live in an imagined life of luxury. Imagined because it includes all the pollution they think they are escaping.

Before patents were invented, the world shared everything that was discovered. Everywhere people could benefit from the discovery of others and improve their life styles. Knowledge blossomed like the radiation of life during the Cambrian Explosion when almost all the lineages of animals developed in 20 million years.

I wrote a sci-fi novel where the weeds were genetically modified to reject poisons in the environment instead of regular plants because they had a greater will to survive. And people had to eat heavily medicated food that was administered by nanobots inside their bodies so all their daily personal needs and protections were met. The part of the country that wasn't underwater was run by corrupt corporate officials. It was supposed to be a joke. It wasn't supposed to happen in my life time.

Dust off the Sahara, which blows high across the Atlantic, fertilises the Amazon rainforests. Thanks to NASA and other satellite operators we can see this happening. However the dust carries many tiny particles of burnt or dried rubbish, from old tyres to camel dung and human waste. Burning is the usual way of getting rid of rubbish in Africa.
This dust is known to disimprove air quality for people on the Canary Islands, and across the ocean in Florida.

Robots starting to replace manual labour on a Cornwall farm. Workers in Britain cost a bit more than workers in some other countries.

https://www.independent.ie/business/f...

The article says the farm robots will make life simpler for the farmer. What kind of farmer? The ordinary farmer? Or a large Corporation masquerading as a farmer? All you see is one arm, where is the rest of it? The answer is simple if the robot is free anyone can use it but if you look closely at the picture the chance of that robot costing less than a luxury vehicle is non-existent.

Replacing people with robots only works if it also provides more jobs for people. All of this is driven by the profit line.

The effort to replace all drivers of commercial vehicles with automated driving vehicles hit it's first roadblock when it literally ran over a person riding a bicycle, killing them. It turns out these programs have bad "eyesight" toward cyclists on the road. There was a person behind the steering wheel but they were apparently using their robot brain [Read: Cell Phone] when the fatal accident occurred.

P. K. Dick spent a lot of time writing about what happens to people when their jobs are taken over by robots and they have little to do with a real job after that. That was 50 years ago, in another time and another place.

In Japan, the average age of a rice farmer a few years ago was seventy. Young people do not want to do this work, and who can blame them? So the Japanese had come up with servo-assisted lift gear - the farmers would step into the gear which flexed and lifted to enable them to lift heavy sacks.

True enough, if the robot arm becomes popular it will probably be made in a robot factory.

An Edible History of Humanity

Here's an author who looks at the shrinking number of people on the land and who thinks we should employ people on the land again.

One thing to consider is that using computers to view the land instead of our own eyeballs and legwork leads to an artificial view that is much better looking on paper then in reality.

An excellent article on ranching and agriculture in California and how soil improvement benefits everybody.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/ma...

Not much in it that I didn't know, apart from the studies themselves. I have added over eighteen inches of depth to my garden soil in twenty years.

My author blog on Goodreads this month covers the Royal Dublin Society Farm and Forestry Awards.
The message is for sustainable and better quality farming, with sustainable and more biodiverse forestry.

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

Here is a nice story about scattering the plants you need to farm, around the community to make it look prettier. In this case, hop plants and climbing unsightly barriers.
I would wonder at the safety of hops collected from beside a road... air pollution. But the hops are not growing for very long before they are picked.

https://www.care2.com/causes/the-beer...

Here is the site of the group called Hops On Lots which says they are going strong.
http://www.hopsonlotspgh.com/

More photos (and beer ads) in a magazine:
https://issuu.com/craftpittsburgh/doc...

Two stories about fruit and veg from Spain on the same day. I have to think they are connected. I'll leave you to work out how we join the dots.

Pick oranges for free as a farmer can't make money by selling them.
https://www.costa-news.com/latest-new...

Up to 45% of the fruits and veg for sale in Spanish markets may be stolen.
https://www.costa-news.com/costa-blan...

NASA used satellites to identify landslips in sloping terrain in Palu, Indonesia. The researchers who used the material, discovered that the terrain which had altered during an earthquake was mainly downhill of an aqueduct. The aqueduct was being used to provide irrigation for rice paddies.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...

The article seems to have been edited without thought for clarity. One line has 'researchers' and next we get 'Yun said' and later 'Bradley said'. At the bottom we are told Bradley is the lead author of a paper published in Nature Geoscience. We are not told where Bradley works.

The reason I include the story in this thread, is first, rice growing on an industrial scale needs to be carried out with attention to geology, and second,
" The slides were slowed or halted by the coconut palm plantations. "

Planting deep-rooted trees is suggested as a way to stabilise the soil, so the trees could be interspersed among paddies. Another reason why monocropping is harmful.

Industrial farming of cotton has led to only the white cotton being prominent when there are other kinds, and to many dyes being used, often with the residues affecting rivers.

So what about growing coloured cotton?
They're working on it.

https://singularityhub.com/2020/08/11...

"“We’ve seen some really beautiful bright yellows, sort of golden-orangey colors, through to some really deep purple,” Filomena Pettolino, a scientist on MacMillan’s team, told Australia’s ABC News. The team is also working on black cotton, which would be a significant achievement—black dyes are notoriously the nastiest, most toxic of the lot. And the less dye the better.

Though they’re favored for speed and quality, synthetic dyes can include formaldehyde and heavy metals which stain the skin and cause cancer. That early-90s dream to make jeans with blue cotton? It’s just as relevant today. In the Chinese province of Xintang, where 300 million pairs of jeans are dyed each year, the toxic runoff flows into rivers by the gallon."

Farming almonds in California - we have mentioned in other threads that this is water-hungry and unsustainable. Now the trees are being ripped up.

"Hartwig is in charge of water management for the mega-property of Woolf Farms, an estate of over 20,000 acres (8,000 hectares) around the small market town of Huron.

This is the first time that the farm has had to uproot so many trees before they reach the end of their life.

From drip irrigation systems to cutting-edge sensors installed throughout the property, everything has been designed to optimize the use of water.

But almond trees are very thirsty, and this is a valley that is sorely lacking in water.

After several years of very low rainfall and a particularly dry winter, California authorities turned off the tap to agricultural producers. In April, after a series of calculations, the farm had to face the hard facts.

"There is not enough water on the market" to keep the almond trees alive, Hartwig said. "It's surely painful to make those changes."

And for good reason: The California almond market is worth nearly $6 billion a year.

California produces 80 percent of the almonds consumed worldwide, a market that has doubled in 15 years driven by demand for substitutes for animal products, such as almond milk."

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-blister...

Directly related to the above.

https://gizmodo.com/how-the-californi...

"California produces “over a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of the country’s fruits and nuts” and much of its dairy products, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture. That means what’s happening in the West is going to have implications for the entire nation. If we don’t move quickly to address climate change and how we manage water resources, this could become a problem that only gets harder to manage every year.

As farmers fight for water, multiple types of food could increase in price due to this megadrought. Timothy Richards, an agricultural economist at Arizona State University, said we’re already starting to see this happen.

“So far we’re seeing avocado prices up 10%,” Richards said. “All of the usual culprits that are water-intensive in California agriculture are starting to increase in prices.”"

Better get use to stuff that doesn't need as much water instead of catering to the unreasonable thirst of a profit crazy industry trying to placate a bunch of spoiled consumers.

Just what is on the list of low water usage edibles?

California is choking on kelp and inland waterways are choking on algae. What raw materials can be harvested from these products? Can it be hauled out, dried, and processed like recycled plastic?

Certainly that kind of material could be fed to livestock.
If salt was washed out, it could be used as fertiliser instead of small fishes, which include fish fry.

A different approach - plants are sometimes good at picking up minerals from soil and could be cropped as a growing mine.

https://singularityhub.com/2024/03/28...

"But while the idea is still at a nebulous stage, there is considerable potential.

“In soil that contains roughly 5 percent nickel—that is pretty contaminated—you’re going to get an ash that’s about 25 to 50 percent nickel after you burn it down,” Dave McNear, a biogeochemist at the University of Kentucky, told Wired.

“In comparison, where you mine it from the ground, from rock, that has about .02 percent nickel. So you are several orders of magnitude greater in enrichment, and it has far less impurities.”

Phytomining would also be much less environmentally damaging than traditional mining, and it could help remediate soil polluted with metals so they can be farmed more conventionally. While the focus is currently on nickel, the approach could be extended to other valuable metals too.

The main challenge will be finding a plant that is suitable for American climates that grows quickly. “The problem has historically been that they’re not often very productive plants,” Patrick Brown, a plant scientist at the University of California, Davis, told Wired. “And the challenge is you have to have high concentrations of nickel and high biomass to achieve a meaningful, economically viable outcome.”"