Pellet stove

[Duane Bozarth]

US farm policy is a complex multi-headed hydra just as is US energy policy or any other area of national interest. The days of non-government interference are long gone for all.

We are currently (and have been for approximately 20 years) engaged in continuing international negotiations regarding US and world farm policies. It would be imo very short-sighted to US economic interests to not continue such negotiations but it would also be quite short-sighted to not ensure that the other nations make similar modifications to their policies. The problem so far has been that most of the trade agreements which have been signed have been kept by the US but not by the foreign nations. This, btw, is not a unique situation for agriculture--it is a general pattern of US trade policy, it seems.

[Brock Ulfsen]

All the usual suspects. Big global companies, developement is mostly by Deapartment of Primary Industries, lots of local seed companies producing hybrid seed to. Universities have largely been urban until recently, so had little to do with horticulture.

Hmmm, mid-chest would be about right heritage varieties, 1m to 1.5m. Crops growing here are usuall half that high.

Here we go, a traditional variety, 2m (6ft) and a modern hybrid 60cm (2ft).

....Brock.

Pictures of horsedrawn harvesters here show wheat tended to be about 1m tall, definitely over waist height, as opposed to barely knee high for the current varieties I see in paddocks by the hyway.

[Doug Miller]

Coming right up...

" A rare type of stony meteorite which contains large amounts of the magnesium-rich minerals olivine and serpentine and a variety of organic compounds, including amino acids. Although fewer than 100 carbonaceous chondrites are known..."

Do you *really* think that's where Earth's petroleum came from? Rare meteorites, of which fewer than a hundred are known? Get real.

[Brock Ulfsen]

So explain Carbonaceous Chondrites.

....Brock.

[Brock Ulfsen]

Note the word _largely_ (whcich was required for a long time in the US peer reviewed press to be allowed to make any references to abiotic origin.

That is a reference to the conventional petroleum geology theory, which has problems of its own, and relies on biological truisms that predate the discovery of extremophile bacteria. I might note that the Russians, who believe in abiotic origins for oil seem to be finding it where they look with at least the same level of reliability of the US based theorists looking in somewhat different places.

....Brock.

[Brock Ulfsen]

Much of the arable land is used for grass, or grain to feed cattle, where the carbon is released into that atmosphere as either exhaled CO2 or farted methane. If we used that same land to grow hemp to make paper and stored the paper in nice dry buildings (made of fibrepanels produced from hemp) for centuries, that carbon would be sequested, and hemp produces more biomass per acre tham grass.

....Brock.

[Larry Caldwell]

The controversy is caused by a bunch of simplistic morons kicking the dirt in a desert and proclaiming that all petroleum resources are from the same source. There is little doubt that deep methane is left over from either the formation of the earth or as a fossil remnant of the earth's original methane atmosphere. OTOH, methane in sedimentary strata is probably the remnant of decomposed organic matter. In both cases, heat and pressure can cook methane into longer carbon chain molecules and free hydrogen, also reducing CO2 to CO, yielding our familiar natural gas fuel.

[Larry Caldwell]

Sort of. It is pointless to grow a large amount of biomass without preserving it, since the decay process releases all the carbon back into the atmosphere. Even large biomass crops, like timber, reach CO2 equilibrium in only a few decades. Building materials sequester a lot of carbon, not only in the lumber, but in cellulose insulation and other manufactured wood products.

Unfortunately, the biosphere just doesn't have the capability of scrubbing all the fossil fuel carbon out of the atmosphere. You would have to cover all the arable land on the planet with crops, and then not allow those crops to decompose, in order to keep up with the release of carbon from coal burning.

Most of the fossil carbon on the earth takes the form of carbonate fossils, like limestone, marble and chalk, which are fairly inert. Little sea critters are still laying down their fossil shells, and over the long run will remove all the carbon we are dumping into the atmosphere.

[Larry Caldwell]

Until the algae dies.

[Larry Caldwell]

Helium is an inert gas that seeps through anything. Methane is a chemically active substance that forms hydrates with water to form methane ices at temperatures as high as 50 degrees. Technically these methane ices are termed clathrates. The bound methane is not a gas, and doesn't escape anywhere.

Most petroleum reserves are found under salt domes, where ancient seas laid down thick organic deposits, then dried, sealing the deposits under a layer of impermeable salt. This all happened long before the earth had an oxidizing atmosphere. You will recall that the earth has only had free oxygen in its atmosphere for the last 600 million years. Prior to that, the earth enjoyed about 3 billion years of anaerobic fertility. The comments about fossil fuel being decomposed dinosaurs are a JOKE, only taken seriously by the uneducated. Even coal deposits mostly date from the carboniferous, about 350 to 300 mya, an era dominated by insects, crustacea, and the first 4-footed animals, mostly amphibians. Coal deposits far outweigh all petroleum reserves, and nobody denies that coal is fossil plant matter.

You forget that the issue is not theoretical. They have to drill wells into oil bearing strata, and big paychecks depend on the process. They have studied core samples from oil wells, and the oil occurs in biotic strata, not in abiotic strata. Your theory is unfortunately running afoul of cold, hard fact.

[JoeSixPack]

That's completely wrong. Horticulture largely pertains to urban and commercial plant production for food and aesthetics. Agriculture pertains to rural and commercial food production from plants and animals. Universities are situated in cities, but their agricultural colleges are fully engaged in rural food production in all areas.

[JoeSixPack]

Giant plants are not so hard to develop, but that's not usually the goal of plant breeders. The key is the efficiency at which plants convert sunlight, water and nutrients into the final biomass product. There's not much room to improve the efficiency of photosynthesis, it has become very efficient over the last few billion years, and the efficiency of our photovoltaic cells lag behind them quite badly.

Bigger plants take longer to grow, take more water and nutrients, so what's the advantage? When grain is the product, there's usually more to gain by shortening the plant, thereby diverting more of the growing plant's energy to developing the head of grain instead if building large stalks. Nature makes plants tall because they usually have to rise above the competition and capture the precious sunlight. In a field of one type of grain, there's no reason for the plants to compete with each other by being taller.

If bulk biomass is the key, it may not be the best strategy to grow a forest of 12-foot high sugarcane that takes 11 months to grow, when the same biomass equivalent can be delivered from a crop of sugar beet harvested 3 times a year.

There's been considerable research and discussion on these subjects, so I recommend you investigate some of it.

[JoeSixPack]

Don't ignore all the indirect ones. Subsidies on fertilizers, pesticides and a phoney "loan" program that will never be repaid, amounts to a 50% subsidy paid to the US farmer on every bushel of grain.

President Bush Challenges EU on Farm Subsidies By VOA News 04 July 2005

President Bush says the United States will drop subsidies to American farmers - if the European Union does the same in Europe. He told British television Sunday, ending those subsidies would allow African countries to compete better, reducing their need for international aid.

President Bush will attend he Group of Eight Summit this week, which will discuss aid to Africa. But farm subsidies are very popular in France and Germany, and the U.S. challenge is not thought likely to be accepted.

[JoeSixPack]

Exactly, but it's not a question of the total carbon budget. It's a question of emission rates exceeding assimilation rates. That's what they fail to get.

About 55 million years ago, there was a very rapid rise of global warming, almost 12C worldwide, in "just an instant" in geologic terms. It has taken a very long time for the temperatures to creep down to recent levels. It seems obvious that assimilation rates for carbon being fixed outside out of the cycle are very slow indeed. In other words, burning biofuels is just a way to pass the carbon around faster.

[Duane Bozarth]

You are completely off the wall, aren't you... :(

[JoeSixPack]

Until you can concoct a way to dismiss away all of this:

....your declarations are running afoul of cold, hard fact.

[JoeSixPack]

If it were not for the existence of a few rational thinkers who choose to maintain an open mind, instead of living up to the stereotypical "hall of laughing scientists" that have been proven wrong time after time, we wouldn't have been blessed with the many scientific breakthroughs we now take for granted.

When you think about it, many radical scientific breakthroughs have come as a result of dogged determination against a torrent of peer ridicule for many years. Continental drift, nanobacterial ulcers and powered flight are just a few examples. Our friend here seems to have the iron will to be counted among the fools who want to circle the wagons and shoot anyone who's not inside the comfortable little circle.

[JoeSixPack]

If you didn't know that plants compete for sunlight, water and nutrients, you shouldn't have been having this discussion.

[Duane Bozarth]

You took a joke and made it the only thing of a total post you replied to.

[JoeSixPack]

Basic agronomics, look it up before you make a complete fool of yourself.