There is, of course, a very simple solution to this problem: use urine as fertilizer. The only reason urine “rivals fertilizer” for pollution is because we’re not putting it on fields anymore.
This is just anti-Florida propaganda in a cloaked form.
Florida is a major producer of fertilizers.
And farms that were going seriously into organic are already well into it or gave up on it.
“Oh, look, organic worked so well for Sri Lanka.”
So unless they’re selling essentially boutique produce to urban markets where people care about organic stuff, they’ve decided it’s not worth the risks.
Also, visit sunny North Florida where you can smell the clouds of Ortho wafting through the night winds! 🙂
BTW, on methylethyl’s housing problem since we’re on the Florida subject: Atlantic coast?
If it’s West Palm Beach, try Vero Beach, stay out of Fort Pierce.
If it’s Daytona Beach, try Palm Coast, stay out of Daytona Beach and its near suburbs.
If it’s Saint Augustine, try Palm Coast as well or out by I-95 at SR 16, stay out of central Saint Augustine.
If it’s Jacksonville, try Green Cove Springs in Clay County, you can do some of your shopping in Saint Augustine that way.
You are going to have serious problems in Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade.
Living around Lake Okeechobee and commuting long distances is not a viable option.
We can do this again for the Gulf Coast, BTW, but you are really not going to like the state of reality.
If your husband wants to switch jobs again, make some inquiries in Gainesville and Ocala.
High Springs and Dunnellon would work pretty well for purchases, and if you want to go down market a bit but safely, there are other options in that area out toward Crystal River.
We are way too far north and rural for you to even begin to contemplate moving out this way.
It’s over 70 miles to the nearest semi-major city and 100+ miles to a bigger one.
Round-trip time from the nearest useful public airport (non-general aviation) is about eleven hours.
Most of the people from Up North look at the history of this area, especially two or three counties over, and decide that maybe buying a farm out in some rural part of Florida is neither peaceful nor safe.
And it’s not.
We use metric fucktons of fertilizers and pesticides out here.
What you are seeing is a fertilizer shortage in your nearby areas.
Alas, I am a Gulf Coast native, it’s where my family is, and… that’s where we’re at. My hometown’s still suffering a pretty awful hurricane-related housing shortage, so that’s a no-go. I seriously doubt he could get a job in G’ville, TBH. Not with Shands owning every medical facility and having to compete with bright young students for all the jobs. Plus the place is a cultural mindsuck and I don’t want to raise kids there… and the rents have tripled since the last time I lived there. They’ve got all the liberal crazy out the wazoo and always have. Ocala’s bloody expensive, last I checked. Could try Tally, but… I hate Tally. I have nice cousins there and I still hate it. Hills. Traffic. Corruption. Ack.
From what everyone tells us, the problem further west is twofold: a bunch of interlopers from CA and CO are trying to relocate there (says our realtor), and Navy Federal just moved their HQ to the area, importing TEN THOUSAND employees. Wish they’d had the foresight to build them an apartment complex or something. The office park is obscenely huge– a mile-long habitrail of glass boxes, like the worlds largest ant-farm. I’m not thrilled at moving there, but it’s got four large hospitals (=job security), a decent church that we already belong to, and…. yeah, that’s about it. Overall what I notice about the place is that it’s a grubby strip-mall-sprawl of a city with a gigantic population of homeless beggars, an extensive ghetto, and a drastic shortage of affordable housing in any part of town that’s not terrifying. Honestly not much even in the terrifying parts. After the hurricane, my hometown bulldozed at least half of its public housing projects, and I think we exported the residents… everywhere else in the panhandle.
It is what it is. Husband needs to work at least a couple years at a large hospital with up-to-date equipment, so he can put on his resume “yep, I know how to run that machine and I have a lot of experience at it”. I’d vastly prefer to go live in the back end of nowhere again, but there aren’t any large hospitals there.
On agriculture: to be fair, we use metric fucktons of fertilizer and pesticide because we have no soil to grow anything, no winter to kill the bugs, and 80-odd inches of rain/yr will wash dang near everything out of the soil– er sand. IMO we should be experimenting heavily with charcoal as a soil additive– it’s great at holding onto some of those nutrients and stays in the ground a long time. I’ve had good results in my own sandbox/garden. But perhaps it doesn’t scale well.
Sometime in the dystopian future, we’ll probably return to being a cattle-and-seafood economy, and maybe the Orange Blossom Special will once again bring tourists from NYC to Miami. The oysterbeds will recover once Atlanta gets depopulated and stops using up all our water, right?
On the plus side, this week in house-hunting wasn’t quite as depressing, and we’re learning the ropes, finally. Basically, there are all sorts of laws against discrimination in rental housing. But, if a landlord doesn’t want to lose his shirt, he MUST discriminate somehow. Criminal background check only gets you so far. All it takes is ONE meth lab, ONE central-american immigrant who moves in fifteen extra people, ONE trashy family that lets their (unreported) huge dog destroy every door in the house and leaves holes in the walls, and they lose money on the rental. Your odds of getting the rental go up exponentially if you just show up, in person, with the whole family, and talk to the landlord or the office staff: let them look you up and down and see that you’re not trailer trash, ghetto-tastic or meth-heads, that you have all your teeth, that your kids are well-behaved and your clothes aren’t sprinkled with dog hair. Or at least that’s my theory. We get a lot more response that way. Any office that does all their business online, gives you a box code to go look at the house, no humans involved… we never hear back from those.
Wishing you luck with the home search. Nowadays everybody’s talking about “biochar” seems like a fancy word for charcoal. Also makes me wonder what kind of farming indigenous people there did, but maybe they did not farm at all…
They did farm. I haven’t seen any info on pre-Spanish agriculture, but when Bartram came through after depopulation, he reported extensive abandoned citrus groves in places the Spanish had never even attempted to colonize.
“biochar” is just what you call it when you pay a lot of money to purchase it in bags. Anybody can collect branches and burn them in a trench for free. Calling it biochar lets you profit off people too dumb to figure that out.
Technically Tallahassee is closer to us than several other cities.
But I’d rather drive all the way over to Jacksonville or up into Georgia to get what we need than deal with anything in Leon County, especially Tallahassee.
The only county in Florida that ranks lower for me is Hillsborough.
You could talk me into visiting Miami again, but Tampa? Oh hell no.
One more attempt to help: Bay or Escambia?
If it’s Bay, good luck with that, try the areas around the NE diagonal road that leads out of the city limits, someone may have sold another farm that’s getting converted to rental spec houses.
There was one out that way I’d looked at, got outbid by one of those big REITs that builds an entire subdivision of rental houses at one time.
It’s probably full of 3k+ square foot monster houses by now.
What’s happened to everything from Santa Rosa over to the time zone line put me off wanting to buy any farm land out that way.
If it’s Escambia … you’re going to dislike this suggestion, but it could be a temporary way out.
Ever thought about Baldwin County, Alabama?
Specifically, ever thought about Bay Minette?
What you don’t like about Alabama gets compensation in the form of much cheaper rent.
If you need a carry permit, I believe FL and AL have reciprocity for that, and as of the latest legislation in AL, I also believe it’s “shall issue” now.
But the whole US 90 corridor through Defuniak Springs and Crestview just sucks now because of all of the traffic, although US 98 manages to be almost as bad as US 41 through South Florida.
I like a good US highway to get off I-10 and I-75, especially if I can skip most of the agricultural stations that eat up time when I’m driving in a truck, but US 90 and US 98?
I’ll just stay on I-10 on the way to pick up stuff Out West, thanks.
The housing shortage in Bay remains intense. We’re currently in Baldwin, oddly enough. It’s a really lovely place– very low crime, polite drivers, hands-off homeschool regs. But no large hospitals, too far to commute except maybe from Lillian, and there are no functional Orthodox churches– we already commute to Escambia for that. We can’t really afford the place, and we’re having to put my husband up in a motel for the work week (12-hour shifts on consecutive days is not commuter friendly)– on week 4 now, and it’s like paying rent on a second house. A crappy house with no kitchen. After a year, we’re kind of desperate to be closer to church, so we can attend all the other services. Haven’t been to vespers in ages, because we end up getting kids home too late at night. Would also be nice to stop paying state income tax and 10% sales tax on groceries.
Don’t need a farm, would settle for a place to put up a clothesline and a patch to grow pumpkins. Not gonna get that in a rental, I think. Sigh. But that carry permit might be handy when we end up moving to the ghetto 😉
“They can’t sell eating bugs on nutritional or ecological grouns so they’re probing another area to attack.”
They’re pushing cannibalism now, but I’m OK with it given some caveats.
Out here you see a lot more of the cycle of life.
And so I’d like to invite the WEF to a Special Dinner where they’ll be the Special Guests.
We’re still figuring out how to build a pressure cooker that seats six fat WEF tards, so it’s going to be a while, and Waste Not Want Not, naturally.
Besides, it’d get a bit Oregon Trail around here otherwise.
“You shot 94 kg of meat, but you were only able to carry 44 kg back to the wagon.”
Dammit, there goes another of my Modest Proposals: Eat The WEF, but prepare them properly, they probably have prion diseases because they’re all Mad Cows, not to mention Chimpox and The Coof.
You needn’t eat them directly. Each one of them represents a large amount of nitrogen (I mean, yeah, we export phosphates, but nitrogen comes from the air and living things).
Here’s the secret to growing amazing pumpkins, squash, and melons in our lovely Florida sandbox: dig a big hole, throw in some charcoal, dump in some gross stinky chunk of biological matter (roadkill works great), throw in more charcoal, cover it over, plant your pumpkins or whatever around the edge. The charcoal absorbs both nutrients and the stench, so you don’t get varmints digging it up (much), and keeps the nitrogen etc. around in the sand long enough for the plants to get it, instead of just washing into the nearest aquifer. Holds onto moisture, too. Win win win.
So… whatever’s too much for your pressure cooker would grow a LOT of pumpkins, cantaloupes, watermelons, loofahs… waste not, want not.
Horizontal transmission of prion diseases is a serious problem.
Defra couldn’t figure out that they were spreading prion diseases when they’d incinerate even a single infected animal back during The British Mad Cow Debacle.
Naturally when there’s a problem with supply chains in the countryside, the first thing that the government does is to assign city bureaucrats to solve agricultural problems with one-size-fits-all ignorance.
[ahem]
Still a bit sore about that after all these years!
I’m a blast at parties: “Hi, I’d like to talk to you about downer cows!” 🙂
So … the pressure cooker’s a required part of the process just so the local environment doesn’t wind up contaminated with transmissible prion diseases that are surprisingly hard to be rid of.
Unfortunately. No telling what they’re carrying.
135+ C for a half hour or more isn’t a light application of a pressure cooker either.
Also, you’ll find that you have an acidic soil problem eventually with all of that charcoal.
Mix in some potash to raise the pH out of the acidic range.
I don’t buy my charcoal: I usually just dig a pit, and burn a bunch of sticks and bark down to glowing coals and then douse it with the hose, so the ash comes with. So far, no pH issues. I dunno if I’m doing it right or if we just get so much rain that no matter how bad I screw it up, it all washes out by next season.
Diluted urine is a great fertilizer or compost kick-starter. Human poop can be composted (there’s right and wrong ways to do that) and afterwards is also excellent compost. Takes 6-12 months after you are done collecting it and your other compost materials but it is doable, especially in low rain/low water environments. We are literally flushing fertilizer down the drain. Close the nutrient cycle! Check out The Humanure Handbook. I declare that I have no conflicts of interest.
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There is, of course, a very simple solution to this problem: use urine as fertilizer. The only reason urine “rivals fertilizer” for pollution is because we’re not putting it on fields anymore.
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This is just anti-Florida propaganda in a cloaked form.
Florida is a major producer of fertilizers.
And farms that were going seriously into organic are already well into it or gave up on it.
“Oh, look, organic worked so well for Sri Lanka.”
So unless they’re selling essentially boutique produce to urban markets where people care about organic stuff, they’ve decided it’s not worth the risks.
Also, visit sunny North Florida where you can smell the clouds of Ortho wafting through the night winds! 🙂
BTW, on methylethyl’s housing problem since we’re on the Florida subject: Atlantic coast?
If it’s West Palm Beach, try Vero Beach, stay out of Fort Pierce.
If it’s Daytona Beach, try Palm Coast, stay out of Daytona Beach and its near suburbs.
If it’s Saint Augustine, try Palm Coast as well or out by I-95 at SR 16, stay out of central Saint Augustine.
If it’s Jacksonville, try Green Cove Springs in Clay County, you can do some of your shopping in Saint Augustine that way.
You are going to have serious problems in Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade.
Living around Lake Okeechobee and commuting long distances is not a viable option.
We can do this again for the Gulf Coast, BTW, but you are really not going to like the state of reality.
If your husband wants to switch jobs again, make some inquiries in Gainesville and Ocala.
High Springs and Dunnellon would work pretty well for purchases, and if you want to go down market a bit but safely, there are other options in that area out toward Crystal River.
We are way too far north and rural for you to even begin to contemplate moving out this way.
It’s over 70 miles to the nearest semi-major city and 100+ miles to a bigger one.
Round-trip time from the nearest useful public airport (non-general aviation) is about eleven hours.
Most of the people from Up North look at the history of this area, especially two or three counties over, and decide that maybe buying a farm out in some rural part of Florida is neither peaceful nor safe.
And it’s not.
We use metric fucktons of fertilizers and pesticides out here.
What you are seeing is a fertilizer shortage in your nearby areas.
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This sudden war on fertilizer smacks of a desire to organize food shortages.
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“a desire to organize food shortages”
There was some talk of food shortages last year and my first reaction was that any that occur would be manufactured on purpose.
The holodomor was just a badly organized attempt at collectivization, they know how to do it right, this time!
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Alas, I am a Gulf Coast native, it’s where my family is, and… that’s where we’re at. My hometown’s still suffering a pretty awful hurricane-related housing shortage, so that’s a no-go. I seriously doubt he could get a job in G’ville, TBH. Not with Shands owning every medical facility and having to compete with bright young students for all the jobs. Plus the place is a cultural mindsuck and I don’t want to raise kids there… and the rents have tripled since the last time I lived there. They’ve got all the liberal crazy out the wazoo and always have. Ocala’s bloody expensive, last I checked. Could try Tally, but… I hate Tally. I have nice cousins there and I still hate it. Hills. Traffic. Corruption. Ack.
From what everyone tells us, the problem further west is twofold: a bunch of interlopers from CA and CO are trying to relocate there (says our realtor), and Navy Federal just moved their HQ to the area, importing TEN THOUSAND employees. Wish they’d had the foresight to build them an apartment complex or something. The office park is obscenely huge– a mile-long habitrail of glass boxes, like the worlds largest ant-farm. I’m not thrilled at moving there, but it’s got four large hospitals (=job security), a decent church that we already belong to, and…. yeah, that’s about it. Overall what I notice about the place is that it’s a grubby strip-mall-sprawl of a city with a gigantic population of homeless beggars, an extensive ghetto, and a drastic shortage of affordable housing in any part of town that’s not terrifying. Honestly not much even in the terrifying parts. After the hurricane, my hometown bulldozed at least half of its public housing projects, and I think we exported the residents… everywhere else in the panhandle.
It is what it is. Husband needs to work at least a couple years at a large hospital with up-to-date equipment, so he can put on his resume “yep, I know how to run that machine and I have a lot of experience at it”. I’d vastly prefer to go live in the back end of nowhere again, but there aren’t any large hospitals there.
On agriculture: to be fair, we use metric fucktons of fertilizer and pesticide because we have no soil to grow anything, no winter to kill the bugs, and 80-odd inches of rain/yr will wash dang near everything out of the soil– er sand. IMO we should be experimenting heavily with charcoal as a soil additive– it’s great at holding onto some of those nutrients and stays in the ground a long time. I’ve had good results in my own sandbox/garden. But perhaps it doesn’t scale well.
Sometime in the dystopian future, we’ll probably return to being a cattle-and-seafood economy, and maybe the Orange Blossom Special will once again bring tourists from NYC to Miami. The oysterbeds will recover once Atlanta gets depopulated and stops using up all our water, right?
On the plus side, this week in house-hunting wasn’t quite as depressing, and we’re learning the ropes, finally. Basically, there are all sorts of laws against discrimination in rental housing. But, if a landlord doesn’t want to lose his shirt, he MUST discriminate somehow. Criminal background check only gets you so far. All it takes is ONE meth lab, ONE central-american immigrant who moves in fifteen extra people, ONE trashy family that lets their (unreported) huge dog destroy every door in the house and leaves holes in the walls, and they lose money on the rental. Your odds of getting the rental go up exponentially if you just show up, in person, with the whole family, and talk to the landlord or the office staff: let them look you up and down and see that you’re not trailer trash, ghetto-tastic or meth-heads, that you have all your teeth, that your kids are well-behaved and your clothes aren’t sprinkled with dog hair. Or at least that’s my theory. We get a lot more response that way. Any office that does all their business online, gives you a box code to go look at the house, no humans involved… we never hear back from those.
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Wishing you luck with the home search. Nowadays everybody’s talking about “biochar” seems like a fancy word for charcoal. Also makes me wonder what kind of farming indigenous people there did, but maybe they did not farm at all…
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They did farm. I haven’t seen any info on pre-Spanish agriculture, but when Bartram came through after depopulation, he reported extensive abandoned citrus groves in places the Spanish had never even attempted to colonize.
“biochar” is just what you call it when you pay a lot of money to purchase it in bags. Anybody can collect branches and burn them in a trench for free. Calling it biochar lets you profit off people too dumb to figure that out.
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“Could try Tally, but … I hate Tally.”
Real Floridian Confirmed. 🙂
Technically Tallahassee is closer to us than several other cities.
But I’d rather drive all the way over to Jacksonville or up into Georgia to get what we need than deal with anything in Leon County, especially Tallahassee.
The only county in Florida that ranks lower for me is Hillsborough.
You could talk me into visiting Miami again, but Tampa? Oh hell no.
One more attempt to help: Bay or Escambia?
If it’s Bay, good luck with that, try the areas around the NE diagonal road that leads out of the city limits, someone may have sold another farm that’s getting converted to rental spec houses.
There was one out that way I’d looked at, got outbid by one of those big REITs that builds an entire subdivision of rental houses at one time.
It’s probably full of 3k+ square foot monster houses by now.
What’s happened to everything from Santa Rosa over to the time zone line put me off wanting to buy any farm land out that way.
If it’s Escambia … you’re going to dislike this suggestion, but it could be a temporary way out.
Ever thought about Baldwin County, Alabama?
Specifically, ever thought about Bay Minette?
What you don’t like about Alabama gets compensation in the form of much cheaper rent.
If you need a carry permit, I believe FL and AL have reciprocity for that, and as of the latest legislation in AL, I also believe it’s “shall issue” now.
But the whole US 90 corridor through Defuniak Springs and Crestview just sucks now because of all of the traffic, although US 98 manages to be almost as bad as US 41 through South Florida.
I like a good US highway to get off I-10 and I-75, especially if I can skip most of the agricultural stations that eat up time when I’m driving in a truck, but US 90 and US 98?
I’ll just stay on I-10 on the way to pick up stuff Out West, thanks.
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The housing shortage in Bay remains intense. We’re currently in Baldwin, oddly enough. It’s a really lovely place– very low crime, polite drivers, hands-off homeschool regs. But no large hospitals, too far to commute except maybe from Lillian, and there are no functional Orthodox churches– we already commute to Escambia for that. We can’t really afford the place, and we’re having to put my husband up in a motel for the work week (12-hour shifts on consecutive days is not commuter friendly)– on week 4 now, and it’s like paying rent on a second house. A crappy house with no kitchen. After a year, we’re kind of desperate to be closer to church, so we can attend all the other services. Haven’t been to vespers in ages, because we end up getting kids home too late at night. Would also be nice to stop paying state income tax and 10% sales tax on groceries.
Don’t need a farm, would settle for a place to put up a clothesline and a patch to grow pumpkins. Not gonna get that in a rental, I think. Sigh. But that carry permit might be handy when we end up moving to the ghetto 😉
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“Stop peeing, you folks”
Actually this is “stop eating meat, you horrible filthy animals! You’re ruining the planet with your excreta!”
They can’t sell eating bugs on nutritional or ecological grouns so they’re probing another area to attack.
They are tireless and relentless in their desire to lock people down and make their lives miserable.
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“They can’t sell eating bugs on nutritional or ecological grouns so they’re probing another area to attack.”
They’re pushing cannibalism now, but I’m OK with it given some caveats.
Out here you see a lot more of the cycle of life.
And so I’d like to invite the WEF to a Special Dinner where they’ll be the Special Guests.
We’re still figuring out how to build a pressure cooker that seats six fat WEF tards, so it’s going to be a while, and Waste Not Want Not, naturally.
Besides, it’d get a bit Oregon Trail around here otherwise.
“You shot 94 kg of meat, but you were only able to carry 44 kg back to the wagon.”
Dammit, there goes another of my Modest Proposals: Eat The WEF, but prepare them properly, they probably have prion diseases because they’re all Mad Cows, not to mention Chimpox and The Coof.
Oh, BTW … WEF?
I’m not locked in here with you.
YOU ARE LOCKED IN HERE WITH US.
Pass the BBQ sauce. 🙂
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Thank you, this made me smile. They are totally mad stupid cows.
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Ahahaaa! While I read that, there was a Tom Waits soundtrack playing in my head: “there’s a scrub-oak fire, like a funeral pyre…”
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I HAVE IT! The solution to your cooking problem!
You needn’t eat them directly. Each one of them represents a large amount of nitrogen (I mean, yeah, we export phosphates, but nitrogen comes from the air and living things).
Here’s the secret to growing amazing pumpkins, squash, and melons in our lovely Florida sandbox: dig a big hole, throw in some charcoal, dump in some gross stinky chunk of biological matter (roadkill works great), throw in more charcoal, cover it over, plant your pumpkins or whatever around the edge. The charcoal absorbs both nutrients and the stench, so you don’t get varmints digging it up (much), and keeps the nitrogen etc. around in the sand long enough for the plants to get it, instead of just washing into the nearest aquifer. Holds onto moisture, too. Win win win.
So… whatever’s too much for your pressure cooker would grow a LOT of pumpkins, cantaloupes, watermelons, loofahs… waste not, want not.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Horizontal transmission of prion diseases is a serious problem.
Defra couldn’t figure out that they were spreading prion diseases when they’d incinerate even a single infected animal back during The British Mad Cow Debacle.
Naturally when there’s a problem with supply chains in the countryside, the first thing that the government does is to assign city bureaucrats to solve agricultural problems with one-size-fits-all ignorance.
[ahem]
Still a bit sore about that after all these years!
I’m a blast at parties: “Hi, I’d like to talk to you about downer cows!” 🙂
So … the pressure cooker’s a required part of the process just so the local environment doesn’t wind up contaminated with transmissible prion diseases that are surprisingly hard to be rid of.
Unfortunately. No telling what they’re carrying.
135+ C for a half hour or more isn’t a light application of a pressure cooker either.
Also, you’ll find that you have an acidic soil problem eventually with all of that charcoal.
Mix in some potash to raise the pH out of the acidic range.
We don’t do Lysenko out here. 🙂
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I don’t buy my charcoal: I usually just dig a pit, and burn a bunch of sticks and bark down to glowing coals and then douse it with the hose, so the ash comes with. So far, no pH issues. I dunno if I’m doing it right or if we just get so much rain that no matter how bad I screw it up, it all washes out by next season.
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Diluted urine is a great fertilizer or compost kick-starter. Human poop can be composted (there’s right and wrong ways to do that) and afterwards is also excellent compost. Takes 6-12 months after you are done collecting it and your other compost materials but it is doable, especially in low rain/low water environments. We are literally flushing fertilizer down the drain. Close the nutrient cycle! Check out The Humanure Handbook. I declare that I have no conflicts of interest.
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Preach it!
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