From a new blog.

7 Fat and 7 Lean Years
by Yeoman Gardener
http://www.feastandfamine.blogspot.com/

There is no cheese, no butter, no dry milk powder, no grains or
anything else left [in US government reserve] ... The only thing left
in the entire CCC inventory will be 5.73 million bushels of wheat
which is about enough wheat to make one half loaf of bread, for each
of the 300 million people in America... [According to the May 1,
2008, CCC inventory report, USDA's Commodity Credit Corporation].
--Larry Matlack, President of the American Agricultural Movement

Long time ago Pharaoh asked Joseph to interpret a dream about seven
fat and seven scrawny cattle, and--double trouble--seven fat and seven
skimpy heads of grain. Joseph described the dream as a warning to make
preparations for seven years of hardship, to act pre-emptively, during
seven years of plenty. He ordered the granaries filled so that people
would not starve when crops failed and famine hit.

If such ancient foresight and investment have not yet been implemented
by the "bread basket of the world," America, in the 21st century,
where does that leave us? What are the precedents and the
possibilities? How do we the people implement economics, as if people
mattered?

Boom and bust cycles are natural and recurring events, chronicled back
to the Middle Ages by a Soviet economist, Kondratieff. Stalin gave him
the task of finding a way to destroy the West economically.
Kondratieff reported back to Stalin that the destruction was cyclical,
self-induced, and inevitable. Boom years of great crop yields and
prosperity were also times of credit excess, borrowing, and
mal-investment. Bank failures, crop failures, drought, flash floods,
locusts, and blights followed boom years. Debts were called in,
properties foreclosed upon, in a great and grinding transfer of wealth
to the banks.

In 1930's America, for example, the Plains states all but blew away in
severe drought. Terrible winds blasted topsoil to perdition in a
farmers' nightmare called the Dustbowl. When farmers planted crops,
seed failed to sprout, or grew a pitiful few inches, shriveled and
died. Many banks had gone belly-up, having invested depositors'
savings in the stock market, which crashed in 1929; FDR had
confiscated citizens' gold in `33. There was no money, nor credit to
buy more seed, nor to pay on mortgages or share cropper rents.
Families were thrown off the land by the banks into a long season
known as the "Bitter Years."

The author's mother remembered walking to school with a damp bandana
across nose and mouth to block out the wildly whipping grit. Eyes
stung with it, land turned to dust and whirlwind. Windows were shut
tight, with rolled towels at their base, in 100 degree heat. Not all
homes had electricity; kerosene lamps lit most farms. Nobody had air
conditioning.

Men roaming the country looking for work to feed their families,
stopped at Grandmother's back door, hat in hand, eyes to the ground,
"You got any work needs doin', Ma'am?" Grandmother never offered a
handout from their garden. So as not to shame the man, she would think
of some small chore. Chore done, she'd bring him a plate of food to
the back stoop. "Thank ye, Ma'am," touching his hat brim, he'd fall on
the food. Those were lean and hungry times, and we have lost most of
the generation who lived through it, and could warn us.

In our present time frame and its crop failure cycle, there is another
story old as time. Alan Greenspan, as a young man, is said to have
wished to be Fed Head during the inevitable Kondratieff downturn.
Greenspan held the belief that flooding the banks and Wall Street with
easy credit could fend off "Kondratieff Winter." As Chairman of the
Federal Reserve, he implemented PPT (Plunge Protection Team)
intervention, allegedly to maintain market stability, but to the
benefit of insiders. The PPT, also known as Working Group on Finacial
Markets was mandated by Executive Order, following the 1987 market
crash. Intervention recently morphed into bailing out JPMorgan, the
monster derivatives holder by gutting Bear Stearns, to save the
system, save it from the consequences of shoddy practices. Relief for
bankers and hedgies only. We will live the results of hubris and
preferential interventions.

Here's another old, old concept: Debt-forgiveness, utterly and across
the board, every 50 years, in a "Jubilee Year." It's an Old Testament
idea: families, widows, orphans could begin anew. There is a "global
Jubilee movement" in our day to forgive unpayable debts, loans made to
deposed dictators, whose poor people now go hungry in that catch-22.
(Given credit card company usury, sub-prime mortgage profiteering, and
diminishing ability of the indebted to pay, families may refuse to be
destroyed at some point.)

The hubris of central bankers—of "Maestro" Greenspan's sleight of
hand—had seemed to have everything under control. Whereas in fact, we
face adverse growing conditions—catastrophic destruction of rice crops
by the Myanmar typhoon, destruction of the US corn (maize) crop by
Mississippi floods, and wheat rust blight spreading at an alarming
rate from Turkey. This all too painfully vindicates Kondratieff's
discovery that bad grain harvest years are correlated with economic
downturns.

In the interim, the system is unraveling. CEO's were once touted as
mythic in reach, greed-is-good as Zeitgest, the Enron-phenom. We are
huddled in a surround-sound theater with few exits, beneath a Ponzi
scheme collapse. Many are frightened. Yet heroes of a different sort
are stepping free of the smoke and mirrors—inventors at work on
alternative energy solutions, whistleblowers of corporate and
government malfeasance such as Rep. Ron Paul, repair folk who keep
things running, sustainable farmers, bridge-builders, skilled
crafters, teachers, and home-schooled young. We will remain rich in
solution-driven people, if not in paper debt instruments.

Theory will not now avert food crisis, only sensible action will. As
an instance of theory, "our" government gave financial incentives to
so-called agricultural corporations to convert food-producing land to
the planting of corn, much of it genetically modified, for ethanol,
which requires more energy input than it produces.


.....You mean to tell me that seed there is gonna save the world?
Well, I'll be. And that same seed company will be our climate change
savior? Hm! That's the company that tainted my neighbor's corn, I do
believe… Well, Sir… Come to find out, pollen from their pricey-as-sin
"modified" corn blew onto my neighbor's land. They contaminated his
whole crop; couldn't be sold for human food. Nope. Ruined him, or so
he thought, till the company up and sued him for stealing their
patent! A real knee-slapper.....


Profit trumped common sense, and even common decency. The mid-term
election hopes for sensible priorities sank into the Potomac swamp,
where borrowed funding, out of actual U.S. "insufficient funds," holds
sway.

The world has looked on as we apparently lay back and resigned
ourselves to belligerent government dysfunction, in order to "feel safe."

Yet despite a perception of Americans as couch potatoes, the "natives
are getting restless" and represent a very interesting gene pool--of
iconoclasts. Over many generations, waves of peoples fled to America
from tyrannies in their countries of origin. We include immigrant
entrepreneurs from all over the world. Out of that heritage, we can
come to life locally with solutions, as our national focus shifts from
flamboyant empire to hearth and home.

As an example, in a variation on the Horatio Alger success story, a
few late 20th century pathfinders voluntarily chose frugality as a
road to success. In The Millionaire Next Door, which lobbed a shot
across the bow of dot-bomb era glitz, the authors interviewed
self-made millionaires, who actually lived within their means—they
bought second-hand cars, maintained and drove them for years; they
shopped at thrift stores and flea markets; their kids went to public
schools, had to earn their weekly allowances, and many worked
newspaper routes. The parents lived in middle class neighborhoods;
they did not build McMansions. These folks were pioneers, aware of the
lessons of the down cycle of the Great Depression, making do, making
things last, living in community.

During the two world wars, food was rationed. Only farmers and black
marketeers were likely to eat well. In each of the two wars the
government promoted nationwide planting of Liberty and Victory
Gardens, respectively. People planted food -- potatoes, corn, beans,
carrots, not lawns or cacti. This may be a concept whose time has come
again. Barbara Kingsolver's, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle shows us how
to produce what we eat, support local growers, and celebrate the
seasons of availability. If nothing else does, rising oil prices will
force us to concentrate on community food production.

Cheaply transported food has been a short-lived phenomenon,
historically speaking. Can we count on planes and trucks to deliver
lettuce from California, grapes from Chile, or any food at all, if
fuel costs exceed what people can pay, for food delivered? In living
memory, cities were fed from surrounding farms. We have strip-malled
and asphalted fertile land with beige suburbia. Can we undo it, and
return rich farmland to cultivation?

We may want to give that a hard look. Jim Kunstler, author of The Long
Emergency and a weekly commentary "Clusterfuck Nation," views suburban
commutes as a fantasy, a wrong-turn, soon to meet the grim reaper of
Peak Oil, in an avalanche of abandoned press board and vinyl-sided
McMansions.

If we need to develop local gardening and farming to alleviate the
downslide of our economy and lean years to come, and we can't buy fuel
for tractors and tillers, will spades and shovels still fit our hands?
Some of our solutions may be Amish or Native American, which remain a
living wisdom of stewardship. Will they teach us; will we learn?


.....Come on over, son, and have a look-see here. Pickax will bust up
that cement slab. Yeah. No-money down, huh? Teaser mortgage rate they
gave the family to dream on; broke now… There's good earth there
still, and it'll be there when we're gone. Go to it, boy. Come find me
when you're done, and we'll plant us a garden.....


Can we muster the oomph to recreate the infrastructure for horse and
mule farming, (and our rail system for that matter?) You bet we can.
Cuba is a hot button in Washington, but those folks went cold turkey
off cheap fuel and farm subsidies into ox-powered organic farming,
when the Soviet Union collapsed.

We face a similar challenge. Our government is bankrupt, hiding it,
and will soon not be able to dole out farm subsidies. Fuel may not
reach farmers or truckers; it may not even be available. Cuba, a small
country, has shown what can be done, at need. The US, a vast land on
the brink of crisis, demonstrated its federal-level response
capabilities in New Orleans, and compounded incompetence by refusing
local and international relief. Remember Katrina.

Our capacity for local decision-making and intervention will
resurge—in Town Meetings, in charity work, in Depression Era soup
kitchens, if it comes to that. Food Banks are way ahead of us—already
asking gardeners to "Grow-a-Row" in their gardens specifically for
Food Bank distribution, as there is little food available for the
laid-off, the foreclosed upon, the homeless Vets.

What do we need? How about hand tools and backyard gardens with the
children helping out and learning. If we don't know how, let's find
those who do. Gardeners tend to be optimists; some will be willing
teachers. How about community gardens, prison gardens, school gardens,
farmers' markets in a no-car zone, where people can stroll and chat.

Have we forgotten how to can/freeze/store food? Are families scattered
and skills lost? Well, let's seek out those with can-do knowledge—they
may be in nursing homes; they may live on small family farms; they may
not have English as their first language. Let's learn from those who
know how to tend land and grow food. Let's dig root cellars to store
potatoes, winter squash, pumpkins, apples, at the ambient temperature
of deep earth, without electricity.

At the local level, zoning can be re-considered--especially if food is
not being trucked in to the supermarket shelves. We could raise
backyard chickens or a milk goat, just for instance. In Cuba people
went hungry when the subsidies stopped. Townspeople dug up lawns,
planted gardens, built chicken coops, set up sidewalk stands. That
"urban farming" has brought entrepreneurial good fortune to families,
and represents a large chunk of Cuba's agricultural output!

Many Americans have grown sweet corn for Fourth of July picnics. It's
just as easy to grow field corn, to feed the chickens, with corn which
produces seed we can save for next season -- this means heirloom,
non-hybrid, non-genetically engineered. The field corn cobs are left
to dry on the stalk, then shucked of husk and stored in backyard
granaries, also known as corncribs, which can be built in a day.
Chickens will peck the dry kernels off the whole cob. Easy!

Eggs and dairy are becoming prohibitively expensive, due to feed and
fuel costs. While fuel and chemical fertilizer were cheap, and feed
was cheap, and farmers made serious money selling off land to
developers, many farmers stopped growing their own feed. Now animal
husbandry folk have to pay exorbitant prices for grain and hay, prices
which are passed on to the consumer.


.....Now, is manure cheaper than chemical fertilizer? Yup. Is it
produced on the farm? Um. But you do have to shovel it.....


Self-sufficient farms and communities are a size which work. Small
organic farms are full of variety, not gazillion acres of
Roundup-ready one-crop far as the eye can see. Small farms are full of
fragrance, fruits, butterflies, birds and ladybugs; they produce food,
sustain families, and empower communities.

Small is bountiful.

Pharaoh asked Joseph what to do. Prepare, he said, for hard times.
Grow food, store food, to feed your people. Joseph got specific; he
said to set aside twenty percent of each of the seven years of bounty.
When famine struck, not just Egypt, but the entire Middle East,
Pharaoh's people were well fed from the granaries. Egypt had saved
enough grain to sell to neighboring kingdoms. They prospered in a time
of famine by Joseph's foresight and preparations.

So, given US preparation thus far, and wealth-hemorrhage abroad,
what'll it be? Katrina?


.....Step right up, folks! Get your half a loaf of bread, to tide each
and every one of you over.....


Until what?… The Rapture?

Or will we go for community, and local can-do? What will we create,
returning to the common sense of township and state governance? Fuel
costs may stop shipments of gulag-goods across the Pacific. Large
"oops" there, in the building of BigBox mega-emporums. If they stand
empty, what's the opportunity? Well, we might spare some diesel for
bulldozers, and return to mom & pop businesses in walk-able
neighborhoods! How about bike lanes as a plan, cluster housing, parks
and community gardens?

Communities know that "we all live downstream;" bureaucracies fund
studies and porkbarrel projects, as levees and bridges and school
buildings crumble. There's work needs doing, and that means
employment. Let's give Americans a task with heart in it, while the
Potomac Titanic plays on… glub glub. We built bombs; let's repair our
bridges, across rivers, and across chasms of policies of destruction.

American immigrants dared everything, to choose freedom.