From FOODFROMTHESKY.org.uk

A brilliant urban food growing initiative on the roof of the Budgens supermarket at Crouch End in London... a Permaculture community garden growing food to sell in the supermarket below while providing a learning and educational space for the different part of the communities. We are growing vegetables, fruits, mushrooms and herbs grown to organic standard with children and other members of our diverse community – sold through the store 8 metres below.

Video here
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From GENE LOGSDON

Since I often think of my barn as my church, it is altogether proper to admit that I have bats in my belfry. The hayloft is full of these furry little phantoms of the night. It happened entirely by accident as is true of so many good things on our farm. When we built the barn, we nailed triangular plywood plates on both sides of all the rafters where they met at the peak of the roof. (See photo.) The space between these plates, which is the thickness of the 2 by 6 rafters, must be just right for Brown bats because they soon took up residence there which means we have about twenty bat houses across the whole roof peak. The bats hang in that space in clusters, usually upside down. Because of them, we’ve rarely suffered much from mosquitoes, even though the barn is surrounded by woodland. The rain barrel that catches water off the barn roof is almost always full of mosquito larvae in summer but only on rare occasion do mosquitoes swarm around my head, and never for any prolonged period of time. The bats get them.

Bats are the most effective control for mosquitoes we have, say entomologists. An interesting article about them in the current (Fall 2011) issue of the Draft Horse Journal by Judy Brodland points out how blessed bats are in horse barns since mosquitoes can drive horses nearly crazy buzzing and biting around their velvety soft noses. I don’t know how the experts did the counting, but a bat can eat some 3000 insects in one night, they say. That’s a lot of mosquito bites that never happen.

I am pleased to say, after thirty years of sharing our barn loft with twenty to forty bats every summer, that I have never once been attacked by a bat, let alone contracted rabies, nor has any farm animal gotten rabies or suffered any kind of poisoning from bat manure, nor I have ever seen a sick bat, nor has a bat gotten tangled in my hair (well, I used to have hair). How these myths continue despite so much expert literature to the contrary never ceases to amaze me. Bats look fearsome, and three kinds in Central and South America do suck blood (from animals not humans) so I guess the superstitions will go on. The incidence of rabies in bats is so rare that even cats get the disease more often and that is a rare thing too. Rabies usually shows up in wild animals like raccoons, skunks, foxes, coyotes and unvaccinated dogs. Bats do not “carry” rabies; they get it just like other wild animals do. Just for perspective, dogs kill about 32 people every year; bats account for about one human death per year. You are much more likely to die of lightning. More…

From GENE LOGSDON

All the talk about creating jobs strikes me as another example of how so many of us sneakily drink one way and piously vote another. Oh how we voice our concern, how much we pretend to support more jobs but we go right on conducting real business on the basis of replacing human workers with machines whenever possible. All the ways being proposed to increase jobs right now are the same old methods that do not face the real cause of the dilemma. The awful truth is that we have created an economy that can’t afford people to do the work and so every year there are fewer meaningful jobs and more pretend jobs. Pretend jobs require pretend money. We are capitalizing costs on money interest not on human interest.

No where is this truer than in farming. We boast about how many people one farmer feeds—155 is the latest number I think— as if that kind of efficiency is a sign of progress. I don’t hear a single business person or government official pointing out that if the whole economy of the common good is considered, one farmer feeding 155 people is not a sign of true profitability but of gross and unsustainable inefficiency. So gross in fact that while the 155 are getting fed, others are going hungry.

It is fairly easy, I think, to demonstrate the inefficiency of one person feeding a hundred and fifty five especially when some of the hundred and fifty five are having a hard time earning enough to buy their food. You can quibble with me on exact numbers, but modern machinery and technology makes it possible for one farmer to grow about 5000 acres of corn with one employee. One almost humorous example of this is how tractors can now guide themselves across unbroken acres of land without human help although a driver is still necessary to turn the tractor at the end of the field. That will soon not be necessary either, I’m told, and so one more “problem” will be avoided: how to stay awake in the tractor. One tractor driver advocates a stack of magazines, not necessarily the kind you leave out on your coffee table.

You can say that manufacturing high tech farm machinery creates jobs, but more and more of the manufacturing is also being done by robotic technology. The robots can even manufacture themselves now with less and less human input. More…

From GENE LOGSDON

One of the bright spots in our fumbling, bumbling economy is the progress of urban and suburban farming, especially in connection with farmers’ markets. But there is another aspect of this coming together of city and country that needs more innovative thinking. I was traveling through Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights in Cleveland, Ohio, recently and was struck by how much of this beautiful, old, well-heeled residential area is really old growth forest with houses in it. And I mean real, old growth forest—lots of huge trees towering over the castle-like residences so densely that the houses are almost hidden from view.

My first thought was how much people love trees because there is considerable risk involved when these trees inevitably die or age enough so that storms drop them on the houses. My next thought was to try to calculate how much wood was growing here in this urban forest which will probably end up in a landfill. Oddly enough, the answer to both potential problems is the same.

Let us take, just for discussion purposes, five square miles of this kind of urban forest. A mile square is 640 acres, so five miles square would be 3200 acres. An acre of established woodland can produce a cord of wood a year without diminishing itself, so the experts agree. With good forestry practices it can do better than that, but let’s go with that figure. Let’s assume that every acre in this old growth urban forest would produce half a cord a year because the houses and lawns take up some of the room. So this tract in Cleveland could be producing 1600 cords of wood a year. At let’s say $200 a cord (more than that as a replacement for heating oil right now), that’s $320,000 a year. More…