So what is going to happen when people in the UK realise that the money in their pocket is now worth a fraction (UK currency down 20%, asset prices up 50%) of what it was last year?

The Americans are better at exposing charlatans that we appear to be. A handful of bankers will go to gaol, some ‘People’s Champions’  on TV will go for the jugular and ask the difficult questions.

Watch;

Barofsky currently serves as the overseer of the 700 billion dollar bailout the Former President George Bush dedicated to bail out the banks.

So  ’There has not been meaningful regulatory reform’. We are back where we were with even bigger banks and little growth export production, no drive to import substitute or productivity revolution.

When this new bubble pops the government will almost certainly nationalise the saving of the few people ‘sensible’ enough to have them.

It will get them by the back door by high inflation coupled with low interest rates.

Over the next 20 years we will experience some of the most fundamental changes in food and farming since the Industrial Revolution. The looming worldwide crisis of diet-related ill-health will drive governments to encourage the sort of dietary changes recommended by the World Health Organization, thereby reducing demand for meat, sugar, fats and dairy products, and increasing demand for cereals, potatoes and other root crops, fruit and vegetables. We will also have to wean ourselves off over half a century’s dependence on oil and gas to provide the soil fertility we need to grow our food. We will instead have to use renewable energy, the power of the sun, to supply soil nutrients through nitrogen fixing crops like red clover.

Not surprisingly it would result in more beef and lamb production. The reason? Grass.

Beef and lamb production would rise to around 168% and 155% of current levels respectively. Chicken, egg and pork production would fall to roughly a quarter of current levels, with resulting massive reductions in energy used in food production, and a reduction in the quantity of grain that goes to feed animals rather than people.

Its encouraging that we might just be able to feed ourselves with organic agriculture but the behavioural changes required are huge. We have been led down this path (low price-low quality, soil damaging, oil intensive , available all year food) by the likes of Tesco and they will in all probability have to lead us back out again.

The other story is about the milk cooperative that went into receivership a few weeks back leaving 20% of dairy farmers with no-one to buy their milk.

The solution, according to one farm consultant, might be to return to grass fed seasonal milk production for these marginal dairy farmers. This low input farming/ high welfare farming  stops producing in the winter. This is a much more resilient farming system.

The consultant went on to say that they dairy farmers had been locked into a risky business model by the power of the supermarkets.

No-one wants to see farmers on the marginal land go under. Perhaps we should all take a break from milk over the winter, we would probably feel better and then we could enjoy those farm cheeses made from vitamin rich spring milk that would be maturing nicely.

60L is an ideal size for a patio pot. They are pre-moulded with drainage holes, have carrying handles and can be  moved about when dry by one strong person or two semi-strong ones.

Polyculture is what Americans call it. Guild growing is what permaculturalists call it. Either way it a kind of  ‘ecological growing’ , the opposite of the monoculture prevalent in farming. In a polyculture plants support and interact with each other in mutually beneficial ways as they do in a healthy eco-system.

Bringing together a successful mini-ecosystem depends on your microclimate, the time when you plant the seeds and the varieties available but it should contain fast and slow maturing plants, plants with different growth forms and with different edible parts.

A typical and well know group is;

Radish: A fast growing quickly shading crop which helps other plants establish by preventing the soil from drying out. I chose the variety French Breakfast.

Lettuce leaves: An upright growing cos variety that can be harvested as young plants as well as a fully hearted mature plant. I chose the variety Little Gem, as well as some ‘cut and come again’ salad bowl types and wild rocket.

Spinach. Ideal early in the year as it is a fast grower.

Carrots: These should be a fast maturing variety. I chose ‘Nantes Early’ but there are faster and slimmer varieties.

I added a peas and broad beans for the medium term crops and as I was growing against a hedge I hoped they would find their own supports there.

Filling a 60l container could have been expensive in terms of buying ready made compost but I had last years compost bin to empty so I mixed this 50:50 with soil from a post hole thrown up when a neighbour put up a new fence post.

This soil would be inevitably full of weed seeds so I planned to use about 75-100mm of new sterile seed compost as a mulch on top to stifle any weed seed growth. (In the end only bindweed came through yhe mulch and I treated it with glyphosate- the translocating herbicide).

One tip I picked up from a soil scientist is to mix the boundary of different soil types to a 100mm depth or so to prevent distinct soil horizons forming. The trouble with these horizons is that they will form water and nutrient barriers to young roots trapping them in one layer. To over come this possibility I mixed in some potting compost into the top layer of the already well mixed home compost:garden soil mix.

Each seed needs to be planted at a different depth and sprinkling them on the surface then laying a depth of seed compost on top makes it easy to build  up the layers.

Container filled and seeded

A  little grow-more general purpose fertiliser and slug pellets and water and the experiment could begin.

THE RESULTS:

Super fast growth. I was harvesting beautiful crisp undamaged radishes in 3 weeks and spinach leaves shortly after.

Excellent succulent leaves: The close growth kept the lettuce leaves tender and succulent.

Beans and Peas: These also grew quickly and set their flowers well as bumble bees, their main polinators, seem to be quite common in our garden area. The peas scrambled through the box hedge quite successfully.

Pea finding ideal support in the box hedge

Carrots: These seemed to struggle at first, having been beaten to the light by the lettuce and radishes. Later on as I harvested these early crops they took their chance and number grew on to decent sizes. Many did not make it though, so the yield from the initial sowing was quite low.

After 4-5 weeks of cropping the leaves got  exhausted and  the spinach went to seed.

I intend to clear out the ground cover plants and get another round of seeds sown while the peas and beans mature.

I even got  a free potato that must have come in with the compost.

One of the pots with a potato growing too

As a former pesce-vegetarian I wondered that since my stone age diet epiphany I have perhaps adopted the meat eating diet too rigorously. At the time I challenged him about what I saw as good reasons to eat meat in this particular rain blessed country; our beef/dairy agricultural heritage, our grass growing climate and the sheer taste pleasure and healthy start in life engendered by a meat based food culture but he wouldn’t budge.

It was time I tested my prejudices a bit; what was the ideal amount if meat to eat every day? Was beef really worse than pork and chicken? Can I survive, nay THRIVE on less than two 150g portions of meat a day! Intuitively I thought yes. My father (b. 1935) grew into a athletic physique on a wartime rationed diet and occasional rabbit stew. By the way, the meat ration was 540 g of meat, and 113g of bacon or ham  and as much offal as you could afford per week. (ref)

Getting reliable information to answer this question is difficult but some internet research reveals the key facts that should allow me to make a decision.

First lets investigate our food history.  According to French research in this article (Ref) from around 1800 to 1945 people ate 25-35Kg of meat a year or 68-96g per day. That figure will include offal that is unlikely to be included in modern day consumption figures.

Nowadays people eat on average 100kg/ year or 275g per day and given that the average includes babies and the old folks (and those saintly vegetarians)  I would expect that most young adults eat over 300g per day.

Meat is about 22-24% protein so;

The latest nutritional recommendations are 56g protein a day for an adult male (Ref) and the British typically get 2/3 from meat and a 1/4 from cereals. If you drop most of the cereals from your diet (as stone age dieters do) then you need to  eat 212g of non-cereal protein a day ((2/3 +1/4) x 56g)=51g protein; 24% of 212g is 51g).

Does this have to be all meat? Not really. Nuts, milk, eggs and tofu are all high quality proteins. In fact my yoghurt and nuts with a couple of spoonfuls of oats breakfast has already supplied 32g of protein before I leave home in the morning. (ref)

What about the sustainability of this level of meat production in the UK?

In the UK we eat about 1,000,000 tons of beef a year and produce about 700,000 tons of it ourselves. (Ref).  I presume they mean tonnes, but they seem not to know the difference.

We eat 1,500,000 tons of pork and produce 700,000 tons ourselves (Ref)

We eat about 353,000 tonnes of mutton and lamb and produce 300,000 tonnes ourselves (Ref )-

850 million chickens (850,000 tonnes meat assuming the average 1.5kg broiler contains 1kg of meat ) are raised and killed here (Ref) and  3,500 tonnes of chicken are imported (ref).

Beef is the most energy intensive meat to produce simply because feed to weight conversion is much slower than other meats. Chicken and turkey are raised in a matter of weeks. But where there is good grass and nothing better will grow, as in many British pastures then raising organic beef is good for wildlife and the country.

It is clear that the country is eating more meat than it can produce  and we are increasingly transporting it from far-off places to feed our greedy appetites. Thailand for chicken, Denmark for pork, New Zealand for lamb and Argentina for beef.

While trade in food is OK in some respects, it must be ethically wrong to over consume and/or waste this meat. What is more important to understand is that the imported meat can be much more energy intensive in its production.

These countries (Thailand, Denmark etc) are intensively rearing for the export market and feed grain and soya beans to their animals, most of which is also intensively raised and transported large distances, such as soya from Brazil.

But lets not forget that our own increased production of meat is also a result of intensive grain fed livestock. The excellent website, manicore.com shows evidence that  the easy availability of cheap meat protein is a product of the boom in intensive oil based farming since 1950 throughout Europe.

So what do I now think?   We don’t need all the meat protein that many of us regularly consume. If I support organic farming (and I do) I need to go back to 1950′s levels of consumption as organic farming can only sustain that level of production in the UK.

My commitments for an ethical, low carbon meat diet (if I must eat meat);

1. I won’t assume that the supermarket portions of meat are right. 100g is probably too much. 75g is about right and 150-200g of meat a day is plenty even for my athletic lifestyle.

2. Eat more fish as this is carbon neutral (almost!)

3. Cook with meat as a flavour rather than the main attraction. European peasant cookery has it right. Hearty slow cooked stews with bone stock, some meat and plenty of vegetables.

4. Eat more offal. Liver and kidney are great, I have yet to venture into brains and tripe but it will mean less meat is wasted and fewer animals are needed.

5. Eat the dairy that matches my beef consumption. 1/2 pint of milk a day equals 100g beef a week. (the calculation is based on the yearly milk production of a dairy cow and the weight of meat on a bullock at slaughter). Eat as many different cuts of meat over the course of a year.

6. Eat more locally produced chicken, rather than pork, as pork consumes the same feedstuff (grain) but grows more slowly. Save products such as bacon and smoked ham for boosting vegetable based dishes.

7. Eat grass-fed lamb from the British hill farms where there is little alternative agriculture.

What about the high protein athletes diet? I don’t know that athletes really need especially high protein despite what these guys think.

A body builder does not work nearly as hard as a brickie’s hod carrier (I know I’ve done it) and judging by what I saw in the canteen they seem to get by on bread, cheese, crisps and mars bars!

Also traditional living tribal people like this Zulu warrior are not eating huge amounts of protein (I have been to Zululand and the locals seemed to eat cornmeal gruel and chicken and fermented milk, young men did weight training in improvised gyms and many had physiques like Spartans!).

Fresh Homemade Yoghurt

Making yoghurt at home is easy if you follow a few simple rules. Yoghurt can cost as much as twice the price of the milk content and in additional milk is cheaper per pint in large sizes,  so it is economical to buy a large size, use half as fresh and make the rest into yoghurt. The yoghurt will store longer than the fresh milk too.

I use a polystyrene fish box and a spirit thermometer (costs about £2.50 from home brew suppliers on the web) to control the temperature accurately as it is the temperature that determines the balance of  bacteria and lactic acid content of the yoghurt and thus the taste.

Thanks to science we know the keys to successful yoghurt making;

1. Use homogenised milk as this improves the texture of the yoghurt. Sterilise a preserving  jar by thoroughly cleaning it and putting it in the oven at 100 degrees Celcius for 10mins. (Without the rubber seal of course!).

2. Heat the milk to 85 degrees Celsius in a milk pan. Use the thermometer to check. Boiling the milk will impair the flavour a little but not much.

3. Concentrate the milk by heating for 5-10 minutes to reduce the volume by 15%. Alternatively add some dried milk powder at a level that will increase the milk solids content by 2-4%. This is difficult to judge  but assuming standard milk is 12% milk solids, I have used a couple of level desertspoon (30ml) per litre. Increasing the milk solids content makes the yoghurt thicker, creamier and slightly more acidic and it keeps better as a result.

4. Pour the milk into the preserving jar and cool the jar of milk quickly to 43-46 degrees Celcius using a water bath. Check with the clean thermometer that it has reached the ideal culturing temperature and stir in a couple of teaspoons (i.e. 2%) of good live yoghurt per 500ml, preferable a yoghurt with three types of  culture, Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Lactobacillus acidophilus. Currently Rachel’s Organic or  M&S Organic are the best but the ingredients of these yoghurts does vary over time so always check.

Milk and culture in hotbox

5. Put the preserving jar in the polystyrene fish box with a large hot water bottle and leave for 3-4 hours to culture. Keep the thermometer in the box to monitor the temperature. I generally refill the hotwater bottle after two hours to keep the temperature in the correct range.

6. Once the yoghurt has set its ready. Chill in the fridge as quickly as possible to maintain the best creamy flavour.

Cultured Yoghurt

Some of us a studying permaculture, others experimenting with ways to grow more of our own food. Behind it all is the need to reduce fossil carbon based energy consumption and strengthen the vital systems that support out life: Habitation, Food, Communities and Economy. Self sufficiency is not our goal, rather community sufficiency at the appropriate scale whether that be local, regional, national or global.

Like ecosystems  cultural systems are resilient when they are diverse, interconnected, recycling and energy efficient.

Families Rigged to Fail

People are increasingly choosing individualism over family and community welfare.

Credentialing versus Educating

Universities are more interested in credentials than providing high quality education.

Science abandoned

Poor Science has become endemic, infiltrating society with unproven ideas without regard to social effect.

Dumbed-Down Taxes

The philosophy behind current collection and distribution of tax revenue distorts society and makes environmental costs impossible to discern.

Self-Policing Subverted

Professions are failing to police their members ethics.

1. Visit your local fishmonger and ask him to save some polystyrene fish boxes for you. (By the way see post on Yoghurt for another use). Cut a couple of 20mm square holes in the bottom for drainage with a sharp knife.

Seedlings coming up after 3-4 days

2. Fill up to a height of 2/3 with a mixture of general purpose compost and good loam in a ratio 1:2.

I got my loam from a molehill, which is a good way to start but unless its your land its best to buy John Inness ready made compost.

Use John Innes No.2 potting compost for and this will contain all the nutrients and peat you need. In fact it probably best to reduce the nutrient level a bit by mixing in 20% grit/ sharp sand or perlite.

The problem with too rich a soil at the seedling stage is that the seedlings can get too leggy and weak.

3.  Water the compost and sprinkle a mixed salad leaves seed mix fairly densely as shown and cover with a thin layer of compost.

Between Oct and Feb you can only really use oriental mustards, out side these dates any popular ‘cut and come again’ salad mix. Remember that nothing  much grows below 6 degrees Celsius and the seedlings will need to germinate at 6-12 degrees for the mustards and 10-25 degrees for lettuce or general salad leaves. The closer the temperature to the ideal or midpoint of the temperatures shown the more the seeds will all come up together and the quicker they will germinate.

4. Cover with a sheet of glass or cling film and a sheet of newspaper to exclude light and leave somewhere warm like a kitchen to germinate.

5. When the first true leaves appear (the set after the cotyledons or seed leaves) you can move the seedlings carefully with a teaspoon to fill any gaps.

6. Leave on a sunny window cill if it is really cold or take outside every morning to get maximum sun. If the night temperature is going to be below 6 degrees Celsius bring it inside for warmth.

Seedlings with glass and second crop of oriental mustard leaves

7. Check the water requirements every other day if uncovered and add a tiny amount of organic liquid fertiliser (I use baby bio) to the watering can if the leaves aren’t  bulking up quickly and there’s plenty of daylight.

8. After 30-40 days the leaves can be cut with scissors as needed to add to salads or stir fries. Be careful to leave any buds near the base as these will quickly grow a new crop.

Second salad crop in March.

9. One box should give enough for 4-6 good portions so you need a about 4 or 5 boxes of boxes to keep a couple supplied with salads on a weekly basis.

10. SLUGS! Once outside these tasty salads will attract the slugs after a while. Make sure you take precautions as your conscience allows. Either pick them off, lay a beer trap or drop a slug pellet or two in the area.