Ice Age Farmer

OPEN THREAD: Many reports of empty shelves, rationing at Costco and others.

Also hearing lots of reports of poor germination/yields from seeds from corporate sources (home depot, etc)..

What are you seeing in your neck of the woods?

Ice Age Farmer

When I saw this post on Telegram, I thought. Ok. Sure. as it appears, there are many of us struggling with germinating seeds. I do not believe it is the seeds only. I think a lot has to do with the weather. The weather has been a bit wet and weird here in Australia. In the US and Europe, it is the opposite. They are short of water. I doubt any of this is man-made.

It shows how important it is to have a self-sufficient local community and trade seeds and edible goods. More the reason to join 061.bz and get involved, share ideas and solve the problems we face as a community.

Here are some random comments from the ICE Age Farmer Telegram Post.

Make my own compost (put in raised beds) and seeds saved from previous year. Great production this year: Cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, onions and herbs. Still getting winter squash, cantaloupe and potateos! Used store bought dirt for peppers which are producing, but very small fruit and curly leaves. Summary: Anything store bought did poorly.

Wales, UK. Terrible growth and yields. Also, we’ve literally had about 10 bees in our garden this year, when we’re normally inundated with them.

In Australia, Victoria, I shop mainly at ALDI and for months they haven’t had tissues or toilet paper, just occasionally one load that’s gone in minutes. The fruit, veg and meat section are always half empty with a few boxes with a few veggies or packages of meat and bare shelves between. It’s so weird but people are used to it now. But if I go to the little local butcher or green grocer, they’re always fully stocked, so it doesn’t seem like it’s a genuine shortage, but like they’re intentionally not stocking supplies.

Here in the North of Scotland everything on my organic croft is growing in abundance. I’ve seen more bees than ever this year and also growing numbers of grass hoppers, crickets, insects, moths and butterflies. A massive variety of wild flowers growing in abundance. An excellent year for frogs and other amphibians.
The hens are laying daily and they don’t get commercial feedstuff like layer’s mash.

The weather is seasonally normal and we haven’t had the heatwave the rest of the UK has suffered.

It is a good year for hay, haylage, silage… but for farmers who use fertiliser the price has increased 4 fold.

I only go to a supermarket knce every few weeks . Lidl is very well stocked. Tesco have cut back some of the range… but who really needs 40 choices of pasta anyway?

As you can see, it is a bit of a mixed bag. It is easy to hype up troubles or exceptions. HOWEVER, food shortages are coming. There is NO avoiding it. It is part of the cycle we are in, and we got the short straw on that. Many YouTube, Telegram and Facebook channels are warning about food shortages, and it is a fantastic “clickbait” item at the moment. Oddly they are right.

So what are we facing?

I am no expert. Let’s put that upfront. I merely tell you what I see and what I believe you have to do your own research—we are facing a mixture of man-made troubles, environmental troubles and planetary problems.

Man Made troubles:

Humans are considered the more intelligent species on the planet, which is a very arrogant statement. More so, it is completely wrong. We kill our environment, we do not plan, we follow who yells the lowest and promises the least resistance, and we do not pass on “survival skills”, just to name a few things. Do you still think we are the intelligent species? Monkeys do better, so much so that as I write this, half the world is “shitting their pants” about monkeypox.

• Artificially increase prices, like the sanctions on the “war” in Ukraine. It is rubbish. There is no need for it, and the war is something neither of us should get involved in. Ukraine just has to honour the agreements. Unfortunately, the US is pushing for war, and the EU is happy to comply. The reason is simple, they are bankrupt, and nothing will hide that better than a war, and in the end, you can blame the war or your “enemy” on the fact that you lost so much money defending something. It works. It’s been done several times before.
• Going green environment warriors, for years, we have had people claiming man-made climate change. It is a hoax, really. I can write several posts about that. Instead, I ask you to check what was said would happen and what happened. You will find non of the predictions matured.
• Soil “rape”, the constant addition of chemicals, has pretty much poisoned the soil. Some say we only have a few yrs of fertile farm soil left. Good farming soil is something you need to grow food.
• Urban development in good crop growing areas. It is a given that cities are built where humans can produce, harvest and find food easily. It is historic. What we see now is that the footprint of those areas is growing and growing with no regard for food production. Living on top of our food is now “coming back and bite us”, we created the reliance on centralised food, out of sight out of mind, and this industrial growing has hit the big time during the CoVid scamdemic. There is no doubt that this is only the beginning.

Environmental troubles:

Mother earth does what mother earth does. It has been like that since day one. It cycles through phases, one after the other, and there is nothing we can do about it or influence it. The best we can hope for is “adapt and overcome”, and that will come at a cost.

• The green debate makes you believe that everything is man-made, yet if you go back in history and look around, you will see something familiar. If you pay attention, you will see the cycles. We are in a Grand Solar Minimum cycle. In simple terms, it means that growing food will get more challenging.
• Reduction in growing degree days, each plant has a requirement on temperature and light, needs to reach maturity. Reduction in the number of days that have the temperature/light the plant needs to mature results in yield loss or, even worse, no yield at all. The solar cycle we are in now has the tendency to reduce the growing degree days simply because it is getting colder. GSM has the nature to magnify both sides of the spectrum, being very cold but also very hot. Radical weather is something the Governments most likely will use to collect more taxes from us.
• Reduction in the sun goes hand in hand with the growing degree days. During this cycle, we will see more clouds forming. This is due to more particles reaching within our “protective” layer. Clouds get formed when moisture can attach to something like dirt etc. More clouds mean less sun, and less sun means colder. You get the idea.

Planetary problems:

This is an interesting one, mainly because we are facing some interesting scenarios that all have occurred in isolation but never, that we know, occurred altogether. Let the fun begin.

• Grand Solar Minimum, I mentioned that, and we are in it. On its own, it can cause some havoc on Earth regarding food growing which I hinted above, and Coronal Mass Ejections (CME). CME is something many do not know about, and it is only recently slightly mentioned in the news. I call them Sun Farts, manly to hide my lack of understanding of these things :-)). It is like this. The Earth has a protective shield, this protective shield is declining in strength whilst the Sun’s CME does not. So if the sun farts, the likely hood of a CME reaching us on Earth is higher. Should it reach the Earth, several things can happen based upon the strength of the CME. It can range from pretty lights in the sky to NO LIGHTS AT EARTH, meaning a full electronic grid down scenario.
• Gas Planets alignment, Adapt2030 pointed this out, and it got my attention. The date is October 2024 thereabouts. That is when the big gas planets square off against the Earth in a rectangle/square box kinda way. Each planet, including Earth, has its own geomagnetic field doing this thing. There is a theory that when they are close enough, they will interact with each other. What that means, I doubt if anybody knows or has a stable scientific explanation, we do know it happened before 74AD, yet never during a GSM.
• Polar flip/reversal, is another interesting thing that is happening, the poles, despite what you might be told at high school, wander as they move. For that reason, you have a little graph on your paper maps showing the degree variation between true north and magnetic north. Pole flip has happened. Rock samples prove it. The odd thing is we have, yet again, no idea what it really means or what the impact will be. It could be as simple as turning your GPS upside down. It could be gradually. It could be instantly, it could be long or short, we do not know.