Good Morning, Everyone! What's on your minds today? This is an Open Thread and the place where you can share every thing, from the trivial, personal, political and philosophical. Don't be shy. We like funny stuff too around here.

And funny stuff I need, because I just read this article:

I. Well Drilling Has Deep Impact on Health of Great Plains

and it's not funny. Now it's four days old news, but for fracking's sake, the consequences of the facts given in the article will last decades to come.

Look at this chart:

The number of oil and gas wells drilled within central provinces of Canada and central U.S. states 1900–2012. Canadian provinces: Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. U.S. states: Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming.

ECOSYSTEM SERVICE TRADE-OFFS. Net Primary Production (NPP), a fundamental measure of a region's ability to provide ecosystem services, is the amount of carbon fixed by plants and accumulated as biomass. It is a fundamental and supporting ecosystem service that is the basis for all life on Earth. We estimate that vegetation removal by oil and gas development from 2000 to 2012 reduced NPP by ∼4.5 Tg of carbon or 10 Tg of dry biomass across central North America. (One Tg is 1 million metric tons or 1 billion kilogram). Advanced technologies in oil and gas extraction coupled with energy demand have encouraged an average of 50,000 new wells per year throughout central North America since 2000. Although similar to past trends, the space and infrastructure required for horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing are transforming millions of hectares of the Great Plains into industrialized landscapes, with drilling projected to continue.

In other words:

They say that the land actually taken up by wells, roads and storage facilities just between 2000 and 2012 is about 3 million hectares. This is the land area equivalent to three Yellowstone National Parks.The hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” used to extract oil and gas is between 8,000 cubic metres and 50,000 cubic metres per well, which means that the total quantity of water squirted into the ground at high pressure during the 12 years to 2012 could exceed 33,900 million cubic metres. At least half of this was used in areas already defined as “water-stressed.”

Oh, that's not all:

The total amount lost in rangelands is the equivalent of approximately five million animal unit months (AUM; the amount of forage required for one animal for 1 month), which is more than half of annual available grazing on public lands managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The amount of biomass lost in croplands is the equivalent of 120.2 million bushels of wheat, ∼6% of the wheat produced in 2013 within the region and 13% of the wheat exported by the United States

Are you getting thirsty? Hungry? Some wheat bread? Some steaks? Too pricey or not available? You might need to steal some water from your neighbors at night, may be.

Although there is legislation, it is limited to lands subject to federal jurisdiction, and 90% of all drilling infrastructure is now on privately owned land—at least, in the U.S.

What? Privately owned land? Who owns it? Families or corporations, bribed and bought farmers? Which government department allows corporation to buy and use so much land for their purposes?

“In the early 20th century, rapid agricultural expansion and widespread displacement of native vegetation reduced the resilience of the region to drought, ultimately contributing to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s./strong>”

Yeah, we all are going to be dust pretty soon ... I love me my dust, right.

“It took catastrophic disruption of livelihoods and economies to trigger policy reforms that addressed environmental and social risks of land-use
change.”

I love me my catastrophic disruptions too. If we can't use our brains to trigger policy reforms, I guess something else will do it. Not that I really want that to happen, but what else would be new? May be Pablo Picasso wasn't that wrong after all in saying that

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

Over night I thought about another development that changed and dominates the US landscape usage.

II. It’s Time to Rethink America’s Corn System

.
Some excerpts to give you food for thought:

Sprawling across the Midwest and Great Plains, the American Corn Belt is a massive thing. You can drive from central Pennsylvania all the way to western Nebraska, a trip of nearly 1,500 miles, and witness it in all its glory. No other American crop can match the sheer size of corn.

We know all the reasons why the US grows so much corn, it's a versatile crop, grows almost everywhere in the US, it can be turned into so many different products, like corn flour, cornmeal, grits or sweet corn, animal feed to make our hogs, chickens and cattle fatter faster. And it can be turned into ethanol, high-fructose corn syrup or even bio-based plastics. Fantastic crop, right?

But the author says that corn needs to be considered a "system" not only a crop and provides four reasons of why the "corn system" is not a good thing for America.

1. The American corn system is inefficient at feeding people

The ultimate success of any agricultural system should be measured in part by how well it delivers food to a growing population. ...Today’s corn crop is mainly used for biofuels (roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol) and as animal feed (roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn, plus distillers grains left over from ethanol production, is fed to cattle, pigs and chickens). Much of the rest is exported. Only a tiny fraction of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, much of that for high-fructose corn syrup.. .... The average Iowa cornfield has the potential to deliver more than 15 million calories per acre each year (enough to sustain 14 people per acre, with a 3,000 calorie-per-day diet, if we ate all of the corn ourselves), but with the current allocation of corn to ethanol and animal production, we end up with an estimated 3 million calories of food per acre per year, mainly as dairy and meat products, enough to sustain only three people per acre. That is lower than the average delivery of food calories from farms in Bangladesh, Egypt and Vietnam. ...
In short, the corn crop is highly productive, but the corn system is aligned to feed cars and animals instead of feeding people.

2. The corn system uses a large amount of natural resources

In the U.S., corn uses more land than any other crop, spanning some 97 million acres— an area roughly the size of California. U.S. corn also consumes a large amount of our freshwater resources, an estimated 5.6 cubic miles per year of irrigation water withdrawn from America’s rivers and aquifers. And fertilizer use for corn is over 5.6 million tons of nitrogen... Much of this fertilizer, along with large amounts of soil, washes into the nation’s lakes, rivers and coastal oceans, polluting waters and damaging ecosystems along the way. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is the largest, and most iconic, example of this.Between 2006 and 2011, the amount of cropland devoted to growing corn in America increased by more than 13 million acres, coming from farms that lost... lost 2.9 million acres of wheat..1.7 milliong acres of oats...as well as sorghum, barley, sunflower and other crops. Looking at these land, water, fertilizer and soil costs together, you could argue that the corn system uses more natural resources than any other agricultural system in America, while providing only modest benefits in food.

3. The corn system is highly vulnerable to shocks.

Given enough time, most massive monocultures fail, often spectacularly. And with today’s high demand and low grain stocks, corn prices are very volatile, driving spikes in the price of commodities around the world....The monolithic nature of corn production presents a systemic risk to America’s agriculture, with impacts ranging from food prices to feed prices and energy prices. It also presents a potential threat to our economy and to the taxpayers who end up footing the bill when things go sour. This isn’t rocket science: You wouldn’t invest in a mutual fund that was dominated by only one company, because it would be intolerably risky. But that’s what we’re doing with American agriculture. Simply put, too many of our agricultural eggs are in one basket.

4. The corn system operates at a big cost to taxpayers

Finally, the corn system receives more subsides from the U.S. government than any other crop, including direct payments, crop insurance payments and mandates to produce ethanol. In all,U.S. crop subsidies to corn totaled roughly $90 billion between 1995 and 2010—not including ethanol subsidies and mandates...In fact, for the 2012 season U.S. crop insurance programs will likely pay out an estimated $20 billion or more—shattering all previous records....It might be time to rethink our crop subsidy programs, to focus tax dollars where they will achieve the greatest public good. We should help farmers recover their losses during a natural disaster, making them whole again, but not gain from failed harvests
at public expense.

5. Bottom line: We need a new approach to corn. What would such a system look like?

We need a new approach, because in short, our investment of natural and financial resources is not paying the best dividends to our national diet, our rural communities, our federal budget or our environment.This reimagined agricultural system would be a more diverse landscape, weaving corn together with many kinds of grains, oil crops, fruits, vegetables, grazing lands and prairies. Production practices would blend the best of conventional, conservation, biotech and organic farming. Subsidies would be aimed at rewarding farmers for producing more healthy, nutritious food while preserving rich soil, clean water and thriving landscapes for future generations. This system would feed more people, employ more farmers and be more sustainable and more resilient than anything we have today.

It is important to note that these criticisms of the larger corn system—a behemoth largely created by lobbyists, trade associations, big businesses and the government—are not aimed at farmers....What needs to change here is the system, not the farmers.

You bet, I agree with all of what was said above. People in smaller countries than the US would be more than happy to have that kind of land mass to work with. But what do you do with your land?

I am that kind of an immigrant you and your ancestors all were, dreaming of a owning a little piece of land and live off it. And if I don't manage it anymore, I hope my son will. We will produce our own energy, we would use, and we will raise our own food we will eat. Especially pigs. Because those corporate ones are just not satisfying our taste buds.

Well, these little "woolen pigs" are cute. There was a German article in one of our newspapers, that included this video and inspired me to get me a real pig into my life.

I really love pigs. When you ever visit Berlin in Germany, go visit the Zoo. They have a great "pig department". I used to go there with my baby son in the seventies.

Have a good day, all.