Goin' Green on St. Patrick's Day

Crossposed from Wiretap

There was an interesting piece in the Fashion section of the NYTimes this Sunday that is a little weird but it gets into some pretty fun stuff.

The piece follows a kid from Brooklyn who is hell bent on becoming an organic farmer. Trucker hats, Carhartts, and Pabst were the fashion but now some are putting the heart behind the fashion and finding the funk in farming.

"The Billyburg scene has changed, said Annaliese Griffin, who contributes to a blog called Grocery Guy. “Having a cool cheese in your fridge has taken the place of knowing what the cool band is, or even of playing in that band,” she said. “Our rock stars are ricotta makers.”

The same is true for Sarah Love, an Oklahoma University political science graduate and sometimes young Clay Pope a former DC staffer turn conservation lobbyist who have formed an organization that helps farmers become more environmentally friendly and companies to offset their carbon emissions.

Pope says he doesn't know about New York farmers but in Oklahoma the coolness of farming just brings the same stream of folks. "But stuff like that usually starts on the coasts and works its way inward." "Boutique farms in Oklahoma would go a whole lot further if you legalize marijuana, though," Love laughs. "I see a lot of kids getting involved then!"

Kidding aside, they hope to increase the interest and financial availability to small farmers and new farmers by providing financial incentives to those who run environmentally friendly operations.

"There are a lot of ways that farms hurt the environment over time," Love tells me. "With someone providing incentives to be more eco-friendly more people are happy to do the right thing for the environment."

Their plan is three fold.

1. Switch to no till farming methods. Traditional farming methods have you work the land, turning over the soil to get rid of weeds and work in fertilizer. When you till the soil, however, carbon dioxide escapes from the ground into the atmosphere. The best way to get the soil to chill out is to let it sit for a while and let grasses grow over it which converts the carbon dioxide into oxygen via photosynthesis. You can let your cows graze on it and plant the next year. This is what people mean when they talk about carbon sequestration through the natural terrestrial cycle.


2. Pasture land management is the next idea. This is what is mentioned a little bit above. The more the land sits and the the grasses can grow and suck the carbon out and change it to oxygen. Reducing production and using it for livestock instead lets the grass do its thing.


3. Buffer zone repairs. In places like Oklahoma there is a lot of water. Tons of lakes, rivers, streams... just a lot of water moving around. And of course a lot of farmland and grazing lands bump up against these waterways. With cows grazing so close to them you have them pulling the grass out of the banks reducing the vegetation that is holding the soil in around the waterways. As a result the land falls into the water... as does everything that is on the land... which means... cow poo too. That pollutes the hell out of the rivers and streams and lakes.
   
   So we have a couple of choices here. Move the buffer zone back 75-300 meters from waterways and it saves the grass. For the waterways that have already been compromised you'll allow the grass to regrow, or you can do what is called active re-forestation and plant trees and grass along to hold the soil together.

What Love and Pope do is work with companies to offset their own carbon emissions by contributing to farmers who do this kind eco-friendly farming and adopt some of these practices.

Organic is hot farming, but here's another way that new farmers can do their thing while also making the environment better and be adequately compensated for it. And its a great way for companies to offset their own emissions in a homegrown local way.

Caucus Hangover

Our buddy Joel Mathis over at the new site RedBlueAmerica.com identified it correctly... it was so hardcore that I know I'm exhausted.

The Caucus itself took for....ev....er. Not the voting part - oh no, once people got in the door it was lickity split, the trouble was getting them in the door. I feel like I got in pretty quick and I spent the rest of the time causing trouble and meeting and greeting with friends I hadn't seen in a while.

I got up at 7:30 this morning to check the CA results - still not fully in - reporting at 83% and my buddies over at CIRCLE needed to wait until at least 93% before they could start coming up with the numbers for youth turnout in the Golden State.

Joel claims that conservatives are coming to terms with their sad sorry loss to John McCain. Awww.... well isn't that too bad.... maybe next time that will teach you not to elect nutbar conservatives that aren't going to totally DESTROY OUR COUNTRY!!!! Hey, I'm just sayin'....

CIRCLE has numbers for turnout in Arizon, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Deleware, New Mexico, Tennessee, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts...

There were a number of states that don't have that kind of data available. One of course is the Great State of Kansas. Despite the hard hard work of a writing partner of mine we couldn't get anything on demographics from Kansas. She said the KDP will have internal numbers but won't share that with the press. I say fooey! Why wouldn't you want people to know the unbelievable turnout numbers, the insane number of non-democrats who showed up to vote, and the count for those caucus sites?? What do ya do?

Mike Connery over at FM analizes some numbers here:

"As a share of the Democratic electorate, young voters increased their share in every state for which comparable data is available.

In most states, that increased turnout was to the advantage of Barack Obama, who won the youth vote in 13 12 of the 15 states for which data is currently available. The margin by which Obama carried young voters in those states varied wildly. In some states, like Georgia, he maintained his towering advantage over Clinton among young voters, and in Missouri, where he won by a mere 10,000 votes, young voters may well have been the difference in his campaign. In other states, though, like California, Clinton cut that advantage down to just a few points. Clinton actually won California. Guess the CNN exit polls are still adjusting.

Regardless of which candidate carries the nomination next month, that increased turnout will be a big advantage for Democrats in the general election. In Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York and Tennessee combined, 458,000 more young people voted in the Democratic contest than the Republican. The actual amount varied widely from state to state with Connecticut at the low end (~19,000 more Democratic youth participants) and New York at the high end (~203,000 more).

The one exception to this rule thus far was Oklahoma, in which 10,000 more young voters participated in the Republican primary than the Democratic primary."

I saw Congrats to the great state of Oklahoma!! There is an excited youth population ready to be developed and recruited! They are just all voting for republicans. Not much surprise there. It seems there is a fairly substantial College Republicans operations there. Pity.

Anyway - this is what I got. Go visit Joel and Mike for more. I need another nap.