Combining Powerful Ideas

There are some amazingly powerful ideas floating around out there, getting traction in different places solving problems and doing good. Not all ideas work in all places since there are legal and cultural barriers but that's okay, there are plenty of good solutions to most of the problems out there.

The problem is that often only one or two ideas get implemented in a particular place, when getting all these ideas together would make an order of magnitude difference or more.

Many of these ideas don't scale well, but that might be an advantage sometimes. You can't economically run an aluminum smelter on solar, it needs the density of coal or nuclear power, but then we don't need a lot of aluminum smelters.

Passive solar homes, maximize the use of sun, shade and wind to minimize the amount of heating and cooling a home needs during the year. The building materials can be pretty flexible too, from sod to straw-bale to adobe to insulated concrete panels.

Alternative power from solar, wind, and microhydro allows you to generate electricity.

Biodiesel for automotive fuel.

Biogas for cooking fuel and fertilizer.

Squarefoot gardening for high density home gardening, it gets a power boost when combined with succession planting.

Permaculture gardening strives for a permanent agricultural solution by maximizing the harvest of rainwater, and extensive use of native and zone compatible perennial edible plants in a layered approach.

Many of these ideas can be combined to create a sustainable lifestyle to keep you and your family alive and healthy during really tough times. Tough times come to everyone in one way or another being prepared will give you peace of mind.

Michael Yon: Gobar Gas II

I love articles like this. It shows us how people are solving a survival problem, but aren't thinking about it as a survival problem. To them it is just the answer.

A Gurkha veteran named Lalit whom I met, deep in the jungles of Borneo, at a British Army man-tracking school, came with good ideas.  Lalit began a conversation by announcing that many of Afghanistan's energy, land restoration and fuel needs could be solved if the Afghans would immediately adopt "Gobar Gas" production. This mysterious substance could improve the lives of Afghans as it had that of the Nepalese, he said, as, with great enthusiasm, he began to explain.

...

“Gobar” is the Nepali word for cow dung.  The “Gas” refers to biogas derived from the natural decay of dung and other waste products and biomass.  In Nepal, villagers use buffalo, cow, human, and other waste products for biogas production.  Pig and chicken dung are used in some places, as are raw kitchen wastes, including rotted vegetation.

Gobar is typically mixed with a roughly equal amount of water, and gravity-fed through a pipe into an airtight underground “digester,” where naturally occurring bacteria feast on the mixture. This anaerobic process produces small but precious amounts of gas. That gas can be fed directly into a heat source, such as a cooking stove, and used to power it.

The biogas that is produced is 50-70% methane by volume, similar to natural gas, and a convenient source of clean energy. The biogas is easily collected and stored for lighting, cooking and other household uses.  After the bacteria have finished digesting the dung, the byproduct is a rich organic fertilizer (sometimes called slurry).  That fertilizer is more effective than raw dung, with two important benefits for hands-on farmers:  it doesn’t smell bad, and almost all the pathogens and weed seeds have been destroyed.  There is no downside.  No waste.  No poisonous residues or batteries.  No moving parts.  Gobar Gas is an astonishingly elegant tap into “the circle of life” that environmentalists, economists, development people and humanitarians should all appreciate.

...

Before coming to the biogas sector, Mr. Rai worked in photovoltaic energy.  “Biogas has much greater socio-economic benefits,” said Mr. Rai in his Kathmandu office, “but biogas is not sexy like photovoltaic, which mostly helps men.  Biogas mostly helps women—the men don’t really notice because they still get cooked food, so why would a man invest 25,000 rupees?  But men will invest in photovoltaic because they get the sexy solar panel,” he said.  “Even women sometimes will opt for photovoltaic solar power because they don’t realize the headaches, coughing and eye problems come from cooking.”

 ...

Ten kilos of dung yields roughly an hour of stove burning time, and one of those skinny cows produces about 12 kilos per day.  KQ had a great herd of sheep—probably a couple hundred—kept in pens when not out feeding.  Villagers scrape sheep dung from the pens, which they mixed with cow (I saw only one), mule and horse manure for cooking.  A small stream runs through the village.  Afghans will use greenhouses if taught; I’ve seen them in Helmand and Oruzgan.

 ...

The bio-slurry from the digester is so effective for growing crops that in some countries, according to Mr. Rai, biogas is not an energy program but an agricultural initiative. In Vietnam it has been adopted for sanitation.  The biogas and the great sanitation benefits, including reduction of waste-borne diseases, are byproducts in one place and impetus in another.  In Karbasha Qalat, with a few greenhouses using the bio-slurry, the standard of life could dramatically improve.  There must be thousands of “Karbasha Qalats” in Afghanistan.

...

For a typical Nepalese family, installing a biogas facility, even with subsidies, is expensive.  But people feel that the investment pays for itself quickly.  Some women reported that Gobar Gas installations completely returned the investment within a year to 18 months.  SNV figures are more conservative, but even they show a complete return on investment after about three years.

...

But it’s important to consider the less easily monetized but still very real benefits of using Gobar Gas.  Saving 2,500 kilograms of trees each year per family has long-term economic value to farmers as the soil is revived. Improved health from better sanitation and the absence of constant wood smoke in the home has clear economic benefits, as does the ability to send children, freed from the labor of searching for fuel, to school.  These gains and many others don’t fit on a balance sheet.  But they are the conditions for real, long-term economic and social development in the Third World. 

...

Households of four to five people require about two cows or buffalos to create enough raw materials.  A thousand chickens or a hundred small humans can match one big water buffalo, and four pigs equal about two cows in dung production. Connecting the family outhouse gives a slight Gobar boost, but is more useful for sanitation than fuel.

...

Afghanistan recently won the silver medal in a competition for the world’s most corrupt nation.  Somalia beat them by a nose, walking away with the gold medal, and all the gold that was meant for the people.  Adding resources to Afghanistan has only made it more corrupt by giving thieves something to steal and more power after they steal it.  Grassroots efforts can bypass many of these issues.

More than forty of the world’s most developed nations are nurturing Afghanistan, trying to push, pull and prod it into shape.  Simultaneously, it won a silver medal for corruption.  This means, at very least, that top-down solutions are typically not working.  The government cannot be trusted with development money, because they don’t care about the development part.  We might as well feed the money into bio-digesters.  Fundamental progress in Afghanistan can best be achieved with more bottom up efforts.  That’s what worked in Nepal. 

...

The caloric rollercoaster for the star anaerobes begins at about 15ºC (59ºF).  That’s when they start waking up and going to work.  To kick them out of bed, some farmers pile straw atop the digester.  Decaying straw produces heat.  Busy anaerobes begin to help by producing heat inside the digester.  Some people build greenhouses over top, or barns.  In China, according to Jan Lam, the SNV biogas project manager in Cambodia, “The ‘3 in 1’ approach is popular.  A greenhouse contains a vegetable garden, pig sty and biodigester.  Vegetable waste is fed into the pigs and their waste goes directly into the plant which is often large enough for cooking and a water heater.”

In cold weather, digestion can be prodded with warm water.  As temperature rises, production rises, but the top of the “thermo coaster,” the ideal temperature, is about 35ºC (95ºF).  Good dung, plenty of water, little oxygen, and the anaerobes do their job.  Above that temperature, they slow down, trying to shed some heat.  But if slowing down doesn’t work, if their world gets too hot, they die.

Installing a digester is like adopting a baby elephant.  It can’t get too hot or cold.  It must eat every day, and drink lots of water.  Sometimes it needs a little washing.  If the water source is far, the system is impractical.  Many parts of Nepal and Afghanistan are impractical for baby elephants and biogas. 

So we have here a simple and durable system for creating cooking fuel, that also handles major sanitation issues and creates great fertilizer as a byproduct.

Unless you are running a diary farm you aren't going to have enough input to make heating fuel, but cooking fuel is a great first step. But a well designed and well sited house will not need very much heating or cooling.

News Roundup

• Masters of Disaster At Wharton's Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, researchers are investigating why humans do such a poor job planning for, and learning from, catastrophes.
• ECONOMIC & POLITICAL WISDOM - JERRY POURNELLE

• An energy strategy for grown-ups; Wind power is not a realistic substitute for oil
• Meet the Radical Homemakers
• Picture Show: The 37 or so Ingredients in a Twinkie

Cooking: The Blanche

Cooking foods does lots of great things for us. First off it often improves the taste, which is always nice. Cooking can also liberate more nutrients providing more power for our bodies. Proper cooking can also kill off surface bacteria. 

I'll focus on the last one for this post: Killing surface bacteria.

Generally speaking most of the food we have is pretty darn clean, but people walking around the produce section can and do cough and sneeze. A simple wash will wash off most of these germs but if you need to be sure your vegetables are germ free you can employ the blanche. 

Blanching food does several things. It will kill surface bacteria, it will liberate cellular oxygen allowing the base color of the food to be more easily seen and it will loosen the skins on certain foods.

You already know that bring water to a boil will kill the germs in the water, but did you realize that boil water will kill the germs on the outside of the things put into the water? Nobody ever mentions it but this is actually very important. 

Have you ever noticed how bright the colors are on those vegetable trays you can get at the store but the raw vegetables you get from the produce section are rather lackluster looking at the same time? The reason is that raw foods still have lots of oxygen bound up in them. By blanching foods the heat will cause the oxygen to liberate from the cells of the food allowing the colors underneath to shine through.  Overcooking will cause the colors and the cellular structure of the food to breakdown resulting in an ugly gray goo. We're going to prevent that with an ice-water shock bath. This works best on foods like broccoli, beans, carrots and celery, you know, the foods you usually see on a veggie tray.

Blanching will loosen the skins on certain foods, like tomatoes and peaches, for easier processing. Cooking tends to weaken cellular structures, since a blanche is so quick only the very outside of the food will cook, that makes skinning the food much easier and less wasteful. This is most often used on foods like tomatoes and peaches. This is the first step to making Tomato Concassé, which is the foundation of tomato sauce, or peach cobbler.

Blanching

To blanche food you need:

A big pot to boil the water in. Wider is better so the food will have room to float around and not touch other food. Lots of water means that the boil will recover the boil faster.

A large bowl, filled with a 1:1 ration of water and ice. After about 5 minutes you will have water at 32°F (0°C). This will shock the food, cooling it down quickly and stopping the cooking process. If we just let it sit on the counter it will continue cooking until it reach equilibrium.

A spider or slotted spoon. To get food in and out of the boiling water.

Since you are working with lots of water a few towels would be handy.

For a veggie tray, you'll want to cut the foods into bite-sized pieces before blanching. Lower a spider full into the water and allow to cook for 30 seconds, then using the spider again remove them into the ice-water bath for the shock. after 1 minute they will have stopped cooking. You can dry them in a salad spinner or on some towels. If you are not going to eat them within the hour store them in the refrigerator to keep them out of the Danger Zone, wrapped in some moist towels to keep them from drying out.

Fresh Tomato Sauce

If you have a garden with tomatoes one of the great things to make is your own tomato sauce. To make a good homemade tomato sauce you should start with a tomato concassé, because the seeds are tough and bitter and the skin will curl up into nasty little tubes that never soften. 

Ingredients

20 Roma Tomatoes, concasséd

1/4 cup olive oil

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1 teaspoon pepper

1 cup finely diced onion

2 teaspoon minced garlic

1 tablespoon finally chopped fresh oregano leaves

1 tablespoon finally chopped fresh thyme leaves

The juice of 1 lemon

Tomato Concassé

For skinning fruit, you'll need to cut a small X in the base (non-stem end) of the fruit and lower 2-3 of them into the water with the spider for 30 seconds. Then remove them with the spider and shock them in the ice-water bath. After a minute you can peel them by rubbing them in a towel to remove the skin or if the skin is still hanging on too tight with a paring knife by grabbing the loose skin at the X we made between the knife and thumb and pulling. We live at high-altitude so we need to go for 60 seconds to loosen the skins enough. Discard skins. 

Cut the tomatoes in half and using your finger remove the seeds and pulp, discard the seeds and pulp. Chop the tomatoes into large cubes discarding the hard stem. 

In a large non-reactive pot cook on low the tomato concassé, oil, salt, pepper, onion, garlic, and herbs for about half an hour until most of the liquid has cooked out.

Add the lemon juice. Let that return to a boil. Check the seasoning and adjust salt and pepper to taste.

News Roundup

• A short history of maize in Mexico
• How to preheat a frying pan
• The economic legacy of the Holocaust in Russia
• What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?
• What Does an Extended Lifespan Really Mean in Terms of Retirement Savings?
• Lawmakers' committee assignments and industry investments overlap
• THE MOST PROFITABLE PLANTS IN YOUR VEGETABLE GARDEN
• Horse Bunk Feeders make ideal raised Garden Planters
• Repurposed Kitchen Tools
• Take This Wok--and Season It! Tips from the Wok Doctor, Grace Young
• How broken does you site have to be for a major company to come out with a browser feature specifically to make it easier to read you content?
• Best Practice to Prevent PDF Attacks
• Perspectives of Poverty
• How To Permanently Delete Your Account on Popular Websites
• Worst Locust Plague in Two Decades Threatens Australian Harvest
• The Education Mess
• 'We Are Totally Unprepared'
• Unlocking the box that holds the secret to digital preservation
• Book reveals what a total economic collapse will look like
• Ark. campers had only seconds to escape from flood
• Is a college degree still worth it?: As U.S. employment patterns evolve, a diploma is no longer a guarantee of a better job and higher pay.
• Latest storms destroy crops, farmers losing millions
• New Jersey’s crazy war on oysters
• Cheap Solar Refrigerator for Vaccines Could Save Millions of Lives

It Just Isn't Possible to Prepare Enough Sometimes

What happened to them is terrible and shows one of the biggest holes I've seen in many preparation plans. 

I know exactly what they went through. We were hit by a drunk driver that crossed the median of the Interstate. My pregnant wife and I ended up in the hospital for a month and, unusually, the drunk was died on scene. Miraculously, we both had the same insurance company and when the hospital called they got agents who were sitting back to back, which expedited things nicely. 

Our emergency fund was depleted in the helicopter and ambulance charges just to get to the hospital. Helicopters are expensive. Ending up in the hospital tends to be very expensive. The cost of healthcare is greatly distorted because of how insurance companies and the government handle claims.

A car crash is one of the more expansive accidents that can happen to you. Cars are very safe nowadays and you tend to survive things that used to kill people outright but injuries can be worse because of it.

I once read that you could self-insure yourself if you had $1 million in the bank. While that is a great goal, you need to build up to it. 

Most advise you get for an emergency fund is 2-3 months of expenses. I prefer 1 month of expenses per $10k salary per year you make. 

Take it to the next level for a crash fund. The trouble is that a crash fund would have to be by definition pretty big. We're talking about $100k+ here. That would be 2-3 years salary for an average person. You can't do that very quickly at all, unless you hit it big on the lottery or something. 

Cash, CDs, gold, silver and other commodities, and the like. Right now stocks and bonds are not looking so great right now but they are options too things will change and they may be valid choices again.

The easiest way to do this is to make it a combined fund: retirement and crash. Don't put all of your funds into locked accounts like an IRA or 401(k) keep some of it liquid and semi-liquid. 

The Canning Experience in Denver

One of the great experiences we get to have is to go to the Denver Cannery and do some volunteer work. The products we do go to the poor and needy and disaster victims, but you can buy some of it yourself.

The LDS Cannery in Denver recently got upgraded to handle meats. So, yesterday we did beef chunks, they also can do chicken and pork and cream of chicken soup, as well as the old standbys of tomato soup and salsa. The USDA inspector comes at least once every day and said he's been impressed by the quality and cleanliness of the volunteers, usually beating the professional meat packers he's also inspecting. I would have loved to get a chance to ask him why he thought that was the case but it was to noisy and busy.

We had about a dozen volunteers doing most of the work, packing the meat into the cans, putting the cans into the basket to go into the pressure canners and packing the finished cans into boxes.

There were 4 missionaries, not the young kids most people see, these are older people doing a couple of years of service who are trained at the process and how to repair the machines and do the more critical/hazardous work like using the crane to move the baskets of cans to and from the pressure canners.

The most amazing thing is how with about 5 minutes of instruction we just self-organized into doing jobs we thought ourselves were best suited for and dove right in.

We blazed through 4 pallets of beef chunks, about 1600 pounds of meat in 4 hours. Even with the lidding machine occasionally eating cans instead of topping and sealing them properly. The cannery itself did 80,000 pounds in the past 4 weeks. Not bad for a place of only about 3000 sq. ft. and a bunch of volunteers.

I was near the front of the line getting the meat from the tubes it came in to the canning table where most people were concentrated. We would dump 25-30 pounds of meat onto to the table every couple of minutes, when things were moving smoothly, to keep the packers supplied with enough meat to not fall behind the cans. We were soon covered in blood up to our biceps. 

Near the end we were getting cramps in our hands from all the work. I couldn't do that work all day, we were warned that it was tough work and he wasn't kidding. But if I had too it wouldn't be too bad if you could rotate out to an easier job from time to time. 

I noticed a lot of the county Food Banks from around the state are signed up to do turns on the schedule: Arvada, Boulder, Larimar, Weld, Food Bank of the Rookies and even The Salvation Army and Jewish Family Services. Next month there is a Mayor's Night, mayors from around the state have been invited to come join in to participate in some canning to get an idea of what is going on in here. 

And all that is just the Wet Pack Cannery, the Dry Pack has its own area, personnel and schedule. 

Most of you don't live by Denver and so I found a list of community canneries by state but it doesn't list the one I know about here in Denver so you'd better look around in your own community.