Update:
The Tiny Farm objective :moments to pause, reflect on directions, the curve of this wave, this financial tsunami we're riding.
Here's a quote of the week to think on.
"So many forces are arrayed against a return to the previous "normal" that we will be lucky, in another eighteen months, to still find ourselves speaking English and celebrating Christmas. What's "out there" is a panorama of mutually reinforcing critical problems pertaining to how we live on this continent. Like the obesity, heart disease, and diabetes that plague the public, these problems are disorders of lifestyle habits and the only possible "cure" is a comprehensive revision of lifestyle."...
(from James Howard Kunstler, lecturer, author and research fellow to oil industry and economic issues...personal blog http://www.kunstler.com/ )
I'm hearing Monty Python skits.."say no more..say no more..!"
meanwhile, back on the ranch...do you occasionally feel like these horses in the Alberta Spring of 1922..?
Yep. It's been one of those. But, did grab moments to weigh critical path on the two acre "farm" in Beamsville, to preview circumstance, structure, ideas, objectives.. we draw upon the expertise of others with similar economic philosophy who are ahead of our personal wave..perhaps already on the beach.
..a rusty duffer building "critical path"..
hanging around the stables looking for a good mount,
an aging knight in rusty armour and dated weaponry.
getting back in shape for an axial moment
Earthly Crusades
critical paths for cities
consumed by economic waves,
piracy in financial markets
the suicidal tendencies of empires.
building food gardens.
Just gardens.
remain focussed on the objective
Objective: community scale , forest gardens, potager gardens: off the grid engineering
Asset: equipt, land, resources, skills
Engine: capital infusion-debenture; capital conversion-equity
Time scale: 1 year to design/build engine: the basic business structure
Economic Paradigm: business environment in real time perspective: an honest appraisal of common circumstance.
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Garth Turner’s reading of national "real estate" markets
in the existing economic environment: from his blog , http://www.greaterfool.ca/ April 11th, 2009 suggests that properties, orchards, vinyards, fields and dormant but salveagable buildings will be available if we want to take on the management of larger resources. The investment in small scale regional food factors is the key.( from Garth Turner's words..)"The implications are profound. It will take until 2014, at least, for the jobs lost in 2008 and 2009 to be returned or replaced. As I have said before, many Boomers will never work again. As a result:
* The housing market will not regain 2007 momentum again for at least a generation.
* Real estate valuations may stabilize, even increase a little due to cheap mortgage rates, but then resume a downward trend which will last for at least a year.
* After that, prices will flatline until buyer confidence rises with job prospects.
* Unprecedented government borrowing and spending to stop the recession from becoming depression will cause higher taxes, higher inflation and rising interest rates in the next decade – all of them negative for real estate.
* Some areas of the country are cooked. Those dependent on manufacturing industries which have vanished, for example, will be full of houses which will never again in our lifetime be worth what they were two years ago."
Garth turner may not know a thing about unfolding options in small scale regional food industries such as we are contemplating. He is focused on and advising individuals in "real estate home investment"..condos, subdivisions etc..the collapse of reason and a warning about clinging to fantasies. As such we think he is defining opportunity for an alternative approach. He is well worth following for eavesdropping on the national and sometimes international real estate market chatter. Take time to drop in on the comments from other readers that is as informative as the blog itself.*****
And for the scope behind what is disturbing Garth Turner?
"Indeed, for all that the 1930s evoke national trauma, that decade was in fact a waiting room for national glory and wellbeing. World War Two ushered in American global ascendancy, the "Happy Days" of the 1950s and an unprecedented middle-class prosperity.
Today's disaster stage of American financialization - the bursting of the huge 25-year, almost $50 trillion debt bubble that helped underwrite the hijacking of the U.S. economy by a rabid financial sector -- won't be nearly so kind. It is already ushering in the reverse: a global realignment in which the United States loses the global economic leadership won in World War Two. The ignominy deserved by Wall Street after 1929-1933 is peanuts compared with the opprobrium the U.S. financial sector and its political and regulatory allies deserve this time."
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and from one of the biggies in the money circles: Ilargi and Stoneleigh..
These are some of the "gurus" comenting from outside of the special interest circles that presently engineer our common circumstance. A must read for the wise investor or interested student like yours truly. They comment from the point of view of those international shell game players who draw on the energy of the slaves of empires for their perrier and yachts. The parts in bold are my emphasis.
" The easy availability of cheap credit has conveyed a considerable amount of price support - price support that will be progressively withdrawn as credit tightens. Prices will fall, but the collapse of credit will cause purchasing power to fall faster than price, leading to the apparent paradox of nominally cheaper goods being less affordable in the future than nominally more expensive goods are today. Moreover, there are likely to be substantial changes in relative prices between essentials and non-essentials. As a much larger percentage of a much smaller money supply will be chasing essentials such as food and energy, there will be relative price support for those items. In other words, while everything is becoming less affordable due to the collapse of purchasing power, essentials such a food and energy will be the least affordable of all, whatever the nominal price. People commonly speak of unaffordable prices as a result of inflation, but do not realize that deflation can have the same effect, only much more abruptly."
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http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/fekete/2005/0307.html to show how long this circle of economists and analysts have been cautioning us about this financial ponzi scheme that has sucked the life out of our industrial age machine. ..with intent? Perhaps the real time symptoms of the truths behind Malthusian theory and the more recent (1970's) Club of Rome studies on the "Limits to Growth."
TSUNAMI IN THE BOND MARKET
by Antal E. Fekete,Professor Emeritus, Memorial University of NewfoundlandMarch 7, 2005
Summary for the busy executive
"The check-kiting scheme between the U.S. Treasury and the Fed, that has been going on quite openly for some 35 years, may have now been supplemented with another, this time between the Fed and the Bank of Japan, conducted in high secrecy. It involves the conspiratorial exchange of non-interest-bearing yen balances for interest-bearing Treasury debt in ever greater volume, over and above the need to finance the American trade deficit with Japan, huge as the latter may already be.
The purpose of the conspiracy is to forestall a run on the dollar by other central banks and foreign exchange speculators. If my assumption about the existence of this conspiracy is correct, then the end-game of the regime of irredeemable currencies will be stretched out by another decade or so. However, that decade will not be one of inflation most observers expect. It will be one of deflation and world-wide depression which hardly anybody expects."
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How do we work with this?
"In at least a dozen recession-strapped communities throughout America, the US Dollar has been superceded by local "coupon" currencies,
denominated in $1, $5, $20 and $50 amounts to help assist in the flow of cash within these communities.
In an interesting article in
USA Today, the local people can buy this currency - the way it works is that shoppers purchase this currency at a discount - say 95 cents for a dollar's worth - and spend the full value within their own communities without a problem. They can also cash in this new currency at their local community bank to reclaim its dollar value. These new local currencies have their own local names like BerkShares, Plenty and Cheers. "
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We also face such things as pointed out in this article below from
G20: A step closer to a new World Currency. If we don't have jobs within that G20 framework, the artifical currencies, we have to invent regional ones to ensure the movement of food and energy at the community level.
The G20 boys are not concerned with that. You and I have to be.
"A single clause in Point 19 of the communiqué issued by the G20 leaders amounts to revolution in the global financial order.
"We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity," it said. SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund that has lain dormant for half a century.
In effect, the G20 leaders have activated the IMF's power to create money and begin global "quantitative easing". In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.
It has been a good summit for the IMF. Its fighting fund for crises is to be tripled overnight to $750bn. This is real money. "
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To close: we focus on 'off-grid' food gardens as leading edge opportunity; marshall resources, steward cash, equity partnerships, "organic" cash crop engines; regional currencies for food gardens, food products and services.
"Our species is hitting the planet so hard because we have lost touch with its majesty. We have surrounded ourselves with ugliness and created a void in our hearts. Naturally, we try to fill that void, but we fill it with things that cause more damage. This is not a good cycle to be caught up in.
I don’t worry about the planet – the planet will be fine. Give it a few thousand years and it will come around. A few thousand years is nothing to a planet. It is humans that need to take stock. Not only are we threatening our own existence, we are not really enjoying ourselves in the process!
We are a part of this magnificent universe, and we deserve to dwell happily within it while we are here. We just need to learn to look for that happiness in the places where it actually lives."
(and to perhaps to create them..with and for others ? )
(WW1 CEF Horse Drawn Artillery Battery: washing the horses: 1915)
Omega seeds, may your canoe ply quiet waters.
regards from Mongrel Puppies
One we can fix ourselves
