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Nebraska retiree uses earth's heat to grow oranges in snow
stable temperature of 58 degrees at 8 ft underground - winter and summer
grows oranges, lemons, grapes
being dong it for 24 years
45 years ago he did the geothermal for the house
lexan poly carbonate for "windows"
75ft out, 75ft across, 75ft back (tube is weeping-tile tubing)
in new design has an extra loop under the greenhouse that recirculates the heat from the top of the greenhouse to one foot underground,
all-organic. no pest problems other than aphids and light flys - both are controlled with horticultural oil (refined mineral oil)
at Sandhills the lots are drying up and vacant - have both power and power already in place
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Winter temperatures in Alliance, Nebraska can drop to -20°F (the record low is -40°F/C), but retired mailman Russ Finch grows oranges in his backyard greenhouse without paying for heat. Instead, he draws on the earth's stable temperature (around 52 degrees in his region) to grow warm weather produce- citrus, figs, pomegranates - in the snow.
Finch first discovered geothermal heating in 1979 when he and his wife built it into their 4400-square-foot dream home to cut energy costs. Eighteen years later they decided to add a 16'x80' greenhouse in the backyard. The greenhouse resembles a pit greenhouse (walipini) in that the floor is dug down 4 feet below the surface and the roof is slanted to catch the southern sun.
To avoid using heaters for the cold Nebraska winter nights, Finch relies on the warm underground air fed into the greenhouse via plastic tubing under the yard and one fan.
Finch sells a "Citrus in the Snow" report detailing his work with his "geo-air" greenhouses and says anyone can build a market-producing greenhouse for about $25,000 or "less than the cost of a heat system on a traditional greenhouse".
in-ground dome house of the family who led geese to fly home
Paula and Bill Lishman spent many winters in a poorly-insulated A frame cabin before realizing they needed to go underground to use the earth’s energy to stay warm, so they knocked the top off a hill, dropped in ferro-cement domes and covered it up again with dirt. Thanks to skylights cut into every dome and the white-powdered marble that covers the interior, their earth-sheltered home is naturally well-lit despite being below the frost line. Fifteen feet below ground, the soil temperature remains about equal to the annual average temperature of the area’s surface air so earth-sheltered homes use sod’s constant temperature to stay warmer in winter and cooler in summer.
Bill Lishman believed in rethinking not just the conventional home, but also how we live. He reimagined his home’s refrigerator by building a round appliance that pops up out of the countertop so the heavier cool air stays inside when opened (via compressed air).
In 1986, Bill Lishman began training Canada Geese to follow his ultralight aircraft and to "teach" the birds migration routes to avoid a threatened extinction. His work on "Operation Migration" brought him popular recognition with the 1996 movie Fly Away Home starring Jeff Daniels.
The Rainforest Action Network released a 2019 report claiming that the US banking giant provided the most fossil fuel firm financing of any bank in from 2016 to 2018.
Rupert Read, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia, and a spokesperson for campaign group Extinction Rebellion, said that the bank is "taken by some to be the largest fossil fuel funder in the world."
He said if the bank's own researchers were "saying the very future of the human race is at stake" then the bank itself should change its direction.
"It's good they [the researchers] are telling the truth more - it's not good they [the bank] remain a strong funder of fossil fuels," he said.
Carbon emissions in the coming decades "will continue to affect the climate for centuries to come in a way that is likely to be irreversible," they said, adding that climate change action should be motivated "by the likelihood of extreme events"
To mitigate climate change net carbon emissions need to be cut to zero by 2050. To do this, there needed to be a global tax on carbon, the report authors said.
But they said that "this is not going to happen anytime soon".
"We cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened," JP Morgan economists David Mackie and Jessica Murray said.
In a hard-hitting report to clients, the economists said that without action being taken there could be "catastrophic outcomes"
Several million acres of crops have now been reported damaged by dicamba, according to industry estimates. And more than 100 US farmers are engaged in litigation in federal court alleging Monsanto and BASF collaboration created a “defective” crop system that has damaged orchards, gardens and organic and non-organic farm fields in multiple states.
Last month the first trial over dicamba damage ended with a $265m jury verdict against Monsanto and BASF. The documents reviewed by the Guardian were obtained through court-ordered discovery by the law firm that won that case.
The jury found on behalf of Missouri peach farmers Bill and Denise Bader, who alleged the companies’ actions led to the dicamba drift that damaged 30,000 peach trees, ruining their 34-year-old family farm. The companies’ actions to encourage widespread spraying of dicamba over large areas created an “ecological disaster”, Bader attorney Bill Randles told the jury.
Dicamba has been in use since the 1960s but traditionally was used sparingly, and not on growing crops, because it has a track record of volatilizing – moving far from where it is sprayed – particularly in warm growing months. As it moves it can damage or kill the plants it drifts across.
In the Roundup system, farmers could spray glyphosate herbicides such as Roundup over the top of certain crops that Monsanto genetically engineered to survive being sprayed with the pesticide. This “glyphosate-tolerant” crop system has been popular with farmers around the world but has led to widespread weed resistance to glyphosate. The new system promoted by Monsanto and BASF similarly provides farmers with genetically engineered dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton that can be sprayed directly with dicamba.
This is a great interview.. One of the best I have ever heard on YouTube. Big Picture thinking. Brilliant.
THE PROBLEM
A century of monocrop farming and reliance on pesticides has damaged our nation’s once-fertile soils and the health of every American. The rapid increase in pesticide use over the past few decades has coincided with this explosion of chronic disease.
A profound change in the demographics of chronic disease is underway in the United States. Independent research from private laboratories and universities around the world, are implicating glyphosate – the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup.
"If we don't loosen up some money, this sucker is going down." -GW Bush, 2008
“Lack of proof that something is true does not prove that it is not true - when you want to believe.” -Humpty Dumpty, 2014
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Prof. Albert Bartlett
