Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
I believe in data. Show me that and I might believe you
There are pages and pages of studies on their website:
The two-year incorporation of the rock dust compost into a poor-quality soil led to a significant increase in the yield with the increase of 120% and 187% compared to untreated control in 2013 and 2014, respectively. Application of rock dust compost obviously promoted superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity and concentration of vitamin C in mature apple trees. The beneficial effects coincided with higher microbial activity and shifts in the composition of the soil microbiome. Our results demonstrate that the practice of combining the rock dust-fortified compost with NPK fertilizers provides a cost- effective way of supplying crops with macro-and micronutrients ensuring better vegetative growth and higher yields.
Here we report that amending a UK clay-loam agricultural soil with a high loading (10 kg/m2) of relatively coarse-grained crushed basalt significantly increased the yield (21 ± 9.4%, SE) of the important C4 cereal Sorghum bicolor under controlled environmental conditions, without accumulation of potentially toxic trace elements in the seeds. Yield increases resulted from the basalt treatment after 120 days without P- and K-fertilizer addition. Shoot silicon concentrations also increased significantly (26 ± 5.4%, SE), with potential benefits for crop resistance to biotic and abiotic stress.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Just mentioned this to my beloved and as practical as ever she said
'I will just have to plant some more' !!!
Big G, cultivating votre jardin comme d’habitude.
You mentioned earlier you thought Ardern will fall next year
As a Kiwi you obviously must have a feel for this and are Kiwi's falling out of love with her?
Short answer, yes.
She’s a very poor administrator and essentially a performative idiot.
Which is interesting because she was more popular than God when she won re-election in 2020, and widely feted across the West. In fact, I think you were a fan at the time too.
A lot can change in 18 months.
True heir to Blair. Even worked as one of his policy wonks.
No she didn’t. She had an admin job. She “allowed” her CV to be over-construed.
Wiki claims 'senior policy advisor' in a 'policy unit'. What does this really mean?
It means she had a cushy number spouting ignorant bullshit that causes enormous trouble when tried in the real world.
At least, judging by the policy advisers I have had the misfortune to encounter.
We could perhaps see some of that with her Covid policies. Magnificent, on paper, effective, for a while, unsustainable in the medium term.
However, it should be noted that the medium term was long enough in that case.
Some policy advisors are really top class, you know.
(Northern_Al, retired Policy Advisor).
I hate to say it mate, because I've always liked what you have to say and you're clearly a lovely person, but...
If you were a policy adviser in education, you were either not top class, or you were ignored.
Odd that the local press were claiming the LD candidate was a woman from Somerset. Richard Foord I used to know - as Mike Smithson says he is a long way from the standard LibDem. He'll stand out a mile in the parliamentary party.
I've just seem some interviews with him and he appears very smart and fluent. Eds successor?
He has to win the seat first, not a given if the Tories pick a good local candidate
Agreed.
I've spoken to a fair number of people and assume almost all of them voted for Parish last time out. Unless Boris is gone or going within weeks it feels like any Tory candidate is up against it. Lots of "not voting Tory while that ... is in charge".
Recent local elections suggest to me that the great British public have sent the message "Boris out" followed by "Which part of Boris out didn't you understand?" Tiv and Hon looks a lot like "Would you like 'Boris out' explained slowly and carefully?".
Odd that the local press were claiming the LD candidate was a woman from Somerset. Richard Foord I used to know - as Mike Smithson says he is a long way from the standard LibDem. He'll stand out a mile in the parliamentary party.
I've just seem some interviews with him and he appears very smart and fluent. Eds successor?
He has to win the seat first, not a given if the Tories pick a good local candidate
Agreed.
I've spoken to a fair number of people and assume almost all of them voted for Parish last time out. Unless Boris is gone or going within weeks it feels like any Tory candidate is up against it. Lots of "not voting Tory while that ... is in charge".
Recent local elections suggest to me that the great British public have sent the message "Boris out" followed by "Which part of Boris out didn't you understand?" Tiv and Hon looks a lot like "Would you like 'Boris out' explained slowly and carefully?".
The only way it doesnt fall I think is if the LD is so uninspiring turnout craters. If he is presentable and gaffe free They ought to take it 50 to 35 or thereabouts with the rest spread amongst labour and the other spanner/minor parties
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
I believe in data. Show me that and I might believe you
There are pages and pages of studies on their website:
The two-year incorporation of the rock dust compost into a poor-quality soil led to a significant increase in the yield with the increase of 120% and 187% compared to untreated control in 2013 and 2014, respectively. Application of rock dust compost obviously promoted superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity and concentration of vitamin C in mature apple trees. The beneficial effects coincided with higher microbial activity and shifts in the composition of the soil microbiome. Our results demonstrate that the practice of combining the rock dust-fortified compost with NPK fertilizers provides a cost- effective way of supplying crops with macro-and micronutrients ensuring better vegetative growth and higher yields.
Here we report that amending a UK clay-loam agricultural soil with a high loading (10 kg/m2) of relatively coarse-grained crushed basalt significantly increased the yield (21 ± 9.4%, SE) of the important C4 cereal Sorghum bicolor under controlled environmental conditions, without accumulation of potentially toxic trace elements in the seeds. Yield increases resulted from the basalt treatment after 120 days without P- and K-fertilizer addition. Shoot silicon concentrations also increased significantly (26 ± 5.4%, SE), with potential benefits for crop resistance to biotic and abiotic stress.
Take your pick.
Adding rock dust to agricultural soils can not only increase yield, it can improve soil stability and reduce soil erosion, draw down 45% of the CO2 that Britain needs to reach net zero, and avoid the need for fertilisers imported from Russia.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Just mentioned this to my beloved and as practical as ever she said
'I will just have to plant some more' !!!
Big G, cultivating votre jardin comme d’habitude.
You mentioned earlier you thought Ardern will fall next year
As a Kiwi you obviously must have a feel for this and are Kiwi's falling out of love with her?
Short answer, yes.
She’s a very poor administrator and essentially a performative idiot.
Which is interesting because she was more popular than God when she won re-election in 2020, and widely feted across the West. In fact, I think you were a fan at the time too.
A lot can change in 18 months.
True heir to Blair. Even worked as one of his policy wonks.
No she didn’t. She had an admin job. She “allowed” her CV to be over-construed.
Wiki claims 'senior policy advisor' in a 'policy unit'. What does this really mean?
It means she had a cushy number spouting ignorant bullshit that causes enormous trouble when tried in the real world.
At least, judging by the policy advisers I have had the misfortune to encounter.
We could perhaps see some of that with her Covid policies. Magnificent, on paper, effective, for a while, unsustainable in the medium term.
However, it should be noted that the medium term was long enough in that case.
Some policy advisors are really top class, you know.
(Northern_Al, retired Policy Advisor).
I hate to say it mate, because I've always liked what you have to say and you're clearly a lovely person, but...
If you were a policy adviser in education, you were either not top class, or you were ignored.
Thanks for the compliment. On the second bit, I didn't work in your bit of education, though - a bit more niche. And actually, if you think things are bad you'd be amazed at how much worse some things would be if some advisors got their way.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Just mentioned this to my beloved and as practical as ever she said
'I will just have to plant some more' !!!
Big G, cultivating votre jardin comme d’habitude.
You mentioned earlier you thought Ardern will fall next year
As a Kiwi you obviously must have a feel for this and are Kiwi's falling out of love with her?
Short answer, yes.
She’s a very poor administrator and essentially a performative idiot.
Which is interesting because she was more popular than God when she won re-election in 2020, and widely feted across the West. In fact, I think you were a fan at the time too.
A lot can change in 18 months.
True heir to Blair. Even worked as one of his policy wonks.
No she didn’t. She had an admin job. She “allowed” her CV to be over-construed.
Wiki claims 'senior policy advisor' in a 'policy unit'. What does this really mean?
It means she had a cushy number spouting ignorant bullshit that causes enormous trouble when tried in the real world.
At least, judging by the policy advisers I have had the misfortune to encounter.
We could perhaps see some of that with her Covid policies. Magnificent, on paper, effective, for a while, unsustainable in the medium term.
However, it should be noted that the medium term was long enough in that case.
Some policy advisors are really top class, you know.
(Northern_Al, retired Policy Advisor).
I hate to say it mate, because I've always liked what you have to say and you're clearly a lovely person, but...
If you were a policy adviser in education, you were either not top class, or you were ignored.
Thanks for the compliment. On the second bit, I didn't work in your bit of education, though - a bit more niche. And actually, if you think things are bad you'd be amazed at how much worse some things would be if some advisors got their way.
Fucking hell. If this true - and I'm assuming it is - it makes me all the gladder I'm getting out.
Because I don't *think* things are bad, I *know* they are, and I can see them getting much worse given the appalling incompetence of those in charge.
And you're saying they're not the worst? That's really alarming.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
I believe in data. Show me that and I might believe you
There are pages and pages of studies on their website:
The two-year incorporation of the rock dust compost into a poor-quality soil led to a significant increase in the yield with the increase of 120% and 187% compared to untreated control in 2013 and 2014, respectively. Application of rock dust compost obviously promoted superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity and concentration of vitamin C in mature apple trees. The beneficial effects coincided with higher microbial activity and shifts in the composition of the soil microbiome. Our results demonstrate that the practice of combining the rock dust-fortified compost with NPK fertilizers provides a cost- effective way of supplying crops with macro-and micronutrients ensuring better vegetative growth and higher yields.
Here we report that amending a UK clay-loam agricultural soil with a high loading (10 kg/m2) of relatively coarse-grained crushed basalt significantly increased the yield (21 ± 9.4%, SE) of the important C4 cereal Sorghum bicolor under controlled environmental conditions, without accumulation of potentially toxic trace elements in the seeds. Yield increases resulted from the basalt treatment after 120 days without P- and K-fertilizer addition. Shoot silicon concentrations also increased significantly (26 ± 5.4%, SE), with potential benefits for crop resistance to biotic and abiotic stress.
Take your pick.
your first link = 404. Your second is classic bullshit: it compares rockdusty compost with "untreated control" - i.e. with no compost at all. We know that compost works, we strongly suspect that rock dust is neither here nor there, so this is a test of compost faking it as a test of rockdust. Just embarrassing. Next one looks the same, final one reports no significant interesting results.
This is just classic crankdom. i am sure there's a tribe in the hindu kush who live to 130 and never get cancer because of their diet of rockdusty apricots.
Odd that the local press were claiming the LD candidate was a woman from Somerset. Richard Foord I used to know - as Mike Smithson says he is a long way from the standard LibDem. He'll stand out a mile in the parliamentary party.
I've just seem some interviews with him and he appears very smart and fluent. Eds successor?
He has to win the seat first, not a given if the Tories pick a good local candidate
Agreed.
I've spoken to a fair number of people and assume almost all of them voted for Parish last time out. Unless Boris is gone or going within weeks it feels like any Tory candidate is up against it. Lots of "not voting Tory while that ... is in charge".
Recent local elections suggest to me that the great British public have sent the message "Boris out" followed by "Which part of Boris out didn't you understand?" Tiv and Hon looks a lot like "Would you like 'Boris out' explained slowly and carefully?".
To which the response is: 'The crowds baying for my blood and dragging me to the guillotine have sent a clear message - they want me to get on with delivering on the priorities of the British people'
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
I believe in data. Show me that and I might believe you
There are pages and pages of studies on their website:
The two-year incorporation of the rock dust compost into a poor-quality soil led to a significant increase in the yield with the increase of 120% and 187% compared to untreated control in 2013 and 2014, respectively. Application of rock dust compost obviously promoted superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity and concentration of vitamin C in mature apple trees. The beneficial effects coincided with higher microbial activity and shifts in the composition of the soil microbiome. Our results demonstrate that the practice of combining the rock dust-fortified compost with NPK fertilizers provides a cost- effective way of supplying crops with macro-and micronutrients ensuring better vegetative growth and higher yields.
Here we report that amending a UK clay-loam agricultural soil with a high loading (10 kg/m2) of relatively coarse-grained crushed basalt significantly increased the yield (21 ± 9.4%, SE) of the important C4 cereal Sorghum bicolor under controlled environmental conditions, without accumulation of potentially toxic trace elements in the seeds. Yield increases resulted from the basalt treatment after 120 days without P- and K-fertilizer addition. Shoot silicon concentrations also increased significantly (26 ± 5.4%, SE), with potential benefits for crop resistance to biotic and abiotic stress.
Take your pick.
your first link = 404. Your second is classic bullshit: it compares rockdusty compost with "untreated control" - i.e. with no compost at all. We know that compost works, we strongly suspect that rock dust is neither here nor there, so this is a test of compost faking it as a test of rockdust. Just embarrassing. Next one looks the same, final one reports no significant interesting results.
This is just classic crankdom. i am sure there's a tribe in the hindu kush who live to 130 and never get cancer because of their diet of rockdusty apricots.
Did they do a comparison between rock dust and de-worming pills dissolved in hot broth, with a Jif topping?
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Just mentioned this to my beloved and as practical as ever she said
'I will just have to plant some more' !!!
Big G, cultivating votre jardin comme d’habitude.
You mentioned earlier you thought Ardern will fall next year
As a Kiwi you obviously must have a feel for this and are Kiwi's falling out of love with her?
Short answer, yes.
She’s a very poor administrator and essentially a performative idiot.
Which is interesting because she was more popular than God when she won re-election in 2020, and widely feted across the West. In fact, I think you were a fan at the time too.
A lot can change in 18 months.
True heir to Blair. Even worked as one of his policy wonks.
No she didn’t. She had an admin job. She “allowed” her CV to be over-construed.
Wiki claims 'senior policy advisor' in a 'policy unit'. What does this really mean?
It means she had a cushy number spouting ignorant bullshit that causes enormous trouble when tried in the real world.
At least, judging by the policy advisers I have had the misfortune to encounter.
We could perhaps see some of that with her Covid policies. Magnificent, on paper, effective, for a while, unsustainable in the medium term.
However, it should be noted that the medium term was long enough in that case.
Some policy advisors are really top class, you know.
(Northern_Al, retired Policy Advisor).
I hate to say it mate, because I've always liked what you have to say and you're clearly a lovely person, but...
If you were a policy adviser in education, you were either not top class, or you were ignored.
Thanks for the compliment. On the second bit, I didn't work in your bit of education, though - a bit more niche. And actually, if you think things are bad you'd be amazed at how much worse some things would be if some advisors got their way.
Fucking hell. If this true - and I'm assuming it is - it makes me all the gladder I'm getting out.
Because I don't *think* things are bad, I *know* they are, and I can see them getting much worse given the appalling incompetence of those in charge.
And you're saying they're not the worst? That's really alarming.
Don't blame you - I'm glad I'm out of it. The bit I worked in has got significantly worse since I left (not because I left, though I do modestly think I was a force for good). I hear horror stories from my old colleagues, and the policy side reflects this government generally - it's shit.
Another example of how negotiating positions change when the facts change. Remember how Putin said that Sweden and Finland joining NATO was a terrible idea and would have unspecified "consequences"? Well, on reflection...
Odd that the local press were claiming the LD candidate was a woman from Somerset. Richard Foord I used to know - as Mike Smithson says he is a long way from the standard LibDem. He'll stand out a mile in the parliamentary party.
I've just seem some interviews with him and he appears very smart and fluent. Eds successor?
He has to win the seat first, not a given if the Tories pick a good local candidate
Agreed.
I've spoken to a fair number of people and assume almost all of them voted for Parish last time out. Unless Boris is gone or going within weeks it feels like any Tory candidate is up against it. Lots of "not voting Tory while that ... is in charge".
Recent local elections suggest to me that the great British public have sent the message "Boris out" followed by "Which part of Boris out didn't you understand?" Tiv and Hon looks a lot like "Would you like 'Boris out' explained slowly and carefully?".
To which the response is: 'The crowds baying for my blood and dragging me to the guillotine have sent a clear message - they want me to get on with delivering on the priorities of the British people'
"Number one priority for delivery being your head in that basket."
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
I believe in data. Show me that and I might believe you
There are pages and pages of studies on their website:
The two-year incorporation of the rock dust compost into a poor-quality soil led to a significant increase in the yield with the increase of 120% and 187% compared to untreated control in 2013 and 2014, respectively. Application of rock dust compost obviously promoted superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity and concentration of vitamin C in mature apple trees. The beneficial effects coincided with higher microbial activity and shifts in the composition of the soil microbiome. Our results demonstrate that the practice of combining the rock dust-fortified compost with NPK fertilizers provides a cost- effective way of supplying crops with macro-and micronutrients ensuring better vegetative growth and higher yields.
Here we report that amending a UK clay-loam agricultural soil with a high loading (10 kg/m2) of relatively coarse-grained crushed basalt significantly increased the yield (21 ± 9.4%, SE) of the important C4 cereal Sorghum bicolor under controlled environmental conditions, without accumulation of potentially toxic trace elements in the seeds. Yield increases resulted from the basalt treatment after 120 days without P- and K-fertilizer addition. Shoot silicon concentrations also increased significantly (26 ± 5.4%, SE), with potential benefits for crop resistance to biotic and abiotic stress.
Take your pick.
your first link = 404. Your second is classic bullshit: it compares rockdusty compost with "untreated control" - i.e. with no compost at all. We know that compost works, we strongly suspect that rock dust is neither here nor there, so this is a test of compost faking it as a test of rockdust. Just embarrassing. Next one looks the same, final one reports no significant interesting results.
This is just classic crankdom. i am sure there's a tribe in the hindu kush who live to 130 and never get cancer because of their diet of rockdusty apricots.
Actually, if you'd troubled yourself to read it, that wasn't the methodology.
'Two different types of compost were prepared and used throughout the study.
The first type, referred to as composted manure (CM), was produced by mixing seven parts of dung with three parts of wheat straw (w/w), which resulted in a C/N ratio of ca. 26. The second type, referred to as composted manure with rock dust (CMRD), was prepared identically except for the 90 addition of 0.4 part of the byproduct of quarry industry, which serves as a source of different trace mineral nutrients. The chemical composition of the rock dust used in this study was described earlier by Li and Dong (2013).'
Why on earth would they have done it in the way you suggest?
The only thing that's embarrassing here is you been the stupid twunt who's claimed there isn't a single study, been told there are in fact multiple studies, and who is now scrabbling around trying to discredit the ones posted by making wild, easily disprovable claims about their methods.
More nuclear power is a very very good idea. Much more is even better. Windfall taxes are just ridiculous. Tory become Labour and eventually will run out of other peoples money. Try redirecting some of the universal benefits the averagely off and well off don't need. Or zero tax on lncome up to living wage and increase the flat rate above. And take tax off heating and power and all food and clothing and whack up purchase tax on luxuries. Or Or Or DO SOMETHING
Leaving aside actually finding space for it next to the decommissioned Magnox, it was a dumb place then and would be a dumb place now. Even assuming they could recommission the line south from Blaenau to actually tranpsort materials to it.
The Wylfa by all means. But Trawsfynnydd? Merely confirms this lot are mad and stupid.
If he wants a sane viable and much cheaper energy policy, let's see those tidal lagoons in Bae Abertawe.
I am not saying that anywhere else has it better, but the UK economy seems quite uniquely fucked.
Not least because the government has no interest in actual economic policy.
Actually, I think we're uniquely positioned to thrive in the current world circumstances. We have (with some caveats), plenty of food, plenty of varied fuel, we have the geographical advantages of being a set of islands, etc. The opportunities just need to be grasped. I'm open to being persuaded otherwise, but this Government is over. Boris can claw back a little respect from me if he deals with the hard situation in NI for his successor. But perhaps even that might take someone new.
The UK is reliant on the EU for 70% of its fresh food.
Are you sure it’s not 70% of imports, rather than 70% of all food consumed?
It should be pointed out as well that the EU was at best a decidedly mixed blessing for British agriculture. Without their policy muddles and corruption, we could have been in a position to feed ourselves. The illegal ban on our beef at the behest of the French (who had twice as much BSE as we did, although they called it something else) was bad, but the subsidy mechanism was far more damaging over the long term.
We went from having in the early 1990s one of the most efficient and advanced agricultural sectors in the world, capable of feeding 60 million people, to, well...
Putting aside the deficiencies of CAP, the idea that the UK can feed itself is risible.
Or, if it could, it would only do so with incredibly high food costs.
This has surely been the case since, I don’t know, the repeal of the Corn Laws.
I think it could but not overnight, it would required 3-5 years of planning and we'd obviously lose stuff like olive oil and speciality imported items as well as fruits out of season. Compared to just 30 years ago, though, the range of food that can now be successfully grown in the UK is huge so the loss would be much less noticeable than most think. I think in a few select areas we could probably cultivate olive trees to make olive oil but it would be very expensive compared to today. The biggest loss would be wine, UK wine is expensive and we absolutely don't produce anywhere near enough compared to consumption. There just isn't enough viable land to support the various grape varieties.
UK sparkling wine delivers better "champagne" than Champagne now.
Chapel Down is simply incredible now. I definitely prefer to Moët and it's almost up there with Bollinger. Maybe better.
The best English fizz is definitely better than the equivalent champagne in the same price bracket
It’s also different: more lively and buttery-fruity
Not cheap, mind
The advance of English fizz is one thing which has really proven global warming, to my mind. A change you can actually see, in the glass, and taste, on the tongue
More nuclear power is a very very good idea. Much more is even better. Windfall taxes are just ridiculous. Tory become Labour and eventually will run out of other peoples money. Try redirecting some of the universal benefits the averagely off and well off don't need. Or zero tax on lncome up to living wage and increase the flat rate above. And take tax off heating and power and all food and clothing and whack up purchase tax on luxuries. Or Or Or DO SOMETHING
A modest nuclear programme replacing what we have is not a bad idea.
A properly renewable programme using our own considerable natural resources that are cheaper, cleaner and indigenous to these islands would be a much better idea.
Leaving aside actually finding space for it next to the decommissioned Magnox, it was a dumb place then and would be a dumb place now. Even assuming they could recommission the line south from Blaenau to actually tranpsort materials to it.
The Wylfa by all means. But Trawsfynnydd? Merely confirms this lot are mad and stupid.
If he wants a sane viable and much cheaper energy policy, let's see those tidal lagoons in Bae Abertawe.
Another example of how negotiating positions change when the facts change. Remember how Putin said that Sweden and Finland joining NATO was a terrible idea and would have unspecified "consequences"? Well, on reflection...
Bluff successfully called, and also a good, sensible outcome. Neither country would be a threat to Russia in any conceivable scenario.
Hmmm - Given the current state of the Russia military, Finland would probably take St Petersburg this time round.
Kaliningrad to Poland. Ingria and Kaliningrad to Finland. Crimea and Donbass back to Ukraine. Re-establishment of the independent Don and Kuban Republics. That should suitably contain Russia.
Leaving aside actually finding space for it next to the decommissioned Magnox, it was a dumb place then and would be a dumb place now. Even assuming they could recommission the line south from Blaenau to actually tranpsort materials to it.
The Wylfa by all means. But Trawsfynnydd? Merely confirms this lot are mad and stupid.
If he wants a sane viable and much cheaper energy policy, let's see those tidal lagoons in Bae Abertawe.
Or Llandudno to Prestatyn proposals
Or indeed put tidal barrages either end of the Menai Strait.
More nuclear power is a very very good idea. Much more is even better. Windfall taxes are just ridiculous. Tory become Labour and eventually will run out of other peoples money. Try redirecting some of the universal benefits the averagely off and well off don't need. Or zero tax on lncome up to living wage and increase the flat rate above. And take tax off heating and power and all food and clothing and whack up purchase tax on luxuries. Or Or Or DO SOMETHING
Well, most of the Western world has been running with, essentially, Modern Monetary Theory for years. If you accept this angle, then the windfall tax is another extension of this ie you raise taxes not because you “need” the money but to reduce inequality. I like the idea that, if you spend on infrastructure, you pay a lower tax
Another example of how negotiating positions change when the facts change. Remember how Putin said that Sweden and Finland joining NATO was a terrible idea and would have unspecified "consequences"? Well, on reflection...
Bluff successfully called, and also a good, sensible outcome. Neither country would be a threat to Russia in any conceivable scenario.
Hmmm - Given the current state of the Russia military, Finland would probably take St Petersburg this time round.
Kaliningrad to Poland. Ingria and Kaliningrad to Finland. Crimea and Donbass back to Ukraine. Re-establishment of the independent Don and Kuban Republics. That should suitably contain Russia.
You've given Kaliningrad to two different countries.
Leaving aside actually finding space for it next to the decommissioned Magnox, it was a dumb place then and would be a dumb place now. Even assuming they could recommission the line south from Blaenau to actually tranpsort materials to it.
The Wylfa by all means. But Trawsfynnydd? Merely confirms this lot are mad and stupid.
If he wants a sane viable and much cheaper energy policy, let's see those tidal lagoons in Bae Abertawe.
There is not a policy decision or policy kite flying exercise I don't wholly disagree with from this Government.
It is like they know exactly what triggers me and are doing their level best to piss me off.
Bluff successfully called, and also a good, sensible outcome. Neither country [Finland or Sweden] would be a threat to Russia in any conceivable scenario.
Belarus, on the other hand, via Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland . .
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
I believe in data. Show me that and I might believe you
There are pages and pages of studies on their website:
The two-year incorporation of the rock dust compost into a poor-quality soil led to a significant increase in the yield with the increase of 120% and 187% compared to untreated control in 2013 and 2014, respectively. Application of rock dust compost obviously promoted superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity and concentration of vitamin C in mature apple trees. The beneficial effects coincided with higher microbial activity and shifts in the composition of the soil microbiome. Our results demonstrate that the practice of combining the rock dust-fortified compost with NPK fertilizers provides a cost- effective way of supplying crops with macro-and micronutrients ensuring better vegetative growth and higher yields.
Here we report that amending a UK clay-loam agricultural soil with a high loading (10 kg/m2) of relatively coarse-grained crushed basalt significantly increased the yield (21 ± 9.4%, SE) of the important C4 cereal Sorghum bicolor under controlled environmental conditions, without accumulation of potentially toxic trace elements in the seeds. Yield increases resulted from the basalt treatment after 120 days without P- and K-fertilizer addition. Shoot silicon concentrations also increased significantly (26 ± 5.4%, SE), with potential benefits for crop resistance to biotic and abiotic stress.
Take your pick.
your first link = 404. Your second is classic bullshit: it compares rockdusty compost with "untreated control" - i.e. with no compost at all. We know that compost works, we strongly suspect that rock dust is neither here nor there, so this is a test of compost faking it as a test of rockdust. Just embarrassing. Next one looks the same, final one reports no significant interesting results.
This is just classic crankdom. i am sure there's a tribe in the hindu kush who live to 130 and never get cancer because of their diet of rockdusty apricots.
Did they do a comparison between rock dust and de-worming pills dissolved in hot broth, with a Jif topping?
I really don't know what you're getting on your hind legs about, the studies I've posted are perfectly ordinary research studies that have no affiliation to anything 'cranky'.
Leaving aside actually finding space for it next to the decommissioned Magnox, it was a dumb place then and would be a dumb place now. Even assuming they could recommission the line south from Blaenau to actually tranpsort materials to it.
The Wylfa by all means. But Trawsfynnydd? Merely confirms this lot are mad and stupid.
If he wants a sane viable and much cheaper energy policy, let's see those tidal lagoons in Bae Abertawe.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Just mentioned this to my beloved and as practical as ever she said
'I will just have to plant some more' !!!
Big G, cultivating votre jardin comme d’habitude.
You mentioned earlier you thought Ardern will fall next year
As a Kiwi you obviously must have a feel for this and are Kiwi's falling out of love with her?
Short answer, yes.
She’s a very poor administrator and essentially a performative idiot.
Which is interesting because she was more popular than God when she won re-election in 2020, and widely feted across the West. In fact, I think you were a fan at the time too.
A lot can change in 18 months.
True heir to Blair. Even worked as one of his policy wonks.
No she didn’t. She had an admin job. She “allowed” her CV to be over-construed.
Wiki claims 'senior policy advisor' in a 'policy unit'. What does this really mean?
It means she had a cushy number spouting ignorant bullshit that causes enormous trouble when tried in the real world.
At least, judging by the policy advisers I have had the misfortune to encounter.
We could perhaps see some of that with her Covid policies. Magnificent, on paper, effective, for a while, unsustainable in the medium term.
However, it should be noted that the medium term was long enough in that case.
Some policy advisors are really top class, you know.
(Northern_Al, retired Policy Advisor).
I hate to say it mate, because I've always liked what you have to say and you're clearly a lovely person, but...
If you were a policy adviser in education, you were either not top class, or you were ignored.
Thanks for the compliment. On the second bit, I didn't work in your bit of education, though - a bit more niche. And actually, if you think things are bad you'd be amazed at how much worse some things would be if some advisors got their way.
Fucking hell. If this true - and I'm assuming it is - it makes me all the gladder I'm getting out.
Because I don't *think* things are bad, I *know* they are, and I can see them getting much worse given the appalling incompetence of those in charge.
And you're saying they're not the worst? That's really alarming.
On the subject of education - apparently 3 more local parents have taken the following option.
1) Take their children out of their high end private school. 2) Enrol them at the local Free school for 6th form. 3) Plan to have them extensively tutored.
a) Costs less than 2 years of expensive private education. b) They can put "state school" on their CVs c) The state school will probably get 3 children into top universities.
More nuclear power is a very very good idea. Much more is even better. Windfall taxes are just ridiculous. Tory become Labour and eventually will run out of other peoples money. Try redirecting some of the universal benefits the averagely off and well off don't need. Or zero tax on lncome up to living wage and increase the flat rate above. And take tax off heating and power and all food and clothing and whack up purchase tax on luxuries. Or Or Or DO SOMETHING
A modest nuclear programme replacing what we have is not a bad idea.
A properly renewable programme using our own considerable natural resources that are cheaper, cleaner and indigenous to these islands would be a much better idea.
If it's tidal, yes. If we'd invested 60 years ago into space based industry we could have extensive space based solar being microwaved back to Earth and so cheap it would be unmetred. We are a stupid, ignorant species though.
I am not saying that anywhere else has it better, but the UK economy seems quite uniquely fucked.
Not least because the government has no interest in actual economic policy.
Actually, I think we're uniquely positioned to thrive in the current world circumstances. We have (with some caveats), plenty of food, plenty of varied fuel, we have the geographical advantages of being a set of islands, etc. The opportunities just need to be grasped. I'm open to being persuaded otherwise, but this Government is over. Boris can claw back a little respect from me if he deals with the hard situation in NI for his successor. But perhaps even that might take someone new.
The UK is reliant on the EU for 70% of its fresh food.
Are you sure it’s not 70% of imports, rather than 70% of all food consumed?
It should be pointed out as well that the EU was at best a decidedly mixed blessing for British agriculture. Without their policy muddles and corruption, we could have been in a position to feed ourselves. The illegal ban on our beef at the behest of the French (who had twice as much BSE as we did, although they called it something else) was bad, but the subsidy mechanism was far more damaging over the long term.
We went from having in the early 1990s one of the most efficient and advanced agricultural sectors in the world, capable of feeding 60 million people, to, well...
Putting aside the deficiencies of CAP, the idea that the UK can feed itself is risible.
Or, if it could, it would only do so with incredibly high food costs.
This has surely been the case since, I don’t know, the repeal of the Corn Laws.
I think it could but not overnight, it would required 3-5 years of planning and we'd obviously lose stuff like olive oil and speciality imported items as well as fruits out of season. Compared to just 30 years ago, though, the range of food that can now be successfully grown in the UK is huge so the loss would be much less noticeable than most think. I think in a few select areas we could probably cultivate olive trees to make olive oil but it would be very expensive compared to today. The biggest loss would be wine, UK wine is expensive and we absolutely don't produce anywhere near enough compared to consumption. There just isn't enough viable land to support the various grape varieties.
UK sparkling wine delivers better "champagne" than Champagne now.
Chapel Down is simply incredible now. I definitely prefer to Moët and it's almost up there with Bollinger. Maybe better.
The best English fizz is definitely better than the equivalent champagne in the same price bracket
It’s also different: more lively and buttery-fruity
Not cheap, mind
The advance of English fizz is one thing which has really proven global warming, to my mind. A change you can actually see, in the glass, and taste, on the tongue
How? The South East of England has always had the required latitude for growing grapes. It's just not been done.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Just mentioned this to my beloved and as practical as ever she said
'I will just have to plant some more' !!!
Big G, cultivating votre jardin comme d’habitude.
You mentioned earlier you thought Ardern will fall next year
As a Kiwi you obviously must have a feel for this and are Kiwi's falling out of love with her?
Short answer, yes.
She’s a very poor administrator and essentially a performative idiot.
Which is interesting because she was more popular than God when she won re-election in 2020, and widely feted across the West. In fact, I think you were a fan at the time too.
A lot can change in 18 months.
True heir to Blair. Even worked as one of his policy wonks.
No she didn’t. She had an admin job. She “allowed” her CV to be over-construed.
Wiki claims 'senior policy advisor' in a 'policy unit'. What does this really mean?
It means she had a cushy number spouting ignorant bullshit that causes enormous trouble when tried in the real world.
At least, judging by the policy advisers I have had the misfortune to encounter.
We could perhaps see some of that with her Covid policies. Magnificent, on paper, effective, for a while, unsustainable in the medium term.
However, it should be noted that the medium term was long enough in that case.
Some policy advisors are really top class, you know.
(Northern_Al, retired Policy Advisor).
I hate to say it mate, because I've always liked what you have to say and you're clearly a lovely person, but...
If you were a policy adviser in education, you were either not top class, or you were ignored.
Thanks for the compliment. On the second bit, I didn't work in your bit of education, though - a bit more niche. And actually, if you think things are bad you'd be amazed at how much worse some things would be if some advisors got their way.
Fucking hell. If this true - and I'm assuming it is - it makes me all the gladder I'm getting out.
Because I don't *think* things are bad, I *know* they are, and I can see them getting much worse given the appalling incompetence of those in charge.
And you're saying they're not the worst? That's really alarming.
On the subject of education - apparently 3 more local parents have taken the following option.
1) Take their children out of their high end private school. 2) Enrol them at the local Free school for 6th form. 3) Plan to have them extensively tutored.
a) Costs less than 2 years of expensive private education. b) They can put "state school" on their CVs c) The state school will probably get 3 children into top universities.
Who said that egalitarianism isn't an option?
That has been going on for years, especially when it came to Oxbridge.
Another example of how negotiating positions change when the facts change. Remember how Putin said that Sweden and Finland joining NATO was a terrible idea and would have unspecified "consequences"? Well, on reflection...
Bluff successfully called, and also a good, sensible outcome. Neither country would be a threat to Russia in any conceivable scenario.
The question now isn't what further military action will Russia take. The question is just how much humiliation will Putin face in Ukraine and whether he will survive it.
But why? Big nukes take years before commissioning.
He seems to have a bee in his bonnet over nukes and is very skeptical of renewables by comparison.
Apparently it is a small modular reactor via Rolls-Royce
Doesn't exist yet AFAIK. And there's nothing for the Welsh bar a little concrete pouring, and the waste (just wait and see: I'm sure some policy wonk has thought of the holes where all that llechi came from not a million miles away).
Another example of how negotiating positions change when the facts change. Remember how Putin said that Sweden and Finland joining NATO was a terrible idea and would have unspecified "consequences"? Well, on reflection...
Bluff successfully called, and also a good, sensible outcome. Neither country would be a threat to Russia in any conceivable scenario.
Hmmm - Given the current state of the Russia military, Finland would probably take St Petersburg this time round.
Kaliningrad to Poland. Ingria and Kaliningrad to Finland. Crimea and Donbass back to Ukraine. Re-establishment of the independent Don and Kuban Republics. That should suitably contain Russia.
You've given Kaliningrad to two different countries.
Can I have Chablis and Meursault, if we are redrawing the map of Europe, in the "self centred style of monkeys in a salad bar", as the late, great PJ O'Rourke put it.
Leaving aside actually finding space for it next to the decommissioned Magnox, it was a dumb place then and would be a dumb place now. Even assuming they could recommission the line south from Blaenau to actually tranpsort materials to it.
The Wylfa by all means. But Trawsfynnydd? Merely confirms this lot are mad and stupid.
If he wants a sane viable and much cheaper energy policy, let's see those tidal lagoons in Bae Abertawe.
There is not a policy decision or policy kite flying exercise I don't wholly disagree with from this Government.
It is like they know exactly what triggers me and are doing their level best to piss me off.
Although I should note the Trawsfynnydd idea was originally developed by Drakeford last year:
I am not saying that anywhere else has it better, but the UK economy seems quite uniquely fucked.
Not least because the government has no interest in actual economic policy.
Actually, I think we're uniquely positioned to thrive in the current world circumstances. We have (with some caveats), plenty of food, plenty of varied fuel, we have the geographical advantages of being a set of islands, etc. The opportunities just need to be grasped. I'm open to being persuaded otherwise, but this Government is over. Boris can claw back a little respect from me if he deals with the hard situation in NI for his successor. But perhaps even that might take someone new.
The UK is reliant on the EU for 70% of its fresh food.
Are you sure it’s not 70% of imports, rather than 70% of all food consumed?
It should be pointed out as well that the EU was at best a decidedly mixed blessing for British agriculture. Without their policy muddles and corruption, we could have been in a position to feed ourselves. The illegal ban on our beef at the behest of the French (who had twice as much BSE as we did, although they called it something else) was bad, but the subsidy mechanism was far more damaging over the long term.
We went from having in the early 1990s one of the most efficient and advanced agricultural sectors in the world, capable of feeding 60 million people, to, well...
Putting aside the deficiencies of CAP, the idea that the UK can feed itself is risible.
Or, if it could, it would only do so with incredibly high food costs.
This has surely been the case since, I don’t know, the repeal of the Corn Laws.
I think it could but not overnight, it would required 3-5 years of planning and we'd obviously lose stuff like olive oil and speciality imported items as well as fruits out of season. Compared to just 30 years ago, though, the range of food that can now be successfully grown in the UK is huge so the loss would be much less noticeable than most think. I think in a few select areas we could probably cultivate olive trees to make olive oil but it would be very expensive compared to today. The biggest loss would be wine, UK wine is expensive and we absolutely don't produce anywhere near enough compared to consumption. There just isn't enough viable land to support the various grape varieties.
UK sparkling wine delivers better "champagne" than Champagne now.
Chapel Down is simply incredible now. I definitely prefer to Moët and it's almost up there with Bollinger. Maybe better.
The best English fizz is definitely better than the equivalent champagne in the same price bracket
It’s also different: more lively and buttery-fruity
Not cheap, mind
The advance of English fizz is one thing which has really proven global warming, to my mind. A change you can actually see, in the glass, and taste, on the tongue
How? The South East of England has always had the required latitude for growing grapes. It's just not been done.
But that’s not what the winemakers themselves say
And there are plenty of winemakers in Spain and France now openly fretting that climate change is fucking with their product, so I’d say this is an issue
“Climate change in Burgundy: Slowing the impact It’s getting hotter in Burgundy – that much is clear, from data analyses and personal testimony. What does this mean for the future of the region’s finest wines, whose style is shaped by its marginal climate? And how are producers responding, asks Tim Atkin MW”
But why? Big nukes take years before commissioning.
He seems to have a bee in his bonnet over nukes and is very skeptical of renewables by comparison.
Apparently it is a small modular reactor via Rolls-Royce
That haven't even been prototyped yet.
This has Garden Bridge and PPE procurement fiasos written all over it
And we wonder why projects don’t get pushed forwards.
Some projects may not work but some might be fantastically successful. One of the advantages of being Government / Tax-funded is you can experiment with things .
Another example of how negotiating positions change when the facts change. Remember how Putin said that Sweden and Finland joining NATO was a terrible idea and would have unspecified "consequences"? Well, on reflection...
Bluff successfully called, and also a good, sensible outcome. Neither country would be a threat to Russia in any conceivable scenario.
Hmmm - Given the current state of the Russia military, Finland would probably take St Petersburg this time round.
Kaliningrad to Poland. Ingria and Kaliningrad to Finland. Crimea and Donbass back to Ukraine. Re-establishment of the independent Don and Kuban Republics. That should suitably contain Russia.
You've given Kaliningrad to two different countries.
What does a “victory” even look like, for Putin, now?
Let’s say they conquer (and destroy) east Ukraine. They then have to rebuild it (with the Russian economy in free fall) and presumably occupy it - a land turned entirely hostile to them, rife with insurrection and partisan attacks on the Russian forces, Meanwhile more “fires” will occur across Russia
At the same time, the EU will be weaning itself off Russian oil and gas, and Russia will edge towards bankruptcy
I don’t see any route out of this that isn’t total defeat for Russia - and that’s even if they “win”
You’ve asked the wrong and the right question
A victory for Russia is not possible at this stage. Their leadership has made a gross error that has resulted in a huge strategic defeat for the country.
A victory is still possible for Putin. In my view complete control of Donetsk and Luhansk would could as victory for the “special military operation” (…our people are safe…)
I think the defence of Mariupol has made it too iconic for Zelensky to give it up… but Putin can point to the destruction of the Azov Brigade as an important step.
I would put this scenario at a 30% chance, but this is why the UK is working so hard to push the western alliance onwards. They see that Russia is on the ground and want to damage them as much as possible. Opportunities like this are infrequent & the UK is not Russia’s friend. Germany and France are more interested in being Russia’s friend as they can make more money that way.
Putin cannot take the whole of Lunansk and Donetsk at this point. They have already gotten bogged down and need to capture Kramatorsk from the north to achieve it. But they have failed to take a large city repeatedly, and this time their supply lines are insecure against the Ukrainian breakout from Kharkiv.
I wouldn’t say “can not” but I do have it down as a 30% chance - I tend to the conservative in my strategic risk assessments however. Better to prepare for the realistic worst case outcome.
The only way Russia can semi-win this is if the entire West buckles. Unfortunately for Putin the British refuse to do this, because they are seeking payback for Skripal and Litvinenko. It was truly stupid of Putin to offend an economy twice the size with attacks on British citizens on British soil.
Russia benefits (or loses) from what Brett Devereaux calls "The Fremen Mirage."
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times".
The view is that Russian soldiers (and soldiers under other dictatorships) are hard, tough, invincible, when pitted against the weak, soft, citizens of democracies, who will cave in to their enemies, just to get another 0.25% on GDP.
I would venture the opinion that actually, liberal democracies are better at waging war than almost any dictatorship.
But we are not actually waging war and fighting we are merely supplying weapons if we had to conscripts our young men we would see how good at war we really are
They have to be better than the joke that is the Russian army, now recruiting the middle aged having run out of those with disabilities from the People’s Republics.
Another example of how negotiating positions change when the facts change. Remember how Putin said that Sweden and Finland joining NATO was a terrible idea and would have unspecified "consequences"? Well, on reflection...
Bluff successfully called, and also a good, sensible outcome. Neither country would be a threat to Russia in any conceivable scenario.
On my reading, Putin was saying that Russia had "no problems" with these countries, but if they join NATO, that will change. But in the end, the existence of Finland as an independent nation is not consistent with Putin's imperial view of greater Russia, as expressed prior to the invasion of Ukraine, so his assurances are not convincing.
I am not saying that anywhere else has it better, but the UK economy seems quite uniquely fucked.
Not least because the government has no interest in actual economic policy.
Actually, I think we're uniquely positioned to thrive in the current world circumstances. We have (with some caveats), plenty of food, plenty of varied fuel, we have the geographical advantages of being a set of islands, etc. The opportunities just need to be grasped. I'm open to being persuaded otherwise, but this Government is over. Boris can claw back a little respect from me if he deals with the hard situation in NI for his successor. But perhaps even that might take someone new.
The UK is reliant on the EU for 70% of its fresh food.
Are you sure it’s not 70% of imports, rather than 70% of all food consumed?
It should be pointed out as well that the EU was at best a decidedly mixed blessing for British agriculture. Without their policy muddles and corruption, we could have been in a position to feed ourselves. The illegal ban on our beef at the behest of the French (who had twice as much BSE as we did, although they called it something else) was bad, but the subsidy mechanism was far more damaging over the long term.
We went from having in the early 1990s one of the most efficient and advanced agricultural sectors in the world, capable of feeding 60 million people, to, well...
Putting aside the deficiencies of CAP, the idea that the UK can feed itself is risible.
Or, if it could, it would only do so with incredibly high food costs.
This has surely been the case since, I don’t know, the repeal of the Corn Laws.
I think it could but not overnight, it would required 3-5 years of planning and we'd obviously lose stuff like olive oil and speciality imported items as well as fruits out of season. Compared to just 30 years ago, though, the range of food that can now be successfully grown in the UK is huge so the loss would be much less noticeable than most think. I think in a few select areas we could probably cultivate olive trees to make olive oil but it would be very expensive compared to today. The biggest loss would be wine, UK wine is expensive and we absolutely don't produce anywhere near enough compared to consumption. There just isn't enough viable land to support the various grape varieties.
UK sparkling wine delivers better "champagne" than Champagne now.
Chapel Down is simply incredible now. I definitely prefer to Moët and it's almost up there with Bollinger. Maybe better.
The best English fizz is definitely better than the equivalent champagne in the same price bracket
It’s also different: more lively and buttery-fruity
Not cheap, mind
The advance of English fizz is one thing which has really proven global warming, to my mind. A change you can actually see, in the glass, and taste, on the tongue
How? The South East of England has always had the required latitude for growing grapes. It's just not been done.
But that’s not what the winemakers themselves say
And there are plenty of winemakers in Spain and France now openly fretting that climate change is fucking with their product, so I’d say this is an issue
“Climate change in Burgundy: Slowing the impact It’s getting hotter in Burgundy – that much is clear, from data analyses and personal testimony. What does this mean for the future of the region’s finest wines, whose style is shaped by its marginal climate? And how are producers responding, asks Tim Atkin MW”
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
I believe in data. Show me that and I might believe you
There are pages and pages of studies on their website:
The two-year incorporation of the rock dust compost into a poor-quality soil led to a significant increase in the yield with the increase of 120% and 187% compared to untreated control in 2013 and 2014, respectively. Application of rock dust compost obviously promoted superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity and concentration of vitamin C in mature apple trees. The beneficial effects coincided with higher microbial activity and shifts in the composition of the soil microbiome. Our results demonstrate that the practice of combining the rock dust-fortified compost with NPK fertilizers provides a cost- effective way of supplying crops with macro-and micronutrients ensuring better vegetative growth and higher yields.
Here we report that amending a UK clay-loam agricultural soil with a high loading (10 kg/m2) of relatively coarse-grained crushed basalt significantly increased the yield (21 ± 9.4%, SE) of the important C4 cereal Sorghum bicolor under controlled environmental conditions, without accumulation of potentially toxic trace elements in the seeds. Yield increases resulted from the basalt treatment after 120 days without P- and K-fertilizer addition. Shoot silicon concentrations also increased significantly (26 ± 5.4%, SE), with potential benefits for crop resistance to biotic and abiotic stress.
Take your pick.
your first link = 404. Your second is classic bullshit: it compares rockdusty compost with "untreated control" - i.e. with no compost at all. We know that compost works, we strongly suspect that rock dust is neither here nor there, so this is a test of compost faking it as a test of rockdust. Just embarrassing. Next one looks the same, final one reports no significant interesting results.
This is just classic crankdom. i am sure there's a tribe in the hindu kush who live to 130 and never get cancer because of their diet of rockdusty apricots.
Actually, if you'd troubled yourself to read it, that wasn't the methodology.
'Two different types of compost were prepared and used throughout the study.
The first type, referred to as composted manure (CM), was produced by mixing seven parts of dung with three parts of wheat straw (w/w), which resulted in a C/N ratio of ca. 26. The second type, referred to as composted manure with rock dust (CMRD), was prepared identically except for the 90 addition of 0.4 part of the byproduct of quarry industry, which serves as a source of different trace mineral nutrients. The chemical composition of the rock dust used in this study was described earlier by Li and Dong (2013).'
Why on earth would they have done it in the way you suggest?
The only thing that's embarrassing here is you been the stupid twunt who's claimed there isn't a single study, been told there are in fact multiple studies, and who is now scrabbling around trying to discredit the ones posted by making wild, easily disprovable claims about their methods.
Yawn
I am down here organically managing 15 acres of pasture and 50-odd fruit trees, someone else on the thread is growing a ha of vines, but you are the one who knows all about it. odd.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Just mentioned this to my beloved and as practical as ever she said
'I will just have to plant some more' !!!
Big G, cultivating votre jardin comme d’habitude.
You mentioned earlier you thought Ardern will fall next year
As a Kiwi you obviously must have a feel for this and are Kiwi's falling out of love with her?
Short answer, yes.
She’s a very poor administrator and essentially a performative idiot.
Which is interesting because she was more popular than God when she won re-election in 2020, and widely feted across the West. In fact, I think you were a fan at the time too.
A lot can change in 18 months.
True heir to Blair. Even worked as one of his policy wonks.
No she didn’t. She had an admin job. She “allowed” her CV to be over-construed.
Wiki claims 'senior policy advisor' in a 'policy unit'. What does this really mean?
It means she had a cushy number spouting ignorant bullshit that causes enormous trouble when tried in the real world.
At least, judging by the policy advisers I have had the misfortune to encounter.
We could perhaps see some of that with her Covid policies. Magnificent, on paper, effective, for a while, unsustainable in the medium term.
However, it should be noted that the medium term was long enough in that case.
Some policy advisors are really top class, you know.
(Northern_Al, retired Policy Advisor).
I hate to say it mate, because I've always liked what you have to say and you're clearly a lovely person, but...
If you were a policy adviser in education, you were either not top class, or you were ignored.
Thanks for the compliment. On the second bit, I didn't work in your bit of education, though - a bit more niche. And actually, if you think things are bad you'd be amazed at how much worse some things would be if some advisors got their way.
Fucking hell. If this true - and I'm assuming it is - it makes me all the gladder I'm getting out.
Because I don't *think* things are bad, I *know* they are, and I can see them getting much worse given the appalling incompetence of those in charge.
And you're saying they're not the worst? That's really alarming.
On the subject of education - apparently 3 more local parents have taken the following option.
1) Take their children out of their high end private school. 2) Enrol them at the local Free school for 6th form. 3) Plan to have them extensively tutored.
a) Costs less than 2 years of expensive private education. b) They can put "state school" on their CVs c) The state school will probably get 3 children into top universities.
Who said that egalitarianism isn't an option?
That has been going on for years, especially when it came to Oxbridge.
Oh indeed.
I had a chat with a chap, not long ago who hade been making very good money in the US.
Apparently, as part of "building a story" to get into university in the US, he would be hired by parents to actually run the teenagers apparently "spontaneous projects", such as building a dune buggy from stuff scavenged from the local scrap yard etc.
I am not saying that anywhere else has it better, but the UK economy seems quite uniquely fucked.
Not least because the government has no interest in actual economic policy.
Actually, I think we're uniquely positioned to thrive in the current world circumstances. We have (with some caveats), plenty of food, plenty of varied fuel, we have the geographical advantages of being a set of islands, etc. The opportunities just need to be grasped. I'm open to being persuaded otherwise, but this Government is over. Boris can claw back a little respect from me if he deals with the hard situation in NI for his successor. But perhaps even that might take someone new.
The UK is reliant on the EU for 70% of its fresh food.
Are you sure it’s not 70% of imports, rather than 70% of all food consumed?
It should be pointed out as well that the EU was at best a decidedly mixed blessing for British agriculture. Without their policy muddles and corruption, we could have been in a position to feed ourselves. The illegal ban on our beef at the behest of the French (who had twice as much BSE as we did, although they called it something else) was bad, but the subsidy mechanism was far more damaging over the long term.
We went from having in the early 1990s one of the most efficient and advanced agricultural sectors in the world, capable of feeding 60 million people, to, well...
Putting aside the deficiencies of CAP, the idea that the UK can feed itself is risible.
Or, if it could, it would only do so with incredibly high food costs.
This has surely been the case since, I don’t know, the repeal of the Corn Laws.
I think it could but not overnight, it would required 3-5 years of planning and we'd obviously lose stuff like olive oil and speciality imported items as well as fruits out of season. Compared to just 30 years ago, though, the range of food that can now be successfully grown in the UK is huge so the loss would be much less noticeable than most think. I think in a few select areas we could probably cultivate olive trees to make olive oil but it would be very expensive compared to today. The biggest loss would be wine, UK wine is expensive and we absolutely don't produce anywhere near enough compared to consumption. There just isn't enough viable land to support the various grape varieties.
UK sparkling wine delivers better "champagne" than Champagne now.
Chapel Down is simply incredible now. I definitely prefer to Moët and it's almost up there with Bollinger. Maybe better.
The best English fizz is definitely better than the equivalent champagne in the same price bracket
It’s also different: more lively and buttery-fruity
Not cheap, mind
The advance of English fizz is one thing which has really proven global warming, to my mind. A change you can actually see, in the glass, and taste, on the tongue
How? The South East of England has always had the required latitude for growing grapes. It's just not been done.
But that’s not what the winemakers themselves say
And there are plenty of winemakers in Spain and France now openly fretting that climate change is fucking with their product, so I’d say this is an issue
“Climate change in Burgundy: Slowing the impact It’s getting hotter in Burgundy – that much is clear, from data analyses and personal testimony. What does this mean for the future of the region’s finest wines, whose style is shaped by its marginal climate? And how are producers responding, asks Tim Atkin MW”
Another example of how negotiating positions change when the facts change. Remember how Putin said that Sweden and Finland joining NATO was a terrible idea and would have unspecified "consequences"? Well, on reflection...
Bluff successfully called, and also a good, sensible outcome. Neither country would be a threat to Russia in any conceivable scenario.
On my reading, Putin was saying that Russia had "no problems" with these countries, but if they join NATO, that will change. But in the end, the existence of Finland as an independent nation is not consistent with Putin's imperial view of greater Russia, as expressed prior to the invasion of Ukraine, so his assurances are not convincing.
They are worth nothing but he knows he’s fucked so what’s the point of trying to act big?
More nuclear power is a very very good idea. Much more is even better. Windfall taxes are just ridiculous. Tory become Labour and eventually will run out of other peoples money. Try redirecting some of the universal benefits the averagely off and well off don't need. Or zero tax on lncome up to living wage and increase the flat rate above. And take tax off heating and power and all food and clothing and whack up purchase tax on luxuries. Or Or Or DO SOMETHING
A modest nuclear programme replacing what we have is not a bad idea.
A properly renewable programme using our own considerable natural resources that are cheaper, cleaner and indigenous to these islands would be a much better idea.
If it's tidal, yes. If we'd invested 60 years ago into space based industry we could have extensive space based solar being microwaved back to Earth and so cheap it would be unmetred. We are a stupid, ignorant species though.
Every sensible investigation of the cost of SPS comes up with it being cheaper to put the solar panels on the ground. Even if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship works and reaches it's $10 million per launch projected cost.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Just mentioned this to my beloved and as practical as ever she said
'I will just have to plant some more' !!!
Big G, cultivating votre jardin comme d’habitude.
You mentioned earlier you thought Ardern will fall next year
As a Kiwi you obviously must have a feel for this and are Kiwi's falling out of love with her?
Short answer, yes.
She’s a very poor administrator and essentially a performative idiot.
Which is interesting because she was more popular than God when she won re-election in 2020, and widely feted across the West. In fact, I think you were a fan at the time too.
A lot can change in 18 months.
True heir to Blair. Even worked as one of his policy wonks.
No she didn’t. She had an admin job. She “allowed” her CV to be over-construed.
Wiki claims 'senior policy advisor' in a 'policy unit'. What does this really mean?
It means she had a cushy number spouting ignorant bullshit that causes enormous trouble when tried in the real world.
At least, judging by the policy advisers I have had the misfortune to encounter.
We could perhaps see some of that with her Covid policies. Magnificent, on paper, effective, for a while, unsustainable in the medium term.
However, it should be noted that the medium term was long enough in that case.
Some policy advisors are really top class, you know.
(Northern_Al, retired Policy Advisor).
I hate to say it mate, because I've always liked what you have to say and you're clearly a lovely person, but...
If you were a policy adviser in education, you were either not top class, or you were ignored.
Thanks for the compliment. On the second bit, I didn't work in your bit of education, though - a bit more niche. And actually, if you think things are bad you'd be amazed at how much worse some things would be if some advisors got their way.
Fucking hell. If this true - and I'm assuming it is - it makes me all the gladder I'm getting out.
Because I don't *think* things are bad, I *know* they are, and I can see them getting much worse given the appalling incompetence of those in charge.
And you're saying they're not the worst? That's really alarming.
On the subject of education - apparently 3 more local parents have taken the following option.
1) Take their children out of their high end private school. 2) Enrol them at the local Free school for 6th form. 3) Plan to have them extensively tutored.
a) Costs less than 2 years of expensive private education. b) They can put "state school" on their CVs c) The state school will probably get 3 children into top universities.
Who said that egalitarianism isn't an option?
That has been going on for years, especially when it came to Oxbridge.
Oh indeed.
I had a chat with a chap, not long ago who hade been making very good money in the US.
Apparently, as part of "building a story" to get into university in the US, he would be hired by parents to actually run the teenagers apparently "spontaneous projects", such as building a dune buggy from stuff scavenged from the local scrap yard etc.
My wife’s nephew has been applying to the likes of Harvard and, as part of the application process, it was strongly suggested that he big up the fact that he was a black kid raised in a single family and talk about the ‘mental suffering’ that arose from that.
When I applied in the late 80s, it was all about your extra-curriculum activities, then it became about your grades, now it’s about how you’ve overcome your “deep suffering”
Good evening from Stockton-on-Tees. I am once again staying in the town's Hampton by Hilton which is owned by the council and was something of a political controversy. The Tories and independents were vociferous that it would be a waste of money, built to help regenerate a town which also now has The Globe theatre (also owned by the council) which would similarly be a white elephant.
And yet here I am, in this very busy hotel, with a car park that is completely full. And a significant number of the guests are going to whatever the show is at The Globe tonight. Couple in front had come up from Norfolk. Have been here during the week as well - also busy.
What is it about Tories especially where investment is subsidy / communism and must be frowned upon?
EDIT - hotel has free car charging which is good! But I can't shift my now fully charged off the charge point as the car park is full. So tough titty anyone getting here late, I'm off for a pint(s) and a parmo.
Another example of how negotiating positions change when the facts change. Remember how Putin said that Sweden and Finland joining NATO was a terrible idea and would have unspecified "consequences"? Well, on reflection...
Bluff successfully called, and also a good, sensible outcome. Neither country would be a threat to Russia in any conceivable scenario.
On my reading, Putin was saying that Russia had "no problems" with these countries, but if they join NATO, that will change. But in the end, the existence of Finland as an independent nation is not consistent with Putin's imperial view of greater Russia, as expressed prior to the invasion of Ukraine, so his assurances are not convincing.
They are worth nothing but he knows he’s fucked so what’s the point of trying to act big?
Isn't a characteristic of a certain kind of bullying child (aged about 8), that after not getting their way, they announce that they really wanted things to happen this way, anyway?
Why is there a ridiculous competition to find a “suitable name” for English fizz, like ‘champagne” or “Prosecco”
The name is right there. ENGLISH FIZZ, It sounds posh, hedonistic and fun. Like a quickie in the Ha-ha. Just use that.
ENGLISH FIZZ
Because nobody except English people would ever use the term.
Not true. It was Americans who coined the term “British fizz”, to classify it on their wine lists
There’s not much of an export market anyway, save for the odd US importer who finds the idea of English wine exotically amusing, and the Norwegians who pay such high taxes that it outweighs the underlying expense.
I am not saying that anywhere else has it better, but the UK economy seems quite uniquely fucked.
Not least because the government has no interest in actual economic policy.
Actually, I think we're uniquely positioned to thrive in the current world circumstances. We have (with some caveats), plenty of food, plenty of varied fuel, we have the geographical advantages of being a set of islands, etc. The opportunities just need to be grasped. I'm open to being persuaded otherwise, but this Government is over. Boris can claw back a little respect from me if he deals with the hard situation in NI for his successor. But perhaps even that might take someone new.
The UK is reliant on the EU for 70% of its fresh food.
Are you sure it’s not 70% of imports, rather than 70% of all food consumed?
It should be pointed out as well that the EU was at best a decidedly mixed blessing for British agriculture. Without their policy muddles and corruption, we could have been in a position to feed ourselves. The illegal ban on our beef at the behest of the French (who had twice as much BSE as we did, although they called it something else) was bad, but the subsidy mechanism was far more damaging over the long term.
We went from having in the early 1990s one of the most efficient and advanced agricultural sectors in the world, capable of feeding 60 million people, to, well...
Putting aside the deficiencies of CAP, the idea that the UK can feed itself is risible.
Or, if it could, it would only do so with incredibly high food costs.
This has surely been the case since, I don’t know, the repeal of the Corn Laws.
I think it could but not overnight, it would required 3-5 years of planning and we'd obviously lose stuff like olive oil and speciality imported items as well as fruits out of season. Compared to just 30 years ago, though, the range of food that can now be successfully grown in the UK is huge so the loss would be much less noticeable than most think. I think in a few select areas we could probably cultivate olive trees to make olive oil but it would be very expensive compared to today. The biggest loss would be wine, UK wine is expensive and we absolutely don't produce anywhere near enough compared to consumption. There just isn't enough viable land to support the various grape varieties.
People should stop poncing about and:
1. Use butter to fry their food. 2. Drink a good pint of ale.
Eating seasonal fruit and vegetables gives you better taste, better nutrition and a lower environmental impact. Having something at its best in its season is one of the joys of eating.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
Thread on food prices - tomatoes as an example. Very worrying...
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 6h The upshot is that half of the greenhouses in the Lea Valley have been left empty this year. It's hard to describe what a big deal this is. Up until this year they hadn't seen a SINGLE one left without plants. This one should have cucumbers growing in it. Instead: nothing.
I've shared this before on here but a good read from 2 months ago about what fertilizer and other shortages mean for food supplies. TL;DR, eye-watering costs for the west and likely famine in many poorer countries.
Dependence on nitrogen fertiliser has been a disaster for nutrition. Nitrogen provides bulk. Its not the only mineral a crop needs to be healthy, and to make nourishing food. Rock dust is plentiful, and a far better fertiliser than nitrogen. So I see this as unintentional good news.
Rock dust is nonsensical woo, debunked all over the Internet, eg
Even if it did what it claims, all it claims is to restore micronutrients. There is no way it is going to increase yields the way artificial npk does.
Have you read the feeble article you posted? That's the debunking equivalent of being thrashed by the proverbial wet lettuce.
Rock dust is being used in Perthshire to make record breaking vegetables, and is apparently now being exported for profit. Evidently the farmers using it must be suggestible dupes, and the football sized cabbages must be holographical projections. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/14/scotland-rock-dust-transform-soil
Jesus christ.
Have you ever grown anything? "The Thomsons' once-exhausted land now produces football-sized cabbages, massive onions and normally delicate fruits the size of a fist." You do realise that the determinants of the size of a vegetable are 1. Variety 2. General growing conditions and alongway third 3. Fertiliser? How the hell are micronutrients on their own meant to produce whatever these fist sized fruits are?
Rock dust “mimics the glacial cycles” and “accelerates the natural weathering process”
Sounds like fou fou dust to me
It can sound like anything it likes to you, the market garden is producing the physical vegetables, and they're not introducing nitrogen fertiliser into the soil secretly at the dead of night, so I suggest you go and sit on a prize-winning marrow.
I believe in data. Show me that and I might believe you
There are pages and pages of studies on their website:
The two-year incorporation of the rock dust compost into a poor-quality soil led to a significant increase in the yield with the increase of 120% and 187% compared to untreated control in 2013 and 2014, respectively. Application of rock dust compost obviously promoted superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity and concentration of vitamin C in mature apple trees. The beneficial effects coincided with higher microbial activity and shifts in the composition of the soil microbiome. Our results demonstrate that the practice of combining the rock dust-fortified compost with NPK fertilizers provides a cost- effective way of supplying crops with macro-and micronutrients ensuring better vegetative growth and higher yields.
Here we report that amending a UK clay-loam agricultural soil with a high loading (10 kg/m2) of relatively coarse-grained crushed basalt significantly increased the yield (21 ± 9.4%, SE) of the important C4 cereal Sorghum bicolor under controlled environmental conditions, without accumulation of potentially toxic trace elements in the seeds. Yield increases resulted from the basalt treatment after 120 days without P- and K-fertilizer addition. Shoot silicon concentrations also increased significantly (26 ± 5.4%, SE), with potential benefits for crop resistance to biotic and abiotic stress.
Take your pick.
your first link = 404. Your second is classic bullshit: it compares rockdusty compost with "untreated control" - i.e. with no compost at all. We know that compost works, we strongly suspect that rock dust is neither here nor there, so this is a test of compost faking it as a test of rockdust. Just embarrassing. Next one looks the same, final one reports no significant interesting results.
This is just classic crankdom. i am sure there's a tribe in the hindu kush who live to 130 and never get cancer because of their diet of rockdusty apricots.
Actually, if you'd troubled yourself to read it, that wasn't the methodology.
'Two different types of compost were prepared and used throughout the study.
The first type, referred to as composted manure (CM), was produced by mixing seven parts of dung with three parts of wheat straw (w/w), which resulted in a C/N ratio of ca. 26. The second type, referred to as composted manure with rock dust (CMRD), was prepared identically except for the 90 addition of 0.4 part of the byproduct of quarry industry, which serves as a source of different trace mineral nutrients. The chemical composition of the rock dust used in this study was described earlier by Li and Dong (2013).'
Why on earth would they have done it in the way you suggest?
The only thing that's embarrassing here is you been the stupid twunt who's claimed there isn't a single study, been told there are in fact multiple studies, and who is now scrabbling around trying to discredit the ones posted by making wild, easily disprovable claims about their methods.
Yawn
I am down here organically managing 15 acres of pasture and 50-odd fruit trees, someone else on the thread is growing a ha of vines, but you are the one who knows all about it. odd.
Oh OK, I thought it was 'controlled studies' that you wanted. Now I've given you the studies, it's back to 'I know best because'.
Within the next 7 days either Russia will turn a local breakthough into a major gain of territory or the Ukrainians will hem it in. This battle. pushing westerly from the town of Popasna has seen Ukrainian defence lines collapse in the last 48 hours. And collapse is the right word. The threat is not only will Russia consolidate its dominance of the Luhansk region but could push on further thus gaining more territory for negotiation.
There were two Ukrainian brigades in reserve north of this area who might offer a support for a plugging operation or a flanking counter but the Ukrainians are having to watch all over the place, including still on their Northern & North Eastern borders, so plenty of reserves that they have are elsewhere in the country
If they are not pushed back, Russia will have scored a major strategic success, not tactical/not local much against the prevailing media that suggests they have been generally failing. Worse for Ukraine, they have the advantage right now on mobilisation versus Russia so now is the time of opportunity. That advantage window could close soon enough.
Has that advantage window even opened yet ?
Wasn't it June when Ukraine's mobilisation was supposed to produce significant new forces ?
More nuclear power is a very very good idea. Much more is even better. Windfall taxes are just ridiculous. Tory become Labour and eventually will run out of other peoples money. Try redirecting some of the universal benefits the averagely off and well off don't need. Or zero tax on lncome up to living wage and increase the flat rate above. And take tax off heating and power and all food and clothing and whack up purchase tax on luxuries. Or Or Or DO SOMETHING
A modest nuclear programme replacing what we have is not a bad idea.
A properly renewable programme using our own considerable natural resources that are cheaper, cleaner and indigenous to these islands would be a much better idea.
If it's tidal, yes. If we'd invested 60 years ago into space based industry we could have extensive space based solar being microwaved back to Earth and so cheap it would be unmetred. We are a stupid, ignorant species though.
Every sensible investigation of the cost of SPS comes up with it being cheaper to put the solar panels on the ground. Even if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship works and reaches it's $10 million per launch projected cost.
Yes because we are 60 years behind where we would have been if serious investment had started into space industry rather than the idiotic and pointless stuff NASA was doing and continues to do. For example, had serious work begun on sky hooks the cost would be right down. But it didn't so we are where we are. We are way behind in getting off this damn rock and guaranteeing a human future.
Why is there a ridiculous competition to find a “suitable name” for English fizz, like ‘champagne” or “Prosecco”
The name is right there. ENGLISH FIZZ, It sounds posh, hedonistic and fun. Like a quickie in the Ha-ha. Just use that.
ENGLISH FIZZ
Because nobody except English people would ever use the term.
Not true. It was Americans who coined the term “British fizz”, to classify it on their wine lists
There’s not much of an export market anyway, save for the odd US importer who finds the idea of English wine exotically amusing, and the Norwegians who pay such high taxes that it outweighs the underlying expense.
Not yet - not enough volume, and word hasn't spread.
Given the spiralling insanity of champagne prices, sparkling wine has a lot of market opportunities at the moment.
Why is there a ridiculous competition to find a “suitable name” for English fizz, like ‘champagne” or “Prosecco”
The name is right there. ENGLISH FIZZ, It sounds posh, hedonistic and fun. Like a quickie in the Ha-ha. Just use that.
ENGLISH FIZZ
Because nobody except English people would ever use the term.
Prosecco was hardly in everyone’s vocabulary 30 years ago.
Exactly, and the name really matters: it creates the brand
Prosecco is a little village near Trieste. It’s a genius name/brand for selling sparkling wine. It actually sounds effervescent. A party in three syllables
I once spent a few days with the sparkling wine makers of Trentino who loudly lamented that their rather pleasant sparkling wine (older and nobler than Prosecco, they claimed) was called “Trentodoc”
TRENTODOC
It sounds like an Adobe spreadsheet app, or maybe a regional water utility. It doesn’t make you want to offer random drunken blow jobs
English Fizz is excellent. Ooh, yah, another gless of English fizz!!
Good evening from Stockton-on-Tees. I am once again staying in the town's Hampton by Hilton which is owned by the council and was something of a political controversy. The Tories and independents were vociferous that it would be a waste of money, built to help regenerate a town which also now has The Globe theatre (also owned by the council) which would similarly be a white elephant.
And yet here I am, in this very busy hotel, with a car park that is completely full. And a significant number of the guests are going to whatever the show is at The Globe tonight. Couple in front had come up from Norfolk. Have been here during the week as well - also busy.
What is it about Tories especially where investment is subsidy / communism and must be frowned upon?
EDIT - hotel has free car charging which is good! But I can't shift my now fully charged off the charge point as the car park is full. So tough titty anyone getting here late, I'm off for a pint(s) and a parmo.
Good evening from Stockton-on-Tees. I am once again staying in the town's Hampton by Hilton which is owned by the council and was something of a political controversy. The Tories and independents were vociferous that it would be a waste of money, built to help regenerate a town which also now has The Globe theatre (also owned by the council) which would similarly be a white elephant.
And yet here I am, in this very busy hotel, with a car park that is completely full. And a significant number of the guests are going to whatever the show is at The Globe tonight. Couple in front had come up from Norfolk. Have been here during the week as well - also busy.
What is it about Tories especially where investment is subsidy / communism and must be frowned upon?
EDIT - hotel has free car charging which is good! But I can't shift my now fully charged off the charge point as the car park is full. So tough titty anyone getting here late, I'm off for a pint(s) and a parmo.
There is a long tradition of subsidising things which are failures by government. And also a tradition of keeping the subsidised failures going to avoid the embarrassment of them actually being seen to fall down.
Would you like a bag of East Africa groundnuts, very cheap?
Why is there a ridiculous competition to find a “suitable name” for English fizz, like ‘champagne” or “Prosecco”
The name is right there. ENGLISH FIZZ, It sounds posh, hedonistic and fun. Like a quickie in the Ha-ha. Just use that.
ENGLISH FIZZ
Because nobody except English people would ever use the term.
Prosecco was hardly in everyone’s vocabulary 30 years ago.
Exactly, and the name really matters: it creates the brand
Prosecco is a little village near Trieste. It’s a genius name/brand for selling sparkling wine. It actually sounds effervescent. A party in three syllables
I once spent a few days with the sparkling wine makers of Trentino who loudly lamented that their rather pleasant sparkling wine (older and nobler than Prosecco, they claimed) was called “Trentodoc”
TRENTODOC
It sounds like an Adobe spreadsheet app, or maybe a regional water utility. It doesn’t make you want to offer random drunken blow jobs
English Fizz is excellent. Ooh, yah, another gless of English fizz!!
More nuclear power is a very very good idea. Much more is even better. Windfall taxes are just ridiculous. Tory become Labour and eventually will run out of other peoples money. Try redirecting some of the universal benefits the averagely off and well off don't need. Or zero tax on lncome up to living wage and increase the flat rate above. And take tax off heating and power and all food and clothing and whack up purchase tax on luxuries. Or Or Or DO SOMETHING
A modest nuclear programme replacing what we have is not a bad idea.
A properly renewable programme using our own considerable natural resources that are cheaper, cleaner and indigenous to these islands would be a much better idea.
If it's tidal, yes. If we'd invested 60 years ago into space based industry we could have extensive space based solar being microwaved back to Earth and so cheap it would be unmetred. We are a stupid, ignorant species though.
Every sensible investigation of the cost of SPS comes up with it being cheaper to put the solar panels on the ground. Even if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship works and reaches it's $10 million per launch projected cost.
Yes because we are 60 years behind where we would have been if serious investment had started into space industry rather than the idiotic and pointless stuff NASA was doing and continues to do. For example, had serious work begun on sky hooks the cost would be right down. But it didn't so we are where we are. We are way behind in getting off this damn rock and guaranteeing a human future.
Nope - because some quite simple algebra tells up that putting the solar panels on the ground and losing a bit from the atmosphere etc is much cheaper than putting a slightly smaller number of the same panels in space and then beaming the power back. Even if launch costs are $100 a kilo.
But why? Big nukes take years before commissioning.
He seems to have a bee in his bonnet over nukes and is very skeptical of renewables by comparison.
Apparently it is a small modular reactor via Rolls-Royce
That haven't even been prototyped yet.
This has Garden Bridge and PPE procurement fiasos written all over it
Your last line is interesting, as I think the comparisons are poor. The Garden Bridge was a massive waste of taxpayers' money, advantaging no-one except for the people who had been part of the dodgy procurement. It was unnecessary and (at least) borderline corrupt.
PPE procurement was a very different thing. We needed PPE desperately, at a time everyone else in the world needed it. We got the PPE we required, even if there was some waste. The question is whether we could have got the same amount of PPE in a timely manner without some waste.
Another example of how negotiating positions change when the facts change. Remember how Putin said that Sweden and Finland joining NATO was a terrible idea and would have unspecified "consequences"? Well, on reflection...
Bluff successfully called, and also a good, sensible outcome. Neither country would be a threat to Russia in any conceivable scenario.
On my reading, Putin was saying that Russia had "no problems" with these countries, but if they join NATO, that will change. But in the end, the existence of Finland as an independent nation is not consistent with Putin's imperial view of greater Russia, as expressed prior to the invasion of Ukraine, so his assurances are not convincing.
They are worth nothing but he knows he’s fucked so what’s the point of trying to act big?
Isn't a characteristic of a certain kind of bullying child (aged about 8), that after not getting their way, they announce that they really wanted things to happen this way, anyway?
Why is there a ridiculous competition to find a “suitable name” for English fizz, like ‘champagne” or “Prosecco”
The name is right there. ENGLISH FIZZ, It sounds posh, hedonistic and fun. Like a quickie in the Ha-ha. Just use that.
ENGLISH FIZZ
Because nobody except English people would ever use the term.
Prosecco was hardly in everyone’s vocabulary 30 years ago.
Exactly, and the name really matters: it creates the brand
Prosecco is a little village near Trieste. It’s a genius name/brand for selling sparkling wine. It actually sounds effervescent. A party in three syllables
I once spent a few days with the sparkling wine makers of Trentino who loudly lamented that their rather pleasant sparkling wine (older and nobler than Prosecco, they claimed) was called “Trentodoc”
TRENTODOC
It sounds like an Adobe spreadsheet app, or maybe a regional water utility. It doesn’t make you want to offer random drunken blow jobs
English Fizz is excellent. Ooh, yah, another gless of English fizz!!
According to my wine selling mates they are all pushing Cremant as the “new” Prosecco this summer. Cheap and sweet generally so will go down a treat in the bars of the UK these coming months no doubt.
Why is there a ridiculous competition to find a “suitable name” for English fizz, like ‘champagne” or “Prosecco”
The name is right there. ENGLISH FIZZ, It sounds posh, hedonistic and fun. Like a quickie in the Ha-ha. Just use that.
ENGLISH FIZZ
For the same reason that you will find "crème anglaise" on many an upmarket menu. If they can find a fancy foreign name for it then it will sell more easily for a higher margin.
Part of our heritage of being conquered by the Normans is an abiding sense of cultural inferiority towards the French, and this is just another example.
Why is there a ridiculous competition to find a “suitable name” for English fizz, like ‘champagne” or “Prosecco”
The name is right there. ENGLISH FIZZ, It sounds posh, hedonistic and fun. Like a quickie in the Ha-ha. Just use that.
ENGLISH FIZZ
Because nobody except English people would ever use the term.
Prosecco was hardly in everyone’s vocabulary 30 years ago.
Exactly, and the name really matters: it creates the brand
Prosecco is a little village near Trieste. It’s a genius name/brand for selling sparkling wine. It actually sounds effervescent. A party in three syllables
I once spent a few days with the sparkling wine makers of Trentino who loudly lamented that their rather pleasant sparkling wine (older and nobler than Prosecco, they claimed) was called “Trentodoc”
TRENTODOC
It sounds like an Adobe spreadsheet app, or maybe a regional water utility. It doesn’t make you want to offer random drunken blow jobs
English Fizz is excellent. Ooh, yah, another gless of English fizz!!
You might feel so, but it's really just a description rather than a special designation that could gain a reputation, like Cava, Prosecco, Cremant, or of course Champagne. It also doesn't mean the liquid itself has to meet any standard of quality - a low quality carbonated English wine would still be 'English fizz', and there would be no way to prevent a winemaker labelling it as such.
More nuclear power is a very very good idea. Much more is even better. Windfall taxes are just ridiculous. Tory become Labour and eventually will run out of other peoples money. Try redirecting some of the universal benefits the averagely off and well off don't need. Or zero tax on lncome up to living wage and increase the flat rate above. And take tax off heating and power and all food and clothing and whack up purchase tax on luxuries. Or Or Or DO SOMETHING
There are three problems with nuclear power:
(1) The number of nuclear power plants that have been built without government subsidies anywhere in the world is... counts... zero. Look at HPC: the electricity from there is almost twice as expensive as the government will guarantee for new wind. Oh yeah, and it turns out that HPC can't actually be built profitably even at that price, and they've just come to the government asking for more as it's (currently) both late and 1.5bn over budget.
(2) Nuclear does not have great reliability. An EDF nuclear plant's uptime is somewhere in the 60s. That means that - yes - you need to build lots of backup power for when your nuclear plant is down for unscheduled maintenance.
(3) Nuclear is not particularly flexible. A plant is - basically - either on or off.
Now, can nuclear be used as a part of our power generation mix to enhance the resilience of the grid? Yes. But if you relied completely on it, you would end up paying an awful lot (in the medium term) for your electricity. And if British firms are paying well above market rates for electricity, then either they will build their own powergen facilities (which will depress demand for nuclear power, causing it's own problems), or it will mean that power intensive businesses move elsewhere.
Why is there a ridiculous competition to find a “suitable name” for English fizz, like ‘champagne” or “Prosecco”
The name is right there. ENGLISH FIZZ, It sounds posh, hedonistic and fun. Like a quickie in the Ha-ha. Just use that.
ENGLISH FIZZ
For the same reason that you will find "crème anglaise" on many an upmarket menu. If they can find a fancy foreign name for it then it will sell more easily for a higher margin.
Part of our heritage of being conquered by the Normans is an abiding sense of cultural inferiority towards the French, and this is just another example.
Cremantglaise (with or without the 't') would be quite a nice way of describing British fizz actually.
Why is there a ridiculous competition to find a “suitable name” for English fizz, like ‘champagne” or “Prosecco”
The name is right there. ENGLISH FIZZ, It sounds posh, hedonistic and fun. Like a quickie in the Ha-ha. Just use that.
ENGLISH FIZZ
Because nobody except English people would ever use the term.
Not true. It was Americans who coined the term “British fizz”, to classify it on their wine lists
There’s not much of an export market anyway, save for the odd US importer who finds the idea of English wine exotically amusing, and the Norwegians who pay such high taxes that it outweighs the underlying expense.
Not yet - not enough volume, and word hasn't spread.
Given the spiralling insanity of champagne prices, sparkling wine has a lot of market opportunities at the moment.
It would be odd if England (or Britain, since there are Welsh and even Scottish vineyards) could compete with the hectarage of Italy or Spain.
If England wants fizz to compete it needs to be high end as a direct competitor to champagne, Which perhaps explains why there seems to be latent dissatisfaction with “Fizz” as a brand name.
Perhaps we need something which denotes especial quality or provenance, sort of in the way methode champenoise does.
More nuclear power is a very very good idea. Much more is even better. Windfall taxes are just ridiculous. Tory become Labour and eventually will run out of other peoples money. Try redirecting some of the universal benefits the averagely off and well off don't need. Or zero tax on lncome up to living wage and increase the flat rate above. And take tax off heating and power and all food and clothing and whack up purchase tax on luxuries. Or Or Or DO SOMETHING
A modest nuclear programme replacing what we have is not a bad idea.
A properly renewable programme using our own considerable natural resources that are cheaper, cleaner and indigenous to these islands would be a much better idea.
If it's tidal, yes. If we'd invested 60 years ago into space based industry we could have extensive space based solar being microwaved back to Earth and so cheap it would be unmetred. We are a stupid, ignorant species though.
Every sensible investigation of the cost of SPS comes up with it being cheaper to put the solar panels on the ground. Even if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship works and reaches it's $10 million per launch projected cost.
Yes because we are 60 years behind where we would have been if serious investment had started into space industry rather than the idiotic and pointless stuff NASA was doing and continues to do. For example, had serious work begun on sky hooks the cost would be right down. But it didn't so we are where we are. We are way behind in getting off this damn rock and guaranteeing a human future.
Nope - because some quite simple algebra tells up that putting the solar panels on the ground and losing a bit from the atmosphere etc is much cheaper than putting a slightly smaller number of the same panels in space and then beaming the power back. Even if launch costs are $100 a kilo.
There are some advantages to space-based power compared to ground solar cells as well - including the potential to generate power 24/7. If it can be made to work, it may be very advantageous to countries well away from the equator.
The fact Musk is so avidly against it, especially given his trade in ground-based systems - gives me an inkling that there's something in it.
More nuclear power is a very very good idea. Much more is even better. Windfall taxes are just ridiculous. Tory become Labour and eventually will run out of other peoples money. Try redirecting some of the universal benefits the averagely off and well off don't need. Or zero tax on lncome up to living wage and increase the flat rate above. And take tax off heating and power and all food and clothing and whack up purchase tax on luxuries. Or Or Or DO SOMETHING
A modest nuclear programme replacing what we have is not a bad idea.
A properly renewable programme using our own considerable natural resources that are cheaper, cleaner and indigenous to these islands would be a much better idea.
If it's tidal, yes. If we'd invested 60 years ago into space based industry we could have extensive space based solar being microwaved back to Earth and so cheap it would be unmetred. We are a stupid, ignorant species though.
Every sensible investigation of the cost of SPS comes up with it being cheaper to put the solar panels on the ground. Even if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship works and reaches it's $10 million per launch projected cost.
Yes because we are 60 years behind where we would have been if serious investment had started into space industry rather than the idiotic and pointless stuff NASA was doing and continues to do. For example, had serious work begun on sky hooks the cost would be right down. But it didn't so we are where we are. We are way behind in getting off this damn rock and guaranteeing a human future.
Nope - because some quite simple algebra tells up that putting the solar panels on the ground and losing a bit from the atmosphere etc is much cheaper than putting a slightly smaller number of the same panels in space and then beaming the power back. Even if launch costs are $100 a kilo.
The difference in cost is going to be two order of magnitude even if you could get costs down to $50/kilo.
Comments
https://www.remineralize.org/rem_publications/effect-of-rock-dust-amended-compost-on-the-soil-properties-soil-microbial-activity-and-fruit-production-in-an-apple-orchard-from-the-jiangsu-province-of-china/
The two-year incorporation of the rock dust compost into a poor-quality soil led to a significant increase in the yield with the increase of 120% and 187% compared to untreated control in 2013 and 2014, respectively. Application of rock dust compost obviously promoted superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity and concentration of vitamin C in mature apple trees. The beneficial effects coincided with higher microbial activity and shifts in the composition of the soil microbiome. Our results demonstrate that the practice of combining the rock dust-fortified compost with NPK fertilizers provides a cost- effective way of supplying crops with macro-and micronutrients ensuring better vegetative growth and higher yields.
https://www.remineralize.org/rem_publications/increased-yield-and-co2-sequestration-potential-with-the-c4-cereal-sorghum-bicolor-cultivated-in-basaltic-rock-dust-amended-agricultural-soil/
Here we report that amending a UK clay-loam agricultural soil with a high loading (10 kg/m2) of relatively coarse-grained crushed basalt significantly increased the yield (21 ± 9.4%, SE) of the important C4 cereal Sorghum bicolor under controlled environmental conditions, without accumulation of potentially toxic trace elements in the seeds. Yield increases resulted from the basalt treatment after 120 days without P- and K-fertilizer addition. Shoot silicon concentrations also increased significantly (26 ± 5.4%, SE), with potential benefits for crop resistance to biotic and abiotic stress.
Take your pick.
If you were a policy adviser in education, you were either not top class, or you were ignored.
Recent local elections suggest to me that the great British public have sent the message "Boris out" followed by "Which part of Boris out didn't you understand?" Tiv and Hon looks a lot like "Would you like 'Boris out' explained slowly and carefully?".
And it's all around us in quarries.
Is it true Sky are making a big deal out of Johnson's meeting with Gray.
Ooh, did he demand the removal of the photos?.
NEW: Boris Johnson is holding Sunak's windfall tax plan to ransom. The PM would only back it if some of the money is funnelled to new nuclear power and offshore windfarms. MY LONG READ on the cost of living conundrum https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/in-the-tory-storm-over-the-windfall-tax-sunak-and-johnson-have-competing-visions-t6nh9pqp5
DAGGERS DRAWN: No 10 official accuses the Treasury of making it "excruciatingly difficult" to fund new infrastructure. This is Boris Johnson's price for backing a windfall tax https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/in-the-tory-storm-over-the-windfall-tax-sunak-and-johnson-have-competing-visions-t6nh9pqp5
Because I don't *think* things are bad, I *know* they are, and I can see them getting much worse given the appalling incompetence of those in charge.
And you're saying they're not the worst? That's really alarming.
This is just classic crankdom. i am sure there's a tribe in the hindu kush who live to 130 and never get cancer because of their diet of rockdusty apricots.
Mind you, the Windfall tax will play well with voters. Good on Rishi for thinking of it. Excellent work.
BBC News - Trawsfynydd: Boris Johnson 'looks to build' nuclear reactor
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-61524450
'Two different types of compost were prepared and used throughout the study.
The first type, referred to as composted manure (CM), was produced by mixing seven parts of dung with three parts of wheat straw (w/w), which resulted in a C/N ratio of ca. 26. The second type, referred to as composted manure with rock dust (CMRD), was prepared identically except for the 90
addition of 0.4 part of the byproduct of quarry industry, which serves as a source of different trace mineral nutrients. The chemical composition of the rock dust used in this study was described earlier
by Li and Dong (2013).'
Why on earth would they have done it in the way you suggest?
The only thing that's embarrassing here is you been the stupid twunt who's claimed there isn't a single study, been told there are in fact multiple studies, and who is now scrabbling around trying to discredit the ones posted by making wild, easily disprovable claims about their methods.
He seems to have a bee in his bonnet over nukes and is very skeptical of renewables by comparison.
Windfall taxes are just ridiculous. Tory become Labour and eventually will run out of other peoples money. Try redirecting some of the universal benefits the averagely off and well off don't need. Or zero tax on lncome up to living wage and increase the flat rate above. And take tax off heating and power and all food and clothing and whack up purchase tax on luxuries. Or Or Or
DO SOMETHING
Leaving aside actually finding space for it next to the decommissioned Magnox, it was a dumb place then and would be a dumb place now. Even assuming they could recommission the line south from Blaenau to actually tranpsort materials to it.
The Wylfa by all means. But Trawsfynnydd? Merely confirms this lot are mad and stupid.
If he wants a sane viable and much cheaper energy policy, let's see those tidal lagoons in Bae Abertawe.
It’s also different: more lively and buttery-fruity
Not cheap, mind
The advance of English fizz is one thing which has really proven global warming, to my mind. A change you can actually see, in the glass, and taste, on the tongue
A properly renewable programme using our own considerable natural resources that are cheaper, cleaner and indigenous to these islands would be a much better idea.
It is like they know exactly what triggers me and are doing their level best to piss me off.
This feels like a sure fire bet unless there’s a video out there of him being spit roasted by two transsexuals, and even then he would probably win.
1) Take their children out of their high end private school.
2) Enrol them at the local Free school for 6th form.
3) Plan to have them extensively tutored.
a) Costs less than 2 years of expensive private education.
b) They can put "state school" on their CVs
c) The state school will probably get 3 children into top universities.
Who said that egalitarianism isn't an option?
If we'd invested 60 years ago into space based industry we could have extensive space based solar being microwaved back to Earth and so cheap it would be unmetred. We are a stupid, ignorant species though.
The name is right there. ENGLISH FIZZ, It sounds posh, hedonistic and fun. Like a quickie in the Ha-ha. Just use that.
ENGLISH FIZZ
This has Garden Bridge and PPE procurement fiasos written all over it
https://www.ft.com/content/70c7d7d7-6658-4d6a-9370-64087bf314e7
Which does not make it less stupid, of course.
How often have I said Johnson and Corbyn are two cheeks of the same arse?
(Not saying I’ll take it because I think Trump will be tempted to say I told you so when it comes to Biden but interested in what you think)
The Sussman trial is certainly interesting and the entire Durham investigation might have a sway in what occurs in the 24 election
And there are plenty of winemakers in Spain and France now openly fretting that climate change is fucking with their product, so I’d say this is an issue
“Climate change in Burgundy: Slowing the impact
It’s getting hotter in Burgundy – that much is clear, from data analyses and personal testimony. What does this mean for the future of the region’s finest wines, whose style is shaped by its marginal climate? And how are producers responding, asks Tim Atkin MW”
https://www.decanter.com/premium/burgundy-climate-change-slowing-the-impact-431196/
Some projects may not work but some might be fantastically successful. One of the advantages of being Government / Tax-funded is you can experiment with things .
With county appellations, of course.
ENGLISH FIZZ
Produced in Sussex, England.
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/27661.pdf
I am down here organically managing 15 acres of pasture and 50-odd fruit trees, someone else on the thread is growing a ha of vines, but you are the one who knows all about it. odd.
I had a chat with a chap, not long ago who hade been making very good money in the US.
Apparently, as part of "building a story" to get into university in the US, he would be hired by parents to actually run the teenagers apparently "spontaneous projects", such as building a dune buggy from stuff scavenged from the local scrap yard etc.
“Christopher Merrett - a scientist, physician, naturalist and metallurgist who in 1662 first documented "how to put the fizz into sparkling wine".
And hooray we already have British wine!!
I'm actually astounded to discover a whole litre for less than £6: a patriotic drink indeed. Maybe a Jubilee special? Dunno.
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/255247035
Or you can have it with extra micronutrients at a premium (no idea if this includes rock dust):
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/25524773
When I applied in the late 80s, it was all about your extra-curriculum activities, then it became about your grades, now it’s about how you’ve overcome your “deep suffering”
And yet here I am, in this very busy hotel, with a car park that is completely full. And a significant number of the guests are going to whatever the show is at The Globe tonight. Couple in front had come up from Norfolk. Have been here during the week as well - also busy.
What is it about Tories especially where investment is subsidy / communism and must be frowned upon?
EDIT - hotel has free car charging which is good! But I can't shift my now fully charged off the charge point as the car park is full. So tough titty anyone getting here late, I'm off for a pint(s) and a parmo.
1. Use butter to fry their food.
2. Drink a good pint of ale.
Eating seasonal fruit and vegetables gives you better taste, better nutrition and a lower environmental impact. Having something at its best in its season is one of the joys of eating.
Wasn't it June when Ukraine's mobilisation was supposed to produce significant new forces ?
For example, had serious work begun on sky hooks the cost would be right down.
But it didn't so we are where we are. We are way behind in getting off this damn rock and guaranteeing a human future.
Given the spiralling insanity of champagne prices, sparkling wine has a lot of market opportunities at the moment.
Exactly, and the name really matters: it creates the brand
Prosecco is a little village near Trieste. It’s a genius name/brand for selling sparkling wine. It actually sounds effervescent. A party in three syllables
I once spent a few days with the sparkling wine makers of Trentino who loudly lamented that their rather pleasant sparkling wine (older and nobler than Prosecco, they claimed) was called “Trentodoc”
TRENTODOC
It sounds like an Adobe spreadsheet app, or maybe a regional water utility. It doesn’t make you want to offer random drunken blow jobs
English Fizz is excellent. Ooh, yah, another gless of English fizz!!
Would you like a bag of East Africa groundnuts, very cheap?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/21/voting-is-surging-georgia-despite-controversial-new-election-law/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https://s2.washingtonpost.com/car-ln-tr/36e5a97/628909f8956121755a881339/5f9a74be9bbc0f3316bf15aa/8/70/628909f8956121755a881339
PPE procurement was a very different thing. We needed PPE desperately, at a time everyone else in the world needed it. We got the PPE we required, even if there was some waste. The question is whether we could have got the same amount of PPE in a timely manner without some waste.
Discuss.
Part of our heritage of being conquered by the Normans is an abiding sense of cultural inferiority towards the French, and this is just another example.
(1) The number of nuclear power plants that have been built without government subsidies anywhere in the world is... counts... zero. Look at HPC: the electricity from there is almost twice as expensive as the government will guarantee for new wind. Oh yeah, and it turns out that HPC can't actually be built profitably even at that price, and they've just come to the government asking for more as it's (currently) both late and 1.5bn over budget.
(2) Nuclear does not have great reliability. An EDF nuclear plant's uptime is somewhere in the 60s. That means that - yes - you need to build lots of backup power for when your nuclear plant is down for unscheduled maintenance.
(3) Nuclear is not particularly flexible. A plant is - basically - either on or off.
Now, can nuclear be used as a part of our power generation mix to enhance the resilience of the grid? Yes. But if you relied completely on it, you would end up paying an awful lot (in the medium term) for your electricity. And if British firms are paying well above market rates for electricity, then either they will build their own powergen facilities (which will depress demand for nuclear power, causing it's own problems), or it will mean that power intensive businesses move elsewhere.
If England wants fizz to compete it needs to be high end as a direct competitor to champagne, Which perhaps explains why there seems to be latent dissatisfaction with “Fizz” as a brand name.
Perhaps we need something which denotes especial quality or provenance, sort of in the way methode champenoise does.
The fact Musk is so avidly against it, especially given his trade in ground-based systems - gives me an inkling that there's something in it.