Food

Energy

Commodities forecast – food, oil, farmland prices to slump

Commodities Trader Peter Brandt sees lower oil prices; bubble in grains, farmland

Brandt is a technical trader, poring over charts and patterns to spot potential breakouts and breakdowns. Nowadays he’s bearish on corn and other grains, along with farmland, oil and natural gas.

“When you look at those markets, I think we’re at prices that are unsustainable.” said Brandt, who also writes a popular Internet blog about trading commodities and stocks. Read Peter Brandt’s blog.

Gold is one of the few commodities Brandt is staying long on. He also said the U.S. stock market is attractively valued, and warns of a “huge bubble” forming in Treasurys and other fixed-income investments once U.S. interest rates rise.

1. Natural gas is a bust

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Food

From farm to plate

London, Ontario……For two hours every Thursday afternoon,  Julie Richards-Bramhill  is a conduit connecting a lone vegetable farmer with  hundreds of families looking for organic food.

Her garage is a drop-off and pickup point for  Triple Cord Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), one of several in the London area.  CSAs are a fast-growing solution to an old issue: how to connect food producers with customers. The customers are essentially buying a share of the season’s crops: if there’s a bumper crop of yams, for example, they all eat lots of yams. If the cucumber crop turns sour, none get to take home cukes.…

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Cooking under pressure

I often forget how good a pot of pintos can be. This last Sunday, I had to come up with a dish to take to church for our first Sunday after church dinner. I knew the main dish would be enchiladas, so I decided to make a pot of pinto beans. My recipe is simple, it’s dried pinto beans, picked, rinsed and soaked overnight.…

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EPA $1m to Colleges for off-grid research

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) awarded more than $1 million in grants to 15 university and college teams for innovative off-grid solutions.

Projects include a new process that uses spinach to capture and convert the sun’s energy to electricity and a partnership with a local landfill to design a process that uses waste heat and drainage to grow algae for biodiesel production.  If one of the teams below is in your area they might be able to use your off-grid home or community as a test bed for ongoing research. Contact via the college or the EPA web site:

The projects were selected from more than 300 college innovators showcasing sustainable projects, almost all designed to facilitate off-grid living and use natural resources more efficiently.   Following an initial peer review process, the EPA selected 45 teams for two days of judging by a panel of national experts convened to provide recommendations to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Here is a complete list of the best projects:…

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Food

Early Spring Garden

It is rare for us to be able to plant our garden before April 15 but, in rather shocking fashion, spring weather is upon us here in Canada nearly a month ahead of normal. So we are getting started early.

For those who think that gardening begins about May 20 we would like to offer some suggestions.
Our favorite vegetables are actually planted as soon as the ground can be worked in spring. We were introduced to Sugar Snap Peas by a friend some years back. He turned us on to how great it is to be eating fresh green peas (shell and all) in late May.…

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Seed catalogs

It’s the middle of winter, cold, dreary, but something I start receiving in my mailbox makes me long for the warm days of spring, the seed catalogs. Those shiny, colorful pages full of picture of ripe fruit and veggies and herbs. I have already started buying some things, a week ago, while on one of my rare trips to town (it’s a 3+ hour drive to town), I was in a Sam’s Club store, I was about to start heading for the check out lanes when I spotted something green and leafy sticking out from an odd aisle.…

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Food

Supermarket Survival

Worldwide food shortages and higher gas prices continue to drive food prices up, up, up. And yet there are still massive savings to be had that most people aren’t even aware of.  Please send us your stories of how to cope with food inflation (mail to news@off-grid.net).

One book promises to slash your grocery bills in half.  Supermarket Survival is an expert guide to juicing supermarkets – follow its rules or THEY will JUICE YOU.

Yes, you could say “don’t even use supermarkets!”  But that is not realistic.…

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Community

Homesteading-book review

Homesteading, it’s a buzzword that means different things to different people, back in the day, it meant getting land for free as long as you lived on it and improved it for x number of years. It was a way to get people to move west (in the USA), back when travel was slow and painful, even dangerous.…

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Community

Going fridgless

Going fridgless, to most people would be paramount to going topless, many people couldn’t imagine living their lives without having a 19+/- cubic foot energy eating, leftover storing, inefficient cold box sitting in their kitchen. Now days refrigerators do so much, in my old life, I worked for a big box electronics store, the one with the blue shirts and the little yellow price tag, they were starting to put computers in the door, not just electronics, but a real computer screen that could access the internet and help you with your shopping and let you watch TV on your fridge.…

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No knead bread

I love making and baking bread, who doesn’t enjoy eating fresh, homemade bread hot from the oven? The problem is the time it takes to make, the mixing, the kneading, the rising, the kneading again, the shaping, the rising again… it just takes too much time and attention.

 

About a year ago, I started seeing books and recipes for no-knead breads, it looks almost too good to be true, this method makes what is often referred to as “artisan breads”, the kind that cost a small fortune in the specialty bakeries, who knew how easy these breads were to make?…

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Community

DIY rocket stove

kent-ivey-diy-rocket-stove

I like rocket stoves, these are usually small, usually portable, mini-cooking-heating devices that are very efficient. You can use twigs instead of larger pieces of wood, these tend to be safer since you aren’t using a lot of fuel (twigs) and it goes out if you aren’t there to feed the wood into the stove. I have seen a lot of different methods of building a rocket stove, from simple bricks without mortar to very elaborate and expensive rigs.…

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