Agriculture

I have sown no wild oats,
Have tilled no black earth;
No mystery of Gaia
Surrenders to me.

The vine, date, and olive,
Oak and ash and thorn —
These mysteries are hidden,
I have lost them all.

But I have the black sauce,
And the seed of heat;
The noodle is summoned,
The dumpling is stewed.

I sit in the hot world.
The steam is rising,
The mineral rain falls
Into the sunlight.

Agricultural Thoughts

Today I was chatting with Gnomus. We were bandying agricultural ideas, like 'the tree that outgrows its roots will fall over,' and 'if the coconuts are too heavy, the palm will sway; the man below will kena hoot.'

It was fun remembering our roots. In fact, we cling to them in very odd ways. Mine are so far away that I have to keep digging up history in order to fix them in place; his are so near and yet always seem precariously balanced. But one thing we have in common is that our parents spent a lot of time and effort reminding us of our roots, which makes them easy to remember and to remain connected with.

We continued exchanging lines like, 'the turnip does not fall down' and 'the sweet potato always remains rooted.' In all the jocularity, there was an element of sobriety. We both know many of our contemporaries, juniors, students and former students, who have turned away from their roots. They don't think they have; they think they have adapted or evolved to 'face the challenges of a new age'.

But when a plant has learnt to walk in order to pursue a different kind of water or soil, is it still the same plant?

Elective Agriculture

Sometimes you keep planting the same stuff in the same place. It wears out the soil by consuming the same nutrients until the rate of replenishment falls below the rate of extraction. Then the crops start coming out 'weeny, weedy and weaky', as that great Roman once said.

This is the same kind of phenomenon as can be observed when an institution begins to feed on itself. If the same structures and powers have been in place too long, the amount of profitable divergence begins to drop. Like the crops, the gene pool is too small for adaptation; the same resource burdens begin to consume ever-decreasing resources, and the crop starts coming out tainted with mediocrity.

It then becomes time to practice elective agriculture. This is like elective surgery but applied to plants. You need to prune plants that can survive it; remove or rotate crops that are leaching out the last resources, so that the soil can recover; and if you are desperate, cut down and burn some plants to return the resources to the soil.

I've always believed that self-selecting cabals (such as the College of Cardinals, many political parties with a cadre system, some administrative teams in some corporate entities) can be very focussed and powerful. However, if the talent pool begins to thin out, this essentially propagative strategy can become self-defeating. That's because limiting your choice to a small pool in a social context normally results in a fall in memetic diversity. The same people say the same things, and 'thinking outside the box' becomes 'thinking more fantastically within the same box under the illusion that it is becoming larger'.

The result is that you begin with powerful leaders who are replaced by shadows of themselves who are then replaced by shadows of shadows. If the powerful leaders outlive (or purge, or otherwise eliminate) their shadows, they will be replaced by the shadows of shadows. A simple and crude mathematical analogy is to consider a 'shadow' as the 40% version of its original. Then the 'shadow of a shadow' is a 16% version of the original. It will take about six of these to replace the original, and that will still only be 96%, assuming that these shadows are additive and do not overlap.

This is why elective agriculture must be practiced. Crop rotation and the selection of new strains must be de rigeur for any organisation seeking to retain its growth potential. At the same time, that selection process is difficult. You can't be choosing new strains for the sake of having something new; you might plant weeds instead. Or the shadows of the shadows of crops.

From crops to outcrops – that is what will happen when wrong-headed replacement policies (either poor or no replacement) are followed. It's always a good thing for the farmers to have a look now and then at their livelihood, before it's all gone.

Selective Agriculture

The interesting thing about my new lease of life is that I get to choose the crops I cultivate, and earn quite a bit more with these boutique crops. The reason that I can charge more is that I genuinely feel I am putting specific personal effort into each of these plantings, and the quality shows.

In the past, I occasionally felt like a rice farmer. In the faraway days of my youth, we used to sing this song, which I think is possible Filipino in origin:

Planting rice is never fun,
Bent from morn till set of sun:
Cannot stand and cannot sit,
Cannot rest a little bit.

Of course, being naughty little primary school boys, we used to modify the line to take into account the possible discharge of natural fertiliser and other things like that. But the key point about feeling like a rice farmer is that in rice farming, you more or less have a huge acreage with what seems like little control over quality because it is such hard work and you have little time for reflection over individual stalks or plots.

In some ways, my previous life reminds me also of Auden's infamous poem, Roman Wall Blues. In that poem, he constructs simple doggerel which bears a huge burden of existential angst, much as any soldier on duty in a distant and inimical place must feel. It's not that I am ungrateful for comrades and shared striving and the wonderful manifold fruits of our labours over the years; I am quite happy to remember all those times.

The similarity lies in the feeling that there never seemed to be an end in sight. You just served tour after tour for years until you were invalided out, invalidated out, or otherwise reduced in validity. And at the end of it, like the Roman on Hadrian's Wall, you would like down on the turf in some more summery clime and look up at heaven's eye with your own single eye.

Currently though, I feel I have caught my second wind. Like the great detective Sherlock Holmes, a retirement to bee-keeping on the Sussex Downs is only the beginning of another story. This time, it is one that is largely off the books and into the mists of legend.

Ethanol

It's getting out of hand. Vast acres of land converted to corn growing for the sake of ethanol production. Here's an article about it which really would have been titled, by a less polite author, "Ethanol – the bullshit product."

The solutions are simple, but difficult to attain.

1) Use less energy. Ha. Haha. North America, China, India. Forget it.

2) Burn less petroleum. Ha. Haha. See above.

3) Use solar-derived or earth-derived sources (wind, geothermal, hydro). This will work in the very long term.

End of summary.

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More entertaining, though, is this list of the ten worst jobs in science. It must really suck to be a professional scientist (as opposed, I suppose, to an unprofessional one) these days.