“Rotations: Moore Estates,” a large-scale piece of environmental art. From the artist, Matthew Moore:

In October of 2004, my grandfather sold the first portion of our family’s land to Taylor Woodrow to build a 253-home suburban community. I acquired the company’s proposed community map from the city and used it as the template for the design of Rotations: Moore Estates. I mapped out Moore Estates at approximately one-third scale — the development site is 85 acres, Moore Estates is 35 acres — using a CAD program and a GPS surveying crew. My father and I planted 253 homes in sorghum (a grain commonly used for dairy feed) and my wife and I seeded the roads in wheat four months later, as the two grains are seasonally opposite. All the grain was harvested at the end of the project and donated to a local dairy.

Foreign Affairs - How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor - C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer →

fuddmain:

This might sound like nirvana to corn producers, but it is hardly that for consumers, especially in poor developing countries, who will be hit with a double shock if both food prices and oil prices stay high. The World Bank has estimated that in 2001, 2.7 billion people in the world were living on the equivalent of less than $2 a day; to them, even marginal increases in the cost of staple grains could be devastating. Filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn — which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year. By putting pressure on global supplies of edible crops, the surge in ethanol production will translate into higher prices for both processed and staple foods around the world. Biofuels have tied oil and food prices together in ways that could profoundly upset the relationships between food producers, consumers, and nations in the years ahead, with potentially devastating implications for both global poverty and food security.

Yes yes. Biofuels are dumb. I mean, alternative fuels are nice and everything, but people eating is more important than cars. Just saying.

"…industrial agriculture is not only unsustainable, but, on the basis of much evidence, is ruinous of the health of everything involved."

Wendell Berry has a letter to the editor in The New York Review of Books