
amazing how open and eager people are to helping you here on 𝕏 once you earnestly share an interest in something. something so uniquely American about that.
Below The Bramble
2.2K posts

@belowthebramble
Educating and promoting small scale rabbit farming. If you can have laying hens you can keep rabbits! Purebred Crème D’Argent rabbits in Western MA.

amazing how open and eager people are to helping you here on 𝕏 once you earnestly share an interest in something. something so uniquely American about that.










JUST IN: The most irreversible consequence of this war is not happening in Tehran. It is happening in a barn in Iowa. A farmer is standing over a kitchen table looking at two seed catalogues. One is corn. One is soybeans. Corn needs 180 pounds of nitrogen per acre. Nitrogen costs $610 per ton on the CBOT March futures settlement as of yesterday, up 35 percent in a month. Soybeans fix their own nitrogen from the atmosphere through root bacteria called rhizobia. They need nothing from the Strait of Hormuz. The farmer is choosing soybeans. Millions of acres are choosing soybeans. And once the planter rolls into the field, the choice cannot be reversed until next year. USDA projected corn at roughly 94 million acres for 2026, down from 98.8 million. Soybeans at 85 million, up from 81.2 million. Those projections were published February 19, before urea surged past $683 at New Orleans. The actual shift will be larger. USDA Prospective Plantings reports March 31. By then the seeds will be in the ground. This is the transmission channel the world is not watching. A 21-mile strait enforced by provincial commanders with sealed radio orders just rewrote the planting economics of 90 million acres of the most productive farmland on Earth. Not through sanctions. Not through diplomacy. Through the price of a single molecule that corn cannot grow without and soybeans do not need. Now follow the cascade. The Renewable Fuel Standard mandates 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually. That consumes roughly 43 percent of the entire US corn crop. The mandate is set by the EPA. It does not flex when corn acres shrink. It is inelastic demand consuming a fixed share of a declining supply. When supply tightens against a fixed mandate, the remaining corn reprices upward. Corn above $5 per bushel compresses every margin downstream. The US cattle herd stands at 86.2 million head, a 75-year low per USDA NASS. Poultry and pork operations face compression from higher corn prices. Feed is the single largest cost in livestock production. When feed reprices, protein reprices. When protein reprices, every grocery shelf in America absorbs the increase. This is the protein cascade. Corn to feed to meat to eggs to dairy to the checkout counter. Each link tightens because the link before it tightened. The originating cause is a urea molecule that cannot transit a strait because a provincial commander’s sealed orders say it cannot. The farmer did not start this war. The farmer cannot end it. The farmer responds to the price on the screen and the biology of the two crops in front of him. Corn needs the molecule. Soybeans do not. At $610 the arithmetic is settled. The planter rolls. The season is locked. Israel just authorised the assassination of every Iranian official on sight. The US has spent $16.5 billion. South Pars is burning. The Fed is holding rates because oil inflation will not break. Gold touched $5,000. Bitcoin is bleeding. China is running exercises near Taiwan. Sri Lanka shut down on Wednesdays. And underneath all of it, a man in a barn is making the decision that determines whether four billion people pay more for food this year. He has never heard of the Mosaic Doctrine. He does not know what a sealed contingency packet is. He knows what nitrogen costs. And he is planting soybeans. Full analysis - open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…




I'm going on Cleveland's NPR ideastream from 9:30 to 9:50 a.m. today tune in to hear about maple syrup!

Same. I raise heritage milk sheep on nothing but pasture, and milk them by hand, and even I have no idea why people are so averse to pasteurization. Sometimes, we drink our sheep's milk raw, or make rennet cheeses, which require raw milk. Other times, we'll make other milk-based foods that require heated, or even boiling milk. It's all great stuff. If there's ANY doubt at all about the health of any of our sheep, we heat the milk by default. Honestly, I wouldn't feed my family raw dairy sourced from anyone else, and I DEFINITELY wouldn't feed them store-bought raw dairy. Quality raw milk and dairy is good. Quality heated milk and dairy is also good. If you ask me, this whole raw milk discourse has become more about political signaling than about nutrition.







Gold is crashing. Silver is crashing. Crypto is crashing. Stocks are crashing. The dollar is crashing. Real talk what should we buy now?

Advice to the younger generation: Skip the degree. Buy land. Become a farmer.

Biology = ultra advanced nanotechnology. Self assembling, self repairing, self replicating, ultra efficient nano systems evolved over billions of years. Thanks to AI, we will not only achieve a full understanding of biology, but go beyond it.