red-signal

[red-signal]

It's been years since I started seeing nutrient flows constantly in my daily life, and the more I study agriculture, the more I see them.

See, every time you harvest something, you take the nutrients in that item away from the soil, and they go somewhere else. When I put a banana peel in my compost bin, I think (a little gleefully) about how I've just added an exotic, different profile of nutrients to my own property--but I also think about that distant banana plantation that lost tons of nutrients per year to US grocery stores, and I wonder what they replaced those nutrients with.

The farmer across my field grows corn, which gets harvested for feed. Corn is a nitrogen-hungry crop. Every year, that corn sucks up nutrients, which get harvested and shipped away. The farmer, being a conventional farmer, mostly replaces those with a conventional fertilizer. Nitrogen is often applied to fields in the form of ammonia fertilizer, which is made via a process that binds nitrogen in the air with hydrogen from natural gas. This feels like a vast resource, but of course we know it's not inexhaustible and not without cost.

Ideally, said farmer does soil tests and applies a carefully considered amount of ammonia. It is taken up by the growing plants and relatively little is lost. Possibly (often), though, some of the ammonia is leached out via rain and ends up in waterways, where it causes plant overgrowth and algal blooms, which harm the waterways in several ways, and turn those nutrients from a resource into a contaminant.

Meanwhile, the corn is also uptaking a variety of other nutrients from the soil which the commercial fertilizer is NOT replacing. Year by year, those nutrients get shipped off to distant feedlots and depleted in the soil. Eventually, those nutrients are gone from my neighbor's field and, quite possibly, languishing in a manure lagoon somewhere in, say, Indiana, where one can only hope it's properly treated and made into compost. But, you know. Not necessarily.

When I buy compost at the store, it's usually based in either cow manure or "forest products". Hopefully, depending on brand, those forest products MIGHT be collected municipal yard waste. Which is pretty good. Those suburbanites don't want their leaves, I do, win/win.

Except that because those suburbanites raked their yard waste, they now need at some point to fertilize their trees, shrubs, and turf grass. Meanwhile, they've eliminated habitat for the many insects that use leaf litter to either overwinter or reproduce. They may not be counting the costs, but the costs don't stop existing.

The ebb and flow of nutrients is something that, in the current system, goes utterly unregarded by most of the people taking part in the process. Even gardeners bring nutrients onto their soils mostly without thinking about the places those nutrients came from. I think in a sustainable world, that needs to change.

Also probably we need to do a hell of a lot more cover-cropping.

[red-signal]

people be like "oh so killing disabled people because there should be less disabled people in the world is EUGENICS now? smh what has the world come to"

[red-signal]

stairway hangout

[red-signal]

a comic thats lived in my brain ever since i first listened to GPTvsTMK

[red-signal]

"the 5th celebrity you have saved on your phone -" you and i live in vastly different worlds

[red-signal]

This is my favourite picture from Pride because 1) great shot of my jacket, kilt and tattoo, 2) only one I've seen where my placard is legible 3) EXTREMELY happy to have this picture of 'CIS DYKES FOR TRANS RIGHTS' chatting with 'CIS PEOPLE PISS ME OFF'

[red-signal]

guy who invented western musical notation: so we're going 12 tones to an octave, named after letters of the alphabet. me: got it. A to L. inventor guy: that's not what i said

[red-signal]

we were talking about the criminalization of homosexuality in class and my professor (who as far as i know isn't in any way queer) said something i quite enjoyed in that. well the exchange was more or less this: a student asked a question (doesn't really matter what exactly just know that i was rolling my eyes So hard internally) and the prof looked at the student and was like (i'm paraphrasing here this conversation was not in english) Do you have any queer friends? and the student went Uhhhh in a manner that made it clear the answer was probably no and the prof said Actually statistically speaking you most likely do. If I had to divide this room into two groups the way to do it would not be "people with queer friends" and "people without queer friends" it would be "people whose queer friends are out to them" and "people whose queer friends aren't". And if you're in the latter category you should consider why that is--if maybe your behavior is indicating to the queer people around you that you're not safe to come out to. to come back to your question if you really want to know about queerness there's a very simple way of doing that: you make yourself a person queer people feel comfortable talking to about their experiences and then you fucking listen to them when they do (the fuck is not paraphrased) (there was a fuck involved) (frankly king shit)

[red-signal]

gonna take a hot shower and put on a big t shirt and my undies and i’m gonna sit on the floor and color at my coffee table like im 6 years old again and then i’ll feel better

[red-signal]

I need him

[red-signal]

marquette btw

[red-signal]

awwww ❤️ im working on refs for all of my ocs but i feel like posting her early

[red-signal]

actually can we change the blog themes to tma fears ... i have ideas . im probably gonna make layouts for all of the fears so when i post them you can just pick the one you like the most ? if that sounds good

sure why not <3

[red-signal]

kind of genuinely insane about how the dateables have the sapience and everything of a human but theyll always be something distinctly separate . the implication that all of them were sentient the whole time and just waiting (hoping) for the player to ever properly acknowledge them . do you think they all on some level want to be human and to have the same freedom that the player has . oh i love overthinking this dating sim

[red-signal]

this girl left some really good tags on the subject of date everything -

[red-signal]

rb with whether people assume you’re older or younger than your actual age

[red-signal]

huge fan of just never doing anything actually productive and just making shit that only i gaf about