What Happened Today? We all left at 6:00 AM to drive to Orlando to see Chris. We arrived around 8:00 AM. Chris seemed to be in good spirits. We played Jewish gin almost 6 hours. When we got home I went to the Sunshine Raceway. Robert Crisp came all the way in the back to the front in 14 laps. San Francisco Giants beat the California Angels (4-3) to win Game 1 of the World Series.
GAIA- Planetary Management:
396. The year-round warmth of the tropics is fine for crop plants, but it is also fine for weeds, pests, and diseases; the tropics lack that great herbicide and pesticide of temperate zones, known as winter.
397. Moreover, many temperate-zone lands feature naturally fertile soils, whereas many tropical soils have lost their nutrients through millennia of tropical downpours that wash out crucial minerals.
398. An area of just one hectare of naturally rich soil in East Anglia (UK) or Iowa can yield as much harvest in one year as 10 hectares of naturally impoverished soil in Bolivia or Zambia.
399. At the same time, temperate-zone farmers, being members of the affluent world, can afford to maintain their soils’ fertility by mans of ever-growing inputs of synthetic fertilizer, plus capital-intensive machinery and other investments.
400. In other words, temperate-land farmers can now engage in “industrialized agriculture”, an option not generally available in the developing world.