Save Your Farm: Questioning Promises to Lease or Buy Your Land

This post has some urgency. I can't think of everything but it provides a start.

I want to caution my neighbors (and others who stumbled upon this post) about the dubious promises being made to rural landowners. If one needs the money and decides to sell or lease land, there are a few things to keep in mind.

First some background. Virginians across the political spectrum have spoken out against the Valley Link Project, a proposed new high-tension power line that would cut through Central Virginia to power data centers. Locally, we are in a legal fight to stop a hyperscaler from building 12 data centers on 900 acres of rural land formerly zoned agricultural.

These are important battles to win. I'm not opposed to AI per se; my other work includes teaching a class on AI and writing and am co-editing both a special issue of an academic journal about AI and peer-tutoring as well as a forthcoming book about AI and the teaching and tutoring of writing. My work with AI in education (see my other blog) has led me to learn quite a bit about the AI industry, its financing, and its use of land. Right now we have a Wild-West approach to this industry and its buildout. I suspect a crash of the 2008 sort is brewing. But by then, a lot of good rural land will have been ruined for decades.

So now my mailbox (not to mention my in-box) is filled with tempting offers to lease or sell some of our unused land to companies putting energy-storage faculties there. I have blocked hundreds of phone numbers from these firms, too. 

As I learned in a workshop on industrial solar-power farms last year, there are many caveats in contracts that turn a farm-field (or second-growth forest) into a solar farm. The same would apply to energy-storage facilities. Here's what to look for:

• If you sell land, can you get legally binding assurances as to how the land would be used? 
• At the end of a lease, will the soil on your land be returned to its "prior state" fully? One brochure promises that. What exactly does that mean? All footings, conduit, and other below-ground materials removed? Soil cultivated and sown with cover crop? Trees replanted? Which sorts of trees?
  
• What happens when a firm sells the lease? This has left some land-owners high and dry when the terms of a lease do not convey to the new owner. Solar farms change ownership frequently, I discovered. I see no reason that battery-storage would not, too.
• What remedies will you have in court if the lease-holder violates the terms of the lease?  
• How safe is an energy-storage facility? How often do they catch fire? If so, will it cause a forest fire near you? How susceptible is it to vandalism?
• Will the company show you other projects? They should take you to several and you should be able to talk to the owners of the property without hindrance from the lease-holders. 
• If the company needs water, where will it come from? Your aquifer or will they bring in their own water? 
• Will there be emissions? That's unlikely from energy-storage, but you should ask about any generators that may run in the event of power failures. If so, how often will they test these diesel-powered motors?

Valley Link and these land-lease companies couch their advertisements with images of solar panels and windmills. I'm not so sure of their environmental credentials. When one firm noted that we could lease wetlands to them, I know the ecosystems on which our farmland depends could be at risk, as well as our ground water and and soil health.

Say no if you can, "maybe but I need proof in a legal document" if you must lease. And get a lawyer to check the contract for you. Long-term thinking here may save us from some long-term damage to our health and the land.

Thinking Little With Wendell Berry

Last year, I picked up my first volume of Wendell Berry's essays. I'd read some of his poetry, but until recently, not the prose.

I found a kindred tractorpunk, even if Berry and his son work their land with animals. I'll point you to one essay in particular, "Think Little," that can be found free of charge at the Web site for the Wendell Berry Center. In particular I want to note a couple of his premises, ones that could be adapted to a Distributist lifestyle even in a big city:

• "The Confucian Great Digest says that the 'chief way for the production of wealth' (and he is talking about real goods, not money) is 'that the producers be many and that the mere consumers be few…. ' ”  To me this means that in a Distributist economy, rather than a Corporatist or Socialist one, we all are makers. We trade, barter, and yes, pay in currency when we must. Above all, we avoid credit.
• "Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato." Stunningly true, even if I struggle to grow white potatoes still. Barbara Dalmrosch said something similar in her wonderful book The Garden Primer: we can make change happen by growing just one thing we like to eat. That could be the potted basil on your apartment balcony. Start little, think little, but imagine big as you influence others.
• "[T]he remedies are not always obvious, though they certainly will always be difficult. They require a new kind of life-harder, more laborious, poorer in luxuries and gadgets, but also, I am certain, richer in meaning and more abundant in real pleasure. To have a healthy environment we will all have to give up things we like; we may even have to give up things we have come to think of as necessities." It's a small task to learn to repair or hold on to common items; I just refurbished my old phone rather than give into Verizon's seductive texts (now blocked) to upgrade it (at more than $250 per month).  A $20 case, some hours removing photos and apps so I could update the OS, and now I have a phone that will last me a few more years without incurring more e-waste or personal bills.
• "Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world." Not odd at all, and certainly less odd than when Berry wrote the essay. Most folks I know keep some kind of garden now, often with local varieties of plants and some food crops. 

I've gotten too critical of urban and suburban life at times. I still could never imagine living in suburbia, though I know some suburbanites who are minimalists and avoid the rat-races of conspicuous consumption and look-just-like-the-Joneses conformity. Moreover, the 'burbs of the 2020s are not those of the 1950s or 70s. You'll find local markets and businesses aplenty, from a halal grocer I frequent next to my locally-owned Yoga studio, to a locally-run bakery or three. I have found cobblers who still fix shoes, tailors who mend clothing, a great local bar, and places that repair small electronics or engines. 

 I'll end with Berry's prescription for change:

"We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibility that we have parceled out to the bureaus and the corporations and the specialists, and we are going to have to put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and households and neighborhoods. We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities. We need persons and households that do not have to wait upon organizations, but can make necessary changes in themselves, on their own."

Can we do this? We have to. The philosophy should appeal to Libertarians of the earth-loving rather than broligarch sort, too. 

You may, like me, have already started. I'll be at a Board of Supervisors meeting next week to mention the economic madness of building soon-to-fail giant data centers in our county. We are involved in a law suit against this plan, a concept voted down by supervisors in the counties north and east of us. If we don't try, we lose by default. Yet if we lose, we keep trying. Onward.

 

The Last X You Will Ever Buy

Sobering, isn't it? At age 65, I confront a strangely comforting dilemma: Many of the thing I buy or do will outlive me. That Deodar Cedar in between us and the road? It will be big when I'm in my 80s, but if climate-change and future residents allow, it will still be growing bigger in the 22nd Century.

If my tree-planting is for the next generation, as well as an "up yours" to the greedy idiocy of denying human-driven climate change, then buying things that last a long time constitutes a statement about economics and frugality. 

Every time we acquire a vehicle, and I'm addicted to clean used vehicles, I say "this one will be here when I ain't." And now when a tool wears out, I start shopping for something that will be in my estate sale. I've written here about the wisdom of getting only vehicles that are friendly for DIY work. That philosophy applies to many things, big and small.

Last week, the first circular saw I'd every owned, a basic Skil purchased in the early 1990s for under $50, gave up the ghost. I could have ordered a new trigger (the motor works still) but stands far from my late father-in-law's Porter-Cable belt sander, a Gibraltar-like device that commands reverence and weighs about 40 pounds. I got a new trigger for that one. It should last another 40 years. The Skil is a cheap tool that lasted a long time because I am careful with my tools, cleaning them and never, ever loaning a tool or vehicle to anyone unless I use it for the borrower.

The saw's replacement is a DeWalt saw. Instead of an $80 Skil, I spent another $100 and got a saw that rips paneling like a hot knife though butter. The handle fits my big hands well, and the trigger design is sure and solid. These features matter after you work with a saw for a few hours.

I really like the DeWalt's corded tools, but I've sworn off the cordless ones because the company changes battery designs regularly and I had to find third-party batteries from China (when I can in these crazy times) to keep a set of 2008 tools running. 

Planned obsolescence violates every fiber of my being.There was a time when a good tool meant a lifetime investment; that's the case for the sander I noted, as well as some of the shop tools we own. My Bosch Miter-box and Delta table saws should survive me (I bought the latter from an estate, in fact). I attended a farm show where a craftsman used a spoke-shave from the middle of the 18th Century; George III was boss here when that tool was made. He told me it would go to a child with an interest in woodworking, as it has been passed down for over 250 years.

I just wonder: if we thought of purchasing as much as possible items that would outlast us, how much healing would that do for the environment? Moreover, how much would it rebuke the purveyors of cheaply made, disposable goods? We would have to save up for a quality item. Wendell Berry made that this sort of durability and longevity tests for a sustainable economy.

When the current stupid era ends with an inevitable economic crash, I wonder if we might return to the Distributist principles of localism, frugality, and durability.

I'll be cutting boards and waiting to see. 

 

It Ain't the Heat...But the Humidity Can be Tamed

I recently installed two large dehumidifiers, at a cost to me of under $500, in a building that simply is too large to air-condition. I've been pleasantly surprised by the results.

Our large out-building is cinder block with a metal roof. The ground floor was built into a hill on the southeast side, which provides some natural cooling at the cost of being damp, causing mold to form in spots on our camper as well as anything else left there. The upper floor bakes in summer, and until later year, could be difficult to enter on a hot day. Last year I added more circulating fans, which did help move air around on both floors, but the humidity persisted.

Now with the dehumidifers running, for a few dollars each month, the entire building is dry and pleasant (downstairs) and tolerable to pleasant (upstairs). I can now work on cars, farm machinery, or carpentry projects without dying of heat stroke.

I set the target relative humidity at 60% for each floor. The units have a garden-hose adapter and the water goes under a garage door to the outside. These units can remove tens of gallons of water from the air daily, but there's not enough of a drop to collect the water in a barrel, something I'd like as I use distilled water from our home AC to flush the radiators in our cars, when I change coolant. I will figure out a system later. Note the starting humidity after I had the bay doors open for 30 minutes. Within half an hour of closing the doors, we were back at 60%.

Such adaptations won't solve all problems, even when I install solar on our property to reduce our carbon footprint. Meanwhile, parts of each floor remain more humid that others, though the circulating fans help reduce that problem. For those like me with a large garage but little money for HVAC, this solution may help you as human-driven climate change makes our summers ever less pleasant. 

 

Rain at Last!

One of the saddest facts about human-caused climate change is how easy it is, for urbanites and suburbanites, to ignore its effects on other living things. In Richmond, most folks seem to only notice our ever-more-common dry spells in early Fall when their monoculture lawns die off, or the city limits watering.

In the country, however, those not on deep wells began to fret this year about the time of our State Fair. That's usually when we get rains to break the dry, hot weather.

Not this year. Even our 2000 gallons of stored water did not seen likely to outlast this drought. As of last week, about half of that had been used for garden and perennials, plus some recently planted trees we were struggling to keep alive.

With a high-pressure system the size of a small nation parked over the East Coast, even tropical systems steered around it. That's a salutary side effect, with one aspect of climate change battling another. We living things, both animal and vegetable, got got caught in the middle of this clash of titans. And yet hardly a drop of rain fell in my part of Virginia for eight long weeks.

Now, thankfully, we have a real soaker, just in time to save the small trees that have been so stressed on our property. We've lost a few, but others we kept going with watering bags of various sorts.

I hope we see more rain like this, on and off and not in deluges, in 2020. This recent day of rain may have broken a pattern but it did not do more than dent the drought. I checked a six-acre field that I needs to till this weekend. Below an inch down, the soil seems as dry as the deserts of Mars. Yet there's more rain in the forecast for Sunday. Hope, unlike rain, does seem to come upon us through an act of will.

We need other changes, too, if we are to address climate change's pernicious and, ultimately, civilization-ending dark promise. Let's get busy on that and vote for sense. Virginia has an election in a month, an I plan to vote against the party of environmental destruction. I hope  you do, too.

Winter Chores

We did not have too much of a winter until last week, thanks to El Niño. I don't much care for warm Decembers, but some Fall chores did get done. My old friend Dominic and I began working to paint a barn roof and I was able to service some equipment that gets harder to do when the mercury drops below freezing.

It has been pleasantly refreshing to hear people note, usually at the cashier's station in rural stores, that this warm weather "just ain't right." In town, however, one does not hear as much of that. It's tempting to give someone a tongue-lashing, so instead I just say "enjoy the season for what it is."

Out in the sticks, my answer is to use the cold weather we finally got for that which is best done in the cold. On the farm that means clearing land for future planting or to prevent saplings from shading our garden out of existence. Winter means getting into places that will certainly be "snakey" in April and May. Having nearly stepped on a a basking Copperhead in 2012, I now appreciate better where serpents like to have a home, and I respect that as long as they respect my space.  For now, my resident and nonpoisonous black snakes are under ground or in a cozy barn-corner, waiting for mouse-hunting season to resume.  The barn, meanwhile, gets filled with additional firewood just in case March surprises us.

In our soggy low places, the ground often freezes nicely.  I can then tromp around and post no-hunting signs and clear an old road to get through the woods to the beeyard. Two junked cars block it for now, but they'll be gone soon. Lots of other junk gets pulled out of the woods to be discarded or reused (mostly, junked). We cut a road to an old run-in full of overly seasoned but usable firewood. It's a pile I dare not disturb after April Fool's Day.

The nicest accidental discovery of the season came via Nancy's looking online about blackberries. She discovered that they fruit best on second-year canes, and that fact provides a great method to keep two huge "patches" in production, yielding jam, pies, and cobbler for us and provender for the wildlife.  I will run a rotary mower (aka "Bush Hog," a brand name) over 1/3 of each patch annually.  That will cut in lanes for harvesting without stepping on snakes or getting tangled in thorny canes. One only picks blackberries at the edge of a patch, though the best ones always seem just out of reach! There's a lesson of something.

All these things and more are possible in the coldest months, as long as the snow does not fall too deeply. This week, as Dom and I put window panels in our new greenhouse, a flurry blessed us for a few moments with the wonder of the season. It hissed down and reminded us, as it piled up quickly, that the universe is both indifferent to us and, with the right attitude, lovely in its indifference.

And later there will be blackberries.