Potpourri: Food Prices, Family Farms, Norwegian Wind Power

--I hear on the Marketplace Morning Report on SDPB today that the Labor Department has released Consumer Price Index figures for April: just a 0.2% increase. Food is more expensive (0.9% April increase), but cars are cheaper. Too bad I'm not hungry for a Chevy sandwich for lunch. The CPI also says energy prices actually stayed flat in April... but real weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation, dropped 0.5%.

--CPI be darned, you know your grocery and gas bills are going up. New York chef Dan Barber writes in the New York Times that those rising prices may bring the next great agricultural revolution away from the petro-industrial ag complex back to real family farms and small-scale agriculture:

In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre. Big farms have long compensated for the disequilibrium with sheer quantity. But their economies of scale come from mass distribution, and with diesel fuel costing more than $4 per gallon in many locations, it’s no longer efficient to transport food 1,500 miles from where it’s grown [Dan Barber, "Change We Can Stomach," New York Times, 2008.05.11].

And food from small farms and gardens tastes better, too!

--Maybe small-scale production is the way to go for energy as well as food. Those crafty Norwegians have figured out a way to use wind power when the wind isn't blowing. It sounds like an Ole and Lena joke, but the Norwegians are doing it on the island of Utsira in the North Sea. The trick: use surplus wind power to make hydrogen from water, compress the hydrogen, then use it for backup power when the wind dies down. A pilot project right now produces enough hydrogen to power 10 homes for two windless days. Sounds like a heck of a system! You tell me: when's the last time South Dakota had more than two days in a row without wind?