Tuesday, August 21, 2007

The Switchgrass Flim-Flam, Part XVIII...

I'm speaking today and tomorrow in Iowa for the IA Bureau and I followed Sterling Liddell who gave a long range outlook. Super presentation. He has all the flamboyant showmanship of an economist, but still strangely likable.

Anyhoo, somewhere toward the end of his talk someone asked about switchgrass. He was far more discrete in his skepticism of this "energy solution" than I have been, but he mentioned an issue I had not heard of before:

Rats.

I can't google up anything tonight, so I will cross-examine him tomorrow but coupled with this story, it struck me as interesting.
Now comes another woe, this one as icky as a biblical plague: millions of mouse-like rodents called voles feasting on everything from beets to potatoes in an infestation that has prompted a desperate, scorched-earth policy in one of Spain's agricultural heartlands.

Farmers unions say the Castille-Leon region in north-central Spain is crawling with an estimated 7.5 million voles, and the local government is baffled: It doesn't know the cause — or the solution. The invasion began gently 10 months ago but has snowballed to stunning proportions.

Spanish television aired footage of scores of voles darting in and out of holes in what would normally be rich, healthy farmland, or quivering in the throes of death brought on by pesticide. Some of the critters have even made it into gardens of homes in the region's main city, Valladolid, according to news reports. [More]

I'll keep looking - but is it me or is getting a little "Nostradamus" around here? What's next - a plague of frogs?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

'at'll teach 'em. Get a CAT! D9 or bigger, with rippers on the back. (For what they been doin' to us for years.)