Category Archives: History

John Quarterman on the Withlachoochee (audio)

Back at the end of March at a river conference in Roswell, Georgia, I was interviewed for a podcast. Here’s the audio, and here’s the blurb they included:

John Quarterman on the Withlachoochee
Monday, July 9th, 2012

John S. Quarterman was born and raised in Lowndes County, where he married his wife Gretchen. They live on the same land where he grew up, and participate in local community and government.

NPS talks with Quarterman and his observations on starting and strengthening a Withlachoochee Riverkeeper organization at Georgia River Network‘s 2012 Weekend for Rivers.

The water organization has since been incorporated as the Georgia non-profit WWALS Watershed Coalition:

WWALS is an advocacy organization working for watershed conservation of the Willacoochee, Withlacoochee, Alapaha, and Little River Systems watershed in south Georgia and north Florida through awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen advocacy.

-jsq

PS: They also recorded another podcast which starts out on what may sound like a completely different topic, but which is actually quite related.

Relics: forty years later you can still read their labels

I remember when my father and I put these things there, around forty years ago. They’re still intact, and if you look closely you can still read the labels. We prefer taking things to the dump these days.

Metal can:

Metal can

Metal can
John S. Quarterman, Gretchen Quarterman, Brown Dog, Yellow Dog,
Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 22 July 2012.

Plastic bottle:

Continue reading →

Advanced sheets-Field operations of the Bureau of Soils, 1917

What was your county like a hundred years ago, roads, houses, streams, ponds, and soils? Digital Library of Georgia in association with the University of Georgia Map Library has made available old soil maps from around 1910-1920 online in a viewer that can pan and zoom. Detail of Cat Creek Road, Lowndes County, Georgia in 1917:

Detail of Cat Creek Road

Detail of Cat Creek Road
John S. Quarterman, Gretchen Quarterman, Brown Dog, Yellow Dog,
Screenshot by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 13 July 2012.

The soils haven't changed much (Tf is Tifton A soil, for example), but the roads and houses have, and many streams have been dammed for ponds.

They seem to have all Georgia counties. Here's Tift County in 1910 and Cook County in 1931.

-jsq

Owed to Don Davis of the Lowndes County Museum at the 11 July 2012 WWALS Watershed Coalition meeting.

 

Largest U.S. declared drought disaster ever

It's not just us. More than half the country is in drought, and almost one third is in a federal disaster area for drought: the biggest ever declared.

Dashiell Bennett wrote for Atlantic Wire today, U.S. Declares the Largest Natural Disaster Area Ever Due to Drought

The blistering summer and ongoing drought conditions have the prompted the U.S. Agriculture Department to declare a federal disaster area in more than 1,000 counties covering 26 states. That's almost one-third of all the counties in the United States, making it the largest distaster declaration ever made by the USDA.

The declaration covers almost every state in the southern half of the continental U.S., from South Carolina in the East to California in the West. It's also includes Colorado and Wyoming (which have been hit by devatasting wildfires) and Illinois, Indiana, Kansas and Nebraska in the Midwest. However, it does not include Iowa, which is the largest grain and corn producer in the U.S. This map show the counties affected:

Look, there we are, right in the center of the red area in the southeast!

-jsq

Early corn Planting —Alla Peek Quarterman

My grandmother wrote this around 1960, when she was around 77 years old. -jsq

I remember when corn in the fields was dropped by hand — 2 grains every two steps. Mule plow opened the furrow & children dropped the grains.

The first corn planter was considered bad — it was sure to keep the seed from sprouting!

My brother Patrick found this text in a notebook his aunt Elsie had kept.

-jsq

Groundwater at historically low levels

The only well in the Withlacoochee, Little, or Alapaha River watersheds that seems to be instrumented for near-realtime depth measurements is in Valdosta. That well is now at historic lows, compared to 55 years of back data.

On the graph to the right, the black triangle in the middle of the green is the median over those 55 years since 1957. The green is 25th to 75th percentile. The yellow is 10th to 24th percentile. The red is below 10th percentile. I’m guessing below the red means never been seen that low before in that month.

The current depth shown, 137.52 feet below the surface on 26 April 2012, is not the lowest ever seen, which was 152.31 feet on 19 September 1990. But apparently it is lower than seen before for April.

Maybe we should think about water conservation more frequently than just when Valdosta’s water pumps have problems. Not just for watering lawns; also for agriculture and silviculture. Maybe we should try to plant crops that don’t require as much irrigation, or plant them in ways that don’t lead to so much evaporation. Maybe we should be more careful about clearcutting trees, which causes rapid runoff that doesn’t get back into the groundwater as much. Maybe we should think about how much growth do we want.

-jsq

Greed is Good for Poisoning the Food Supply?

For many years big agro has treated the world’s health as an economic externality, a problem for somebody else that did not affect its own bottom line. That is starting to change, most recently in Argentina.

Anthony Gucciardi wrote for NaturalSociety 11 April 2012, Explosive: Monsanto ‘Knowingly Poisoned Workers’ Causing Devastating Birth Defects,

In a developing news piece just unleashed by a courthouse news wire, Monsanto is being brought to court by dozens of Argentinean tobacco farmers who say that the biotech giant knowingly poisoned them with herbicides and pesticides and subsequently caused ”devastating birth defects” in their children. The farmers are now suing not only Monsanto on behalf of their children, but many big tobacco giants as well. The birth defects that the farmers say occurred as a result are many, and include cerebral palsy, down syndrome, psychomotor retardation, missing fingers, and blindness.

This would be the same Monsanto that was convicted of chemical poisoning in France.

But this is once again far away in a small country of which we know nothing, right? Wrong:

The farmers come from small family-owned farms in Misiones Province and sell their tobacco to many United States distributors. The family farmers say that major tobacco companies like the Philip Morris company asked them to use Monsanto’s herbicides and pesticides, assuring them that the products were safe. Through asserting that the toxic chemicals were safe, the farmers state in their claim that the tobacco companies ”wrongfully caused the parental and infant plaintiffs to be exposed to those chemicals and substances which they both knew, or should have known, would cause the infant offspring of the parental plaintiffs to be born with devastating birth defects.”

Still, it must be some obscure poison only sold in the third world, right?

Wrong:

The majority of the farmers in the area used Monsanto’s Roundup, an herbicide with the active ingredient glyphosate that has shown to be killing human kidney cells. What’s more, the farmers say that the tobacco companies pushed Monsanto’s Roundup on the farmers despite a lack of protective equipment. In other words, these farmers — many in dire economic conditions — were being directly exposed to Roundup in large concentrations without any protective gear (or even experience or skills in handling the substance). Still, the farmers say the tobacco giants required the struggling farmers to ‘purchase excessive quantities of Roundup and other pesticides’.

That would be the same Roundup that farmers use around here all the time, without protective equipment. The Roundup we already knew was Continue reading →

Drying Out South Georgia Wetlands in Dirty Dozen by Georgia Water Coalition

We’re on Georgia Water Coalition’s Dirty Dozen 2011: as 9. South Georgia Wetlands: Four Decades of Ditches Dry Out South Georgia Wetlands:

Since the 1970s, state and federal regulatory agencies have allowed the destruction of more than 200,000 acres of highly critical wetlands throughout South Georgia to increase timber production and agricultural yields and usher in residential and commercial development. These wetlands that captured water and slowly released it to streams no longer perform that important function. The result has been increased floods when it rains and record low flows when it doesn’t….

Flooding? Like the 700 year flood in Lowndes County 3 years ago today?

What’s a wetland, anyway?

the greatest concentration of wetlands is in the Coastal Plain of South Georgia. Though these forested foodplains and wetlands may not seem directly linked to our rivers and streams, they play an important role in holding water during rain events and dispensing it during dry periods. The sponges and kidneys of our state, they mitigate major floods, lessen the impacts of drought, and clean the water that passes through them, while regulating the amount of freshwater entering Georgia’s coastal estuaries where commercially important seafood find critical habitat. Additionally, these wetlands provide important habitat for waterfowl and other wildlife.

So what’s the problem?

In an effort to convert these wild lands into
Continue reading →

Organic farming as productive as pesticiding (proven yet again)

Rodale Institute has been running a side-by-side comparison of organic and chemical agriculture since 1981. They report:
After an initial decline in yields during the first few years of transition, the organic system soon rebounded to match or surpass the conventional system. Over time, FST became a comparison between the long term potential of the two systems.
Year after year, Rodale found:
Organic yields match conventional yields.

As Tom Philpott reported for Mother Jones 17 November 2011, Yet Again, Organic Ag Proves Just as Productive as Chemical Ag,

And now comes evidence from the very heart of Big Ag: rural Iowa, where Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture runs the Long-Term Agroecological Research Experiment (LTAR), which began in 1998, which has just released its latest results.

At the LTAR fields in Adair County, the (LTAR) runs four fields: one managed with the Midwest-standard two-year corn-soy rotation featuring the full range of agrochemicals; and the other ones organically managed with three different crop-rotation systems. The chart below records the yield averages of all the systems, comparing them to the average yields achieved by actual conventional growers in Adair County:

Norman Borlaug, instigator of the “green revolution” of no-till and pesticides, when asked in 2000 whether organic agriculture could feed the world, said: Continue reading →

The now unendangered Tennessee Coneflower

Aunt Elsie gets mentioned again for her pioneering career in plant ecology.

According to the Nature Conservancy (undated), Tennessee Coneflower — No Longer Endangered

After years of hard work and the support of many dedicated individuals, an iconic flower is once again thriving in Tennessee. On August 4, 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced the removal of the Tennessee coneflower from the Endangered Species List, marking an extraordinary recovery from the brink of extinction. The story of the coneflower exemplifies the power of conservation.

In 1968, Vanderbilt biology professor Elsie Quarterman and graduate student Barbara Turner accidentally discovered the fuschia-colored coneflowers at Mount View Cedar Glade. The plant had been thought extinct until the rediscovery. In time, three other coneflower sites were discovered in Davidson and Wilson counties. In 1979, the Tennessee coneflower became one of the first plants to be recorded on the Endangered Species List.

Quarterman subsequently became a trustee of the Tennesee Chapter of The Nature Conservancy and urged the protection of the cedar glade habitats where the Tennessee coneflower and other rare plants have adapted to live in harsh, stony conditions.

Her nephew Patrick found this.

-jsq