Fred Iutzi

🌰🌳In Urbana, IL, Kaitie Adams runs
@savannainstitute.bsky.social's Agroforestry Demonstration Farm, stewarding 11 windbreak systems & 3 alley cropping systems to understand regional best practices. In the heart of the Corn Belt, her team shows farmers an alternative vision of what’s possible.

Excited to host the public launch of this book at our upcoming Perennial Farm Gathering, #PFG2026!

www.savannainstitute.org/pfg2026/

Just for variety, I'm going to say One by U2. The lyrics are okay, but the song is so soaringly amazing overall that being merely okay drives the ratio way up.

Look, God made whether any given tree is a boy or a girl a sacred mystery, and that's that.

Recommendation letters and reference checks are less of a communication and more of a token of completion of a minor quest: can you, the candidate, find several people willing to say multiple good things and no significant bad things about you?

Feel free to give me a shout sometime if you're ever back this way and want to grab a coffee.

The authors call this a paradox but it is anything but: generative AI, with its ability to quickly generate paper-shaped objects, is just an accelerant in a system that was already rewarding widget production over innovation.

I continue to worry this book will be heavily marbled with left-vs.-left straw man beating. But I am now convinced it will also make new and critically important points about the past, present, and future of food systems, and that whether or not I am appalled, I will be delighted. Pre-ordered.

Come work with me! Seeking an #agroforestry demonstration farm manager at the Savanna Institute.

I have been unpleasantly surprised to discover in the last 10 years that there are people who disagree with this, and I now think their numbers might be pretty high. Definitely a behavior we need to be relentless in de-norming anywhere it crops up.

That is some Animal Science s___ for sure.

I was curious about the Carthage College branding on the sign, and it turns out there is a full-on beef underway: www.facebook.com/CarthageInst... www.wgtd.org/news/dinosau...

If goal is to prep for an emergency that ideally will never (or rarely) arrive, the stockpile could theoretically be in the form of fossil fuels! Renewable electricity could be "converted" by allowing domestic ff extraction to be diverted to stockpile, or exported for cash to pay for ff imports.

As far as I know, the big gun for this is probably still pumped hydro. In regions where the water cycle allows, and if one were unconcerned with the downsides of a vast reservoir building campaign, the scaling potential is probably immense.

The exterior vibe of the church and immediate environs felt more Episcopalian to me than Catholic, somehow.

In the Midwest, where there are 100+ year old Catholic church buildings out in the countryside, it's not unusual to have an adjacent cemetery of equal or greater age. Not sure about the Northeast, though.

I've met those Catholics. Are they just LARPing American right-wing Protestantism? Of course. Just saying the movie is a reasonable mirror for the farce of real life.

At long last, an ultra-fine scale 3D bar chart of population distribution.

It also seems to me that urban sidewalks are the single most socially valuable form of pavement out there, and not really a good candidate for deliberately subjecting to accelerated breakup via plant helpers.

Meet me in Dubuque!

Wake up babe, new AI use case just dropped.

atlantic article screenshot headline: no one knows how big pumpkins can get sub head: a decade ago, the worlds heaviest pumpkin weighed 2,000 pounds. now the 3,000 pound mark is within sight by yasmin tayag

this headline hums with ancient autumnal dread

The markets and the manufacturing had started, at least, but I suppose there was a lag in actually getting the supply chains extended.

That, plus the later date of onset of large-scale settlement of the plains meant that imported timber and wire fence were available right from the start.

I'm only deeply read on these histories for the Corn Belt, but here I have a strong impression these attitudes were a moving target based on availability of substitutes for local timber, i.e. lumber imported from other regions and lumber substitutes like steel fence material.

I am a written word person and only once ever have I decided to systematically listen to all episodes of a podcast. This is that podcast.

Background image of a solar panel. Text says, "Currents for Currants, Agrivoltaics at UW-Madison." In the bottom right is a QR code to YouTube.

At the @uwmadison.bsky.social Kegonsa Research Campus, scientists from across UW and the @savannainstitute.bsky.social are growing currant berries between solar panels. This practice is known as #agrivoltaics and has many potential benefits.

Learn more: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMGH...

Corn, beans, and tall fescue.

Just going to submit a screenshot of this thread as our next funder progress report.