Petroleum used for everything

To the Editor:
    It takes a ton of oil to make each ton of fertilizer. The Koch Boys are all over the map drilling, fracking and pumping as fast as they can, not a good move for a critical resource which is a finite fossil fuel. The faster we use it, the quicker it will be gone, and we will be gone too if we can’t find a substitute.

    The three largest oil fields on this earth are each over 75 years old, and efforts to find replacements have failed, so in each case. to sustain vicious production they are being “flushed” with seawater or natural gas, while the hunt goes onward all over this Earth for an equal supply.
    I have one option in mind. I have a couple of old John Deere tractors, an “A” and a “B” that are small by today’s standards, but I think they would make great ELECTRIC TRACTOR conversions. The fossil fueled engine is removed where possible and a surplus jet engine electric starter takes its place. The E Drive has powerful torque which we used here in the USA in the early 1970’s in order to convert VW Beetle’s into electric cars, some of them capable of 45 mph cruising speed for a distance of 45 miles.
    This is not a new idea. When the Russians had to evacuate Cuba of their war capacity after threatening the USA they left behind about 14,000 diesel tractors, with no fuel. To keep from starving Cuba tried to make them into “electrics”, and it was very successful. Common DC batteries were used, eight at a clip in series. So successful has been the program, that the last time I checked Havana Cuba raised half of all its food required just within the city limits. No frost, of course, so we should not expect to do quite as well, but we are making gains with winter farming. Ask yourself, “If it takes a ton of oil to make a ton of fertilizer, and oil is finite, how many years will it be before we all go hungry”?
    Too many Maine farms are suffering from weed over-run, particularly by a spring flowering white topped weed called Smooth Bedstraw. It was a piratical weed once used in pioneer times for stuffing mattresses, thus its name. It only needs a two or three year visitation to dominate all the other plants on Maine farm fields.
    Mowing idle land, once a year lightly, with an old cyclebar or disc mower may well be an adequate control for “bedstraw,” milkweed and other takeover weeds, so that native grasses can out-survive the piratical weeds, keeping the fields in shape for the day when we stop getting our two week old lettuce harvest from a trailer truck with California plates full of $4-6 greens?
    The E Tractor conversions are expected to be easy on fuel, at perhaps 1/4 the present cost of fossil fuel. Last year I was privileged to reach the summit of Mt. Washington’s Auto Road, a 4,700-foot climb in a conversion E-car for somewhere close to 50 miles per dollar fuel cost. Try that in your old converted E-tractor and see who salutes.
    Farmers and tractor collectors can join in this discussion at my attention at this newspaper which may reach my mailing list contacts. The fields you save may be your own.

Charles MacArthur
Sangerville