Alas, summer is over. The days grow shorter as the sun sinks lower in the sky each day. A chill wind whips across the micro-farm’s meadow; a harbinger of the winter to come. Home from vacation, the citizens of Europe are back to violently protesting the austerity measures foisted upon them while they lay, unawares, sipping wine and roasting on the sun-drenched shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Spain, despite a summer bailout of its banking system, is hinting that it may need to begin feeding at the public trough that Greece has already sucked dry. The only thing holding them back is that they hope to get a better deal by going into default-ish along with Italy.

On our side of the pond, the upcoming election seems to be tilting toward another landslide as even the rabid, right-wing, gun-toting, home-schooling, God-fearing, clear-cutting, coal-burning, sock-darning wing of the Republican Party finally seems to get that yet another round of tax cuts for the wealthiest among us – the “Job Creators” – will actually work, and more jobs will be created – in China.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve Bank – that shadowy face of the New World Order – has announced its latest stimulus attempt for the U.S. economy, namely an open-ended commitment to purchase all sorts of mortgage-backed securities on the open market. This will, in theory, provide a new infusion of cash to reverse the ongoing recession but, in actuality, is a brand-new, cleverly-disguised bailout for banks, investment firms, and that section of the public which is over-the-top-wealthy enough to own mortgage-backed securities, i.e. the “Job Creators.”

I hope someday to count myself among them.

Nevertheless, there is an elephant in the room, about which not a word is spoken. The politicos, pundits, and expositors are careful not to even glance in its direction. Its existence is widely known and right now it’s sitting on the top floor of the house-of-cards that is the world economy. It even has a name: Where is all the money for these bailouts coming from? Which is a rather long-winded name but, hey, it’s an elephant sitting on a house of cards so it’s entitled.

Ending this whole happy scene is that the old answer to the elephant’s question, that is: China, is working on its own stimulus plan. The upshot of which is that the answer will soon change to: from thin air.

If you stop to think about the elephant for any length of time longer than say, ten seconds, you’ll come to the conclusion that you wish it had a different name.

I did and I do, so I made like an ostrich and hid my head in a book. The book, recommended by my beekeeping friend Michael, is The Beekeeper’s Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America – a long enough title to make you think it might be an elephant’s name – written by Hannah Nordhaus. It is an interesting book, tracing the hard life of a commercial beekeeper through the year. But Ms. Nordhaus, in a thesaurian slip that still makes my skin crawl, willy-nilly interchanged the terms “farm” and “ranch” – it pains me to even write that – and thereby scuffed the gloss of her narrative.

While both are agricultural enterprises and aspects of one may occur on the other – a cattleman raising his own hay, for example – by-and-large they are separate and distinct species. For Ms. Nordhaus to write “almond ranchers” and “bee ranchers” is akin to juxtaposing “honest politicians” or “an improving economy”. You can put the words together, but they don’t really mean anything.

Ms. Nordhaus’ malapropism did get me thinking about the differences between farms and ranches and how we could use both concepts to provide a closed loop of symbiosis, sustainability, and nutrition down on the micro-farm. So, hatchet in hand, I went to check on the chickens.

Not to worry, the chickens are safe – for a while anyway – it’s just that their corral currently includes the woodpile and I needed to split some kindling. While swinging the axe I noticed that the foraging pullets kept coming up empty – they had managed to eat every single bug in their enclosure. “Awwww…” I thought. “The chickens need some more worms for protein.”

So I wandered down to Bay Hay and Feed, my favorite store, to see if they could help me out.

Sure enough, the helpful clerk pointed me to a shelf containing large bags of “chicken treats”, AKA freeze dried mealworms. I hefted one of the bags and looked at the yellow tag.

I swooned.

My face dripping from the ice water the clerk had used to revive me, I shook off my disbelief. “Eighteen bucks???!!!” I held up the package. “For a bag of worms?”

Bay Hay, also sells these cute little, locally made, hideously expensive chicken signs. They have pictures of cute little chickens with cute little sayings like “Peep Spoken Here” or “Fresh Eggs” or “Chicken Crossing” or endless variations thereof. The sales clerk pointed at a cute little sign that said “You Are What Your Chickens Eat”, and smiled.

“Well,” I said, tossing the bag back on the shelf. “I guess I’ve been lucky to keep mine out of that big pile of stupid I’ve got sitting out back.” And I stormed off.

By the time I walked home, I had calmed down a bit and the profit-greased gears in the mind of a future “Job Creator” had started turning. I delved into the subject of worm wrangling and learned that, once you got your mealies started, the big problem was how to make them stop. I did some quick calculations and determined that, with each generation, a mealworm population increases not by a factor of two or four or even ten, but by a factor of five hundred. It takes about three months to go from mealworm – the larval stage of the Tenebrio molitor beetle if you’re interested – to adult, but once your beetles start laying eggs you’ve created a self-sustaining nightmare.

I rushed over to the PetCo and bought a package of fifty “Giant Mealworms,” then darted to Home Depot for a Tupperware tub for them to live in, and finally (and contritely, I might add) back to Bay Hay for a bag of wheat bran, the mealworm’s favorite food.

I drilled some holes in the top of the container for air, dumped in the bran – food that doubles as bedding, threw in a chopped up carrot for a water supply, and sat back and waited.

“What’s that in the bathtub?” Came the inevitable question.

“It’s the worm ranch.”

There was a brief, but chilly, pause, and I found myself alone.

I waited the anticipated three weeks but there was no indication that any of the giant mealworms was in the mood to pupate and move on with its metamorphosis into a reliable income stream. So I went back online and read the fine print. “When starting your mealworm ranch, make sure NOT to get ‘super’ or ‘giant’ mealworms. They’ve been treated with a hormone to prevent them from changing into adult beetles.”

Oops.

I sifted the fifty problem mealworms out of the bran and tossed the bugs to the chickens which, as expected, happily gobbled them down. I then headed back to PetCo for the correct, untreated bugs. This time I bought a hundred and let them loose in the upper-forty (gallons).

While they were busy munching bran, I revisited my calculations. Figuring fifty-percent mortality on the store-bought worms, in four months I should have some twenty-five thousand creepy-crawlies in the upstairs tub. The generation after that – the point at which I could go commercial – I’d have six million; even after feeding half of the first batch to the chickens.

I snuck back to Bay Hay and looked at the bag; I guessed it held about five thousand bugs, which meant I’d end up with some 1,200 bags of worms. At ten-bucks a bag wholesale, that would be about $120,000 inside of a year, all for an initial investment of less than $20.

After that it would be downhill sledding.

With such a successful venture in my future, the idea for which tumbled from a chance encounter with a misused noun, I wondered how, with millions of such ventures around the world, we let the world economy fall into such dire straits. I mean, the Republicans are right, if it’s this easy to move into the 1% then how did the elephant ever get in?

The problem is, obviously, the government’s fault: the massive public debt that’s been run up over the past forty or so years supporting the three massive entitlement programs: Medicare/Medicaid, Food Stamps, and the Department of Defense. Had we paid for these bloated, wasteful social programs back when the economy was strong it would have hurt a bit, but the economy would have survived. We didn’t, we put it off. Now, our leaders having collectively mortgaged the future, we find ourselves with a stagnant economy, a staggering debt, and that pesky elephant. The issue is that “From thin air”, isn’t a workable answer. Without enough money for all the bailouts and refinancing needed to pay for the things we bet the future on, the economy is stuck. Our unbelievable debt load is sucking it down, taxes can’t be raised and government spending can’t be cut without causing the economy to stall even further, or worse.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t; on a global scale.

Glad we’ve got the worm ranch. If we can’t sell them, we can always eat them.