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A trio of undergraduates at the University of Rochester in New York have turn used used cooking oil from fryers in the the school's dining halls into fuel for the shuttle buses that carry students and faculty throughout the campus. The oil is mixed at a four-to-one ratio with regular diesel and requires no engine modifications on the buses. Three undergraduate students (David Borelli, Dan Fink and Eric Weissman) coordinated the entire project. Their first bus will ferry students and faculty to their biodiesel lab for a tour of the facility. Not only will the project recycle cooking oil, it is itself composed of recycled components scrounged from around campus - a used processor, tanks and pumps. Biodiesel and other alternative fuels, whether from fast food byproducts or straight from farm fields, is a great idea for any number of reasons, but it is going to need smart people with practical experience, like the Rochester Three, to turn today's visions into tomorrow's everyday realities.

A trio of undergraduates at the University of Rochester in New York have turn used used cooking oil from fryers in the the school's dining halls into fuel for the shuttle buses that carry students and faculty throughout the campus. The oil is mixed at a four-to-one ratio with regular diesel and requires no engine modifications on the buses. Three undergraduate students (David Borelli, Dan Fink and Eric Weissman) coordinated the entire project. Their first bus will ferry students and faculty to their biodiesel lab for a tour of the facility. Not only will the project recycle cooking oil, it is itself composed of recycled components scrounged from around campus - a used processor, tanks and pumps. Biodiesel and other alternative fuels, whether from fast food byproducts or straight from farm fields, is a great idea for any number of reasons, but it is going to need smart people with practical experience, like the Rochester Three, to turn today's visions into tomorrow's everyday realities.

Money is a strange and wonderful and horrible and useless and powerful thing. An economist might stand in front of your annual co-op get-together and tell you and your neighbors that his specialty is a science. But then watch his eyes as they dart quickly from side to side to see if anybody's snickering. It's not a science like physics is a science. Drop a bowling ball from a 50-story building and physics can pretty much tell you what's going to happen when it hits the sidewalk. But if a company, like say, AIG, runs itself so far off a cliff that it can't afford to pay its light bill, much less meet payroll, and should seriously shut itself down, well, then, economics might say, "Now wait a minute, what could happen here..."

It was a conversation about conservation at the Stroud Water Research Center last week. The occasion was a bus trip to the center by a group of Lancaster County ag and civic leaders who were there to spend a day learning about the world's fresh water supply, and the global efforts being made to protect it. During a Q&A after an informative PowerPoint presentation, one of the bus riders stood up to say that education about environmental issues should start early in grade school. I thought she made a good point.  When I was in grade school, we called these studies "geography." I remember it was about people, the climates they lived in, the topography, the native plants and animals, natural resources, crops, transportation...

Everything you wanted to know, if you were paying attention, about people, the ways in which they react and influence the world about them and the ways in which that world influences those who inhabit it. But geography is a word you don't hear in discussions about elementary and high school curricula. I thought maybe the subject is being ignored in colleges, so I checked Penn State's website. How wrong I was.  PSU has an entire geography department and 55 undergraduate courses with "geography" in the title.  Apparently, geography is far from being a dead issue, and I don't know where I got the idea that it was. Maybe I haven't been paying attention.

Food safety is a hot topic in Washington these days.  Tracy Sutton, Lancaster Farming's zone editor, took a trip to Washington last week to attend a Farm Foundation forum on food safety. She found some agreement, more questions than answers, and very few utterances of the word "farm." Her story is in our current issue.

How to jazz up your cow barn...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2tFeWfzQps

There was a tree sale going on yesterday when I went to the Farm and Home Center for the Lancaster Chamber's monthly ag issues forum. It was the Conservation District's 35th annual tree sale and it sent me back a few years. More than a few. I bought a trayful of white pine seedlings at the district's second or third sale - about 1976 if you're into math - and planted them on my three-quarter acre suburban lot. Each 10-inch seedling cost a dime. At home, I picked a random spot for the first tree, dug a hole with a mattock and planted it. Then I threw the mattock over my shoulder. Wherever it landed, the second tree went. And so forth, until there were 50 trees in the ground. Those seedlings now soar over our house. We still live there, and one reason we never left is the trees. I googled my neighborhood the other day, and could pick out my house from space. There's lawn to the east, lawn to the west, a cornfield to the north and a tiny pine forest right in the middle. When I was picking up my trees, there was a 92-year-old guy in line behind me, waiting to pick up his tree order. I thought, "Why would a 92-year-old guy plant trees that are going to take decades to mature?" Now, I think I know.

The Stroud Water Research Center is a world leader in the science of fresh water. It is tucked away - really, really, tucked - in the rolling hills of Chester County.  A busload of Lancaster County ag and civic leaders paid a visit to the center on April 3, and an account of their visit is in this week's Lancaster Farming.

 Sometimes a lot of money. In New Hampshire, for example, if your undeveloped campsite sits on a hill with a sweeping view of mountains, trees and soaring hawks, that vista may add $200,000 to $300,000 to your tax assessment. Property owners were stunned and outraged when the view tax went into effect in 2005. And they're stiill complaining. Imagine! New Hampshire has no sales tax, but I would rather pay 6 percent of $30,000 or so on annual expenditures for restaurants, dog food, a new refrigerator, a set of tires, etc., than an extra $4,000 because of what I can see from my rustic front porch or through my tent flaps on a dewy Granite State morn. And a question people keep asking is, "What if the property owner is blind?" And my question would be, "What if the view is of Vermont?"

There's been a lot of blue sky talk lately about growing your own energy. Tractors that run on straight vegetable oil, in fact, could be on the market within five years. But what about growing your own tires? Science is working on it. Lei Jong and Jeffrey Byars, with the Agricultural Research Service in Peoria, Ill., are refining methods to transform defatted soybean oil into a replacement for carbon black, which is used in tire manufacturing as a pigment and strengthening agent. Carbon black is produced by burning heavy petroleum products to produce a maximum amount of soot. That soot is carbon black, which is messy and carcinogenic. A soybean replacement for carbon black would be more eco-friendly and provide another market for growers.  And, who knows, a used soybean-based 26/12.00-12 might provide enough base for a lifetime supply of chili.

Drop for drop, the White Clay Creek in Pennsylvania's Chester County may be the most intensively studied,  wadable, body of water in the world. The Stroud Water Research Center is perched on the White Clay's banks, and ever since 1966, part of the streams flow has gone through one of the center's labs. Fish and insects and everything else that swims, crawls, clings, eats and breathes in the outdoor White Clay acts the same way inside. Last Friday, I tagged along with a group of Lancaster County government and ag leaders as they visited the Stroud. Their mission for the day, fully accomplished, was to learn some of the things the tiny White Clay has taught science about the workings of our water-covered planet. Some of those lessons were learned in micro-environments contained in the world's largest collection of specially fitted Coleman coolers. Bernard Sweeney, the center's president, figured if they were going to buy 600 Coleman coolers at one shot, Walmart should give them a discount. "But we buy 600,000 Coleman coolers a year," the folks at Walmart told him. So the order for Stroud, as befits a water research center, perhaps, was just a drop in the bucket for Walmart.

Forget about keyboards, passwords, uploads, downloads.  Give me ink on paper. The rustle, the feel, the smell of a newspaper. Easy to navigate. No www//blatherblatherblather.com or dot this or dot that and don't forget that a back slash isn't the same as a front slash. I can read the paper in the back yard, listen to the birds, hear the farmer cutting hay, feel the breeze on my neck.  Or I can lay my magazine down, go for my second cup of coffee and not worry about whether or not I'll be disconnected when I get back.  And if I drop half that cup of joe on my latest edition of Wired, I don't have to worry that I'm going to lose a week's worth of work and a month's worth of salary.

There was barely a drizzle misting the windshield when we pulled out of the driveway last Sunday for the 10-minute trip to my brother-in-law's house in Ephrata.  Halfway there, it was like somebody was hurling marbles at our car - big marbles - and then BOOM! Did a tree hit us? Part of a building? Had the wind picked up one of those Holsteins we'd seen and felt sorry for a hundred yards back and thrown her into our car? Whatever it was, it was invisible.  Couldn't see a tree, a cornice or a carcass.  We took shelter in the playground of a little red school house, and five minutes later, we were back to a drizzle.  The next morning, the Honda wasn't working quite the way it should have been, and, after a $1,000 trip to the dealer (Covered by warranty! Yaay!) we discovered the computer was dead. Death by lightning? Who knows? Speaking of struck by lightning...