First there was tiny-house porn. Then, cabin porn. And now, we have a new group of fantasy-inducing buildings to ogle: farmhouses.

There's not a Tumblr, yet. But there is a Pinterest board, brought to you by undercaffeinated editors at Modern Farmer:

Spent the morning finding farmhouses we like and putting them up on Pinterest, waiting for the coffee to kick in pinterest.com/modfarm/farmho…

— Modern Farmer (@ModFarm) February 12, 2013

2012 was a brutal year for American farmers. The massive drought meant that the Department of Agriculture paid out $15 billion in crop insurance; prices of staple crops skyrocketed as yields plummeted.

It appears, however, that this was the darkness before the dawn. A new estimate from the USDA suggests that 2013 will be the most profitable year for farmers in four decades. From The Wall Street Journal:

The Department of Agriculture projected in a report Monday that net farm income in the U.S. will reach $128.2 billion in 2013—the highest since 1973 when adjusted for inflation and the highest on record on a non-adjusted basis.

The rosier outlook is driven by expectations farmers will grow more corn and soybeans after last year's drought. Analysts predict increases in production will more than offset any price declines and rising costs, with the agency seeing corn stockpiles rising by more than 2 billion bushels.

The forecast also reflects a continued boom in the farm belt initially fueled by rising global demand for grains and increased mandates for corn-based ethanol.

And the first thing those farmers will do is repay the USDA for its crop insurance outlays in 2012, I assume. After all, it was God who made a farmer, not the USDA.

Congratulations, Dennis Egan, on your new job as executive director of the Minnesota Industrial Sand Council, an organization that advocates for the industrial use of sand, particularly in fracking. But, while we have your ear, maybe we should talk about your other job as mayor of Red Wing, Minn.

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

At an intense City Council meeting attended by about 50 people who applauded the harshest rebukes of the mayor, two City Council members directly asked Egan to resign as mayor or step down as executive director of the Minnesota Industrial Sand Council. He steadfastly refused either option, saying he has no conflict of interest that can't be managed on a case-by-case basis by recusing himself from city action on sand-mining issues.

"I deeply care about Red Wing,'' said Egan, who was elected in November to a four-year term before he went to work for the sand council.

In an AP article, the honorable mayor notes that he signed a ban on frack sand mining in the city before he took the second job with the advocacy group. Interestingly, the prospect of sand mining in Red Wing is not the only point of concern for the city council. Again from the Star-Tribune:

Council President Lisa Bayley said Egan's post with an industry that has encountered public opposition in its plans to expand sand-mining operations in Minnesota has taken a negative toll on the city and could hurt economic development.

When people went down to the Antarctic to hang out with penguins at the turn of the 20th century, they did it with class. They did it with dignity. They did it with bagpipes.

Jeremy Clarkson, the guy from the British show Top Gear, has designed and now driven the world's tiniest car. It looks more like a fifth grader's Halloween R2D2 costume, but it really is a car (or, as Clarkson put it, "I promise it's a real car"). It has a two-stroke 100cc engine. He takes it on the A3, which is a very big road, and although he lives to tell the tale, he does so kind of by the skin of his teeth, and there's not a lot of dignity involved.

You know how in movies there's sometimes a moment after some cataclysm in which the protagonist sits up in bed or steps out of a doorway, rubs his eyes, and the sun is shining? All around him are crumbled buildings and cars missing doors, but he looks up and the air is still and the sun is out and you, the audience, understand that something has changed. The terror is behind us.

Well, sit up in bed and rub your eyes. From the Times:

In another blow to its Alaskan Arctic drilling program, Royal Dutch Shell said on Monday that it had decided to tow its two drill vessels there to Asian ports for major repairs, jeopardizing its plans to begin drilling for oil in the icy northern seas next summer.

The new potential delay in drilling does not necessarily doom Shell’s seven-year, $4.5 billion quest to open a new oil frontier in the far north, but it may strengthen the position of environmentalists who have repeatedly sued to stop or postpone exploration that they claim carries the risks of a spill nearly impossible to clean up. ...

For drilling to proceed, two vessels are needed, one to stand by to drill relief wells in case of a blowout. It would be difficult to find other suitable ships for drilling in the Arctic.

The two vessels Shell is sending out for repair are the Kulluk -- which ran aground in December, damaging its hull -- and the Noble Discoverer -- which escaped its moorings and almost ran aground, but needs fixes to its propulsion systems.

Far and away the thing that most motivates me to consider staying a vegetarian is that I hate the idea of animals suffering -- not only as they die but also throughout their lives. But five weeks into this experiment as a meat lover testing out vegetarianism, I have to admit: I still want to eat meat.

I can’t do factory-raised, but I’m thinking, hey, farm-raised might be a nice compromise. I wanted to talk to some people who were involved in raising and killing their own animals, and lo and behold, I went to a party last week and happened to meet Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Brett Ridge, the stars of the reality show The Fabulous Beekman Boys, which tells the story of the couple starting a farm in upstate New York.

The show ended, the farm lives on. Kilmer-Purcell and Ridge raise two pigs a year, have them slaughtered on their farm every fall, and then they eat the pigs’ meat. I watched the episode in which their two pigs, Porky and Bess, are slaughtered, and interviewed Kilmer-Purcell about his experience raising, killing, and eating the pigs.

Q. So you had Porky and Bess from very young?

A. Yes, we got them when they were weaned and we raised them for 10 months before we had them slaughtered. That was the first time we raised and slaughtered two pigs, but we've done it twice more since then. We hire someone to come do it. [Laughs.] It is a misconception to think that every farmer can perform every task on a farm. I have slaughtered chickens before, but slaughtering a pig is a pretty special skill. It would be cheaper for us to bring them somewhere else to be slaughtered, but what’s most traumatic for the animal, we’re told, is the transport. We want to make sure we did everything as humanely as possible, and so we never took them out of their homes.

When Glenn Ross was a child, in the early 1960s, he liked to take a shortcut through a field of sunflowers on his way to school. “It was beautiful, all these yellow sunflowers,” Ross recalls. “We’d bring home the seeds and fry ‘em up with butter and salt.”

A charming memory, but for the fact that Ross grew up in an industrial section of East Baltimore and this bucolic scene bordered a steel plant. One day he was at the neighborhood playground when word went around that “men in spacesuits” were collecting the flowers. When he went to investigate, he says he saw workers in Hazmat gear harvesting the plants, having surrounded the area with caution tape. Many years later, Ross learned that sunflowers are used in phytoremediation projects to pull lead from the soil. (Trail mix, anyone?)

These days, the site -- now a vast sorting facility for construction debris -- is one stop on Ross’ Toxic Tour, a rollicking bus ride through the contaminated wonderland that is inner-city Baltimore. A self-described “urban environmentalist,” Ross leads dozens of tours a year, primarily for college students from Johns Hopkins University’s schools of medicine, nursing, and (wait for it) public health, which are located nearby. The tours take in brownfields, rat infestations, truck traffic, illegal dumping sites, vacant buildings, and other environmental hazards in Baltimore’s poor, predominantly black communities.

Ross, who has been leading them for nearly a decade, makes sure the bus windows are open for these warm-weather outings. “I put it right up in their face -- they've got to smell it, taste it, the whole nine yards,” he says. “And at the end of the tour, they get it.”

“It,” says Ross, is nothing less than environmental racism. “These things only happen in poor urban communities, neighborhoods where there’s poor political representation."

We've written a lot over the past month about the sharing economy -- how people are using apps and technology that make it easy to share cars, bikes, homes, couches, offices, tools, pets. More sharing = less resource use = all-around goodness.

And now the latest addition to the list of shareable items: kids. Yes, people are using websites and Facebook pages to find like-minded people with whom to share children. From The New York Times:

[A] new breed of online daters [is] looking not for love but rather a partner with whom to build a decidedly non-nuclear family. And several social networks, including PollenTree.com, Coparents.com, Co-ParentMatch.com, and MyAlternativeFamily.com, as well as Modamily, have sprung up over the past few years to help them.

“While some people have chosen to be a single parent, many more people look at scheduling and the financial pressures and the lack of an emotional partner and decide that single parenting is too daunting and wouldn’t be good for them or the child,” said Darren Spedale, 38, the founder of Family by Design, a free parenting partnership site officially introduced in early January. “If you can share the support and the ups and downs with someone, it makes it a much more interesting parenting option.”

The sites present what can seem like a compelling alternative to surrogacy, adoption or simple sperm donation.

Late last month, I wrote a post about an intriguing new solar technology that promised to radically reduce the delivered price of solar electricity. At the top of my post, I included that standard disclaimer, warning people not to get too excited until the product proved itself in the marketplace.

Of course, that disclaimer did not stop the inevitable: Cranky people from all over the internet descended on the comments to explain why the technology is absurd and could never possibly work. This is a familiar cycle to anyone who writes about cleantech.

Robert Styler, the chief marketing officer at V3Solar, contacted me to ask if I would elevate his response to some of the criticisms so that people would be sure to see it. So I'm doing that.

Just to be clear: I have no particular expertise on solar technology. I'm in no position to adjudicate these conflicts. But I do think they're worth hashing out in public. So here are some criticisms from champion skeptic MrSteve007 and some responses from Mr. Styler.

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Robert Styler:

We don't reveal everything about our tech on the internet and that creates some false assumptions. Hopefully this will clear up some of the more common mistakes. In response to the questions by MrSteve007:

1. No matter what angle the sun is shining, 50% of the solar cells are always shaded at one time (except at high noon, at the equator). That dramatically increases cost and inversely lowers efficiency.

Steve, you are looking at this as static rather than dynamic. The inner cone is rapidly spinning in and out of highly concentrated bands of light -- also, the ambient light on the backside of the cone will be captured. PV is a light-sensitive semiconductor. Every other semiconductor works under periodicity, on/off, 1/0, binary code. For the last 30 years, PV has either been ON during the day, or OFF during the night. Moore's law states that the computing power of semiconductors doubles every two years. Why have we not seen a similar dramatic increase in PV?

By creating high-intensity flashes of light, we make the PV respond differently than it does in a static environment, just baking in the sun (see Q-switching and the Avalanche Photodiode effect). Again, we only go into specifics under NDA [non-disclosure agreement] with stakeholders and investors. We all know what we know, but few are open-minded enough to know what we don't know -- and that's the first step of innovation.