A backyard gusher? Only in my dreams

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: greensand marl, a mineral that is mined in New Jersey to the tune of several million dollars worth a year. It’s apparently used as an organic fertiliser and a water softener.

But a call to Karl W Muessig, the state geologist of New Jersey, dashed my hopes. “We always look at it and hope it takes off like gold this year, but it never has,” he told me. Besides, he explained, it’s found in central and southern New Jersey, not anywhere near my home. “You’re out of luck,” he said.

I checked with my friend Diana Henriques, a reporter here at the paper who has been writing wonderful articles about the commodities markets. She did her best to warn me off of bellies. “We have a glut” right now, she said. “People who are farming pork bellies have pushed a lot of it out to market,” in large part because of the rising costs of feed and transportation. The economics are iffy, she added, “not to mention how it would affect your neighbors.”

She has a point. My fellow white-collar suburbanites might find a pump jack charmingly rustic, but the smells and squeals of a pigpen could bring down the wrath of the local zoning board. That is, unless I really struck it rich with the porkers. Then the fanciest of my neighbors might think about a sty to call their own - they have mortgages and fuel bills, too - and find a way to call it green. We’d be happy as pigs in, well, what pigs wallow in. But Diana had talked me out of it.

Crops sounded like a sure thing, since I live in the Garden State. That is, until I talked with Michael Schop, a master gardener working with the Cooperative Extension Service of Rutgers University. He was not very encouraging about getting any kind of big cash crop out of the eighth of an acre in my backyard. But he brightened for a moment.

“You want to flood your backyard and grow rice?” he asked. This, I mentioned, might be unpopular with, yes, the neighbors.

“For the kind of property you have,” he said, “the feasibility is nil.”