Skip to main content

Welcom to ZeroHedge readers -- now go away!

Trust me there's nothing to see here.  This blog is all about Canada, 24/7, Canada all the time!  Really boring boring place Canada -- we speak English (more or less) like the Americans (different spelling on certain words). We also speak French (although our French cousins need subtitles to understand our movies -- and sometime us too).   None of our successes (or failures) have any applications elsewhere!  Canada is a special case country.  No lessons can be drawn from our political process.  Trust me on this:

Healthcare -- its OK but France and Germany are almost certainly better (less expensive with better outcome). We don't talk about our "southern neighbors" health care system here (they get really pissy when we mention that their system seems to fail many of them and is terribly expensive)

Banking system -- our tiny banking system with 6 "real banks" that account for about 95% of all retail deposits.  We have no lessons for anyone.  None of the rules that apply to Canada can be replicated elsewhere.

Education:  Run by the provinces and not the Federal government (many many reasons for this).  Even Canadians don't know why their education system is successful (its a new thing here).  If you talk to parents they will tell you they cannot figure out how well their children are doing (grading has become strange).  We know our children read more than other kids elsewhere -- personally I blame our cold dark winters...

Canada's army is a bit of a joke (granted its an affordable one), did you hear about the subs we bought... they sink (and not in a good way).  We are fighting to decided if its appropriate to replace our 30 year old fighter aircraft (yep that's what we talk about between snowball fights).

Still thanks for the bump in readership, Canada just cannot be that interesting.  Trust me on that, we are boring!

Have a good day

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process
Post a Comment
Read more

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki
Post a Comment
Read more

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu
Post a Comment
Read more