Skip to main content

So life goes on. Two weeks of Trump

you've got to hand it to Trump; he has managed in less then 2 weeks to pissoff Mexico, China, Germany, France, and the Uk.  Plus to add more fun he's manage to pissoff the Australians...it takes some effort to achieve that level of success.

So far he's made the Canadians happy; by reopening NAFTA (to teach the Mexicans a lesson I guess) and Israel.  The Canadians cannot believe their good luck...they've been furious as virtually every single car plant in Canada has been shut, and Canada has a large trade deficit with the US -- a real opportunity for the solf lumber industry and some of Canada's dairy producers that have been kept out of the US market.  Trump must had wondered what all that cheering was when he starts his little fight with the Mexicans!  As for Israel, they were best buds until Israel pointed out that moving the Embassy to Jerusalem was maybe not the best idea, and then that add insult to injury the right wing press (in Israel) have been saying unkind things about Trump.

Yes Trump is a special guy, who will go down in the history books as a guy with a massive ego, who know nothing about the constitution or the separation of power.  I have no idea how long he will last, already the crazy wing of the GOP wants him to abolish the ACA without a replacement (freedom caucus but also the mean wing of the GOP), talking of impeachment! It's been two weeks, feels like much longer.

Anyway

Comments

Post a Comment

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