Skip to main content

Unrelated and interesting

1.  Rumors are that France's 2019 budget deficit may be higher than Italy's planned budget deficit -- of which the EU said this is unacceptable.  Next game of chicken

2.  Russia just sent a large number of nuclear-capable long-range bombers to Venezuela....I'm sure that Trump will like that

3.  China arrests Canadian ex-diplomat in what appears to be a "tit for tat" move against the arrest of Huawei's CFO

4. Brexit vote delayed -- cause May doesn't have the vote and a rejection of her plan would almost certainly lead to elections (and possibly a new referendum).  A game of chicken is being played between May and the parliament:  "Back me or we have a hard Brexit"

5.  Trump's position is getting very uncomfortable.  It appears now that the Russia discussions were not only over an 18 month period but involved a large number of players -- on both sides.  This was not a single meeting and a single conversation, but

6.  As long as the GOP believes that their 2020 election prospects remain acceptable they will back Trump, if they feel they are losing they will drop him and vote for impeachment (or at least force him to resign)

7.  US government shutdown may occur because Trump wants his wall at "any cost".  Will try to blame the Democrats -- who buy the way are still in Minority in Congress (until January)!!!

8.  While America (at least the Federal Government & Trump) are looking at cutting basic research funding, China is increasing its overall fundamental research funding...what do you think the impact of that will be over the medium/long term.

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