Skip to main content

Living in tropical paradis

 Reading a Canadian magazine while waiting for my dental appointment there was this blurb about this Canadian family that had left Canada for good in 2015 for Costa Rica.  Starting in a beach hut and over the years progressing to a “five bedroom with pool house on top of a mountain”.  The whole thing ends with the family retiring to Toronto in 2021, because of the impact of global warming.

First a few facts about Costa Rica: it’s poor and it’s a cheap place to live.  When it’s not raining it’s as hot and dusty as hell. That’s Costa Rica, and the reason it’s poor is the above mentioned!

Now having lived in many tropical countries I can attest that the first few years are great, and yes there are some very violent weather episodes, but the real problem with these countries, that is unsaid in the articles, is that they are poor and are destinations for people looking for cheap ways to live in luxury, think the English expats in turkey from the late 1990.  Nothing wrong with that, but I am always surprised by people who don’t seem to understand why a tropical paradise is so poor, the reason is the terrible dry seasons and the ungodly thunderstorm that are the reality of Costa Rica.  BTW to blame global warming for Costa Arica’s violent and difficult weather is to not understand the country.  

Still, if they think they will escape global worming in Toronto…I wish them luck.

Finally, there are tropical paradises out there.  Bloody expensive too ifyou ask me.  See how much change you get from buying a beach house in Barbados.

Comments

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

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

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