six weeks ago, my neighbour had problems with one of his transformers that were provided by the local power company. The immediate solution was to acquire the use of a temporary power station that would provide the necessary electricity for him to run about a third of its farming operations.
last night, we had a beer or maybe three at our local and he was telling me that until a week ago the timing for placement transformer to arrive was supposed to be June 1 of this summer two days ago, he got notice that the delivery date for the transformer had become empty, in other words the power company had no idea when the transformer would actually be available.
During Covid, we became acutely aware on our farm of the risks of supply chain Disruption something that we had never considered beforehand, when suddenly filters for tractors could not be had for love or money. It forced us to consider our inventory of consumable products for all our power equipment from tractors To ATVs and of course, in our case out gaspowered generators Those who follow this blog and they’re not that many, know that the farm relies exclusively on a few solar panels, but more importantly on our biodigester that produces methane thing that is used to power our two generators that powers the entirety of our farm.
my farm manager and myself since Covid have made sure that critical components were always backed up by spare inventory in our warehouse. Thankfully, most of the equipment we use on the generators are relatively common would very few exceptions. The same with our biodigestors most of the equipment comes from China, but can easily be replaced by equipment available domestically.
For our neighbour This is a catastrophe outcome because the diesel that is used to create. The power is about six times more expensive than grid power and that’s before taking any consideration the cost and the noise that the temporary generator creates.
he could implement a solution similar to our farms, but it’s not as easy as it was when we did it in 2017, because a lot of the equipment necessary to make our farm work and the energy side our equipment that are sourced in China. This is forced my neighbour to consider a number of unattractive solutions somewhat temporary, and it has already been implemented. He is now leasing space on our farm for his milk cows it just so happen we did and do have the spare capacity other operations may not be as easy to relocate, but there’s real issues in combining certain herds. In fact, the milk herds are not actually combined they are and will remain separate in different part of the barn it’s not ideal, but it’s good enough.
where does my neighbour go from here, it’s not entirely clear and wow the community around here is very supportive. It’s not like we all have to spare capacity. Sure, I was Able to accommodate his 25 cows, but I can’t do anything for his pigs or his meat cattle or his chickens
It’s a difficult consideration for everyone, and in my opinion, just the beginning
What I’m saying is that this location we expected to occur in a few years from a slowdown and potential collapse of China is occurring now already.
Comments