Back in the day...

Back in the early days of the Industrial Revolution and up into the 1950s, many manufacturing plants were a dreadful hodgepodge of equipment clumped in a semi-random way. As business grew, additional capacity would be added, often in a lean-to attached to the main facility. Sometimes shoehorned into space that had been used for something else.

Some captains of industry grouped equipment by type. All of the milling machines in one corner of a building. All of the lathes in another corner. Heat-treating in a different building. And so on and so forth.

There was rarely any over-arching plan about how things would be manufactured. Parts more-or-less percolated through the system as capacity opened up for the next operation. Because of the chaos and random routing, assembly lines were not feasible (and had not become mainstream until the 19-teens anyway).

The parts that were "in process" were moved from the pile of "finished goods" at one operation to the next process by employees classified as "shunters". They typically loaded parts on steel-wheeled carts and wheeled them to their next operation. Sometimes that that involved pushing the cart up a ramp to higher floors. Sometimes it involved pushing the cart along cratered pathways to different buildings.

They did that all day long. They were the human equivalent of a fork-truck: Lifting, moving, lowering.

If you look through an Industrial Engineering book written in the 1930s, you will notice that one of their primary metrics were the Calories consumed by workers in each classification. Shunters were among the very highest at 4500 to 5000 Calories per shift. 

Shunters are the Industrial Revolution's counterpart to the men pulling ships up the Volga river and pockets of them existed into the 1950s even in "civilized" countries like the US, England and Germany.

Back-in-the-day

Every farm boy who kept his ears open knew that if you were going to the newfangled "confinement" method of rearing livestock, you needed to ventilate the space to ensure a minimum of one complete air change-over every 15 minutes.

Chemical pneumonia from ammonia gas and stagnant air would kill far more adult animals than cold ever would.

I am keeping that rule-of-thumb in mind as I upgrade the duck-jail.

My primary motivation is to make it easier to collect the eggs. But as long as I am putting some effort into construction, I might as well be as smart as possible.

The current method of collecting eggs involves two chunks of firewood. One of them is put beneath the pick-ax so I can lift the side of the truck-cap high enough to wedge the second piece of firewood beneath it. Then I reach WAY IN to the space and feel around for new eggs. Sometimes I steal Quicksilver's toy rake to pull them to within my reach.

After collecting all that I can find, I double-check by looking from the back end of the truck cap to ensure I got them all. Then I lift up the edge, pull out the second chunk of firewood, lower the edge and then put all of the tools away.

The new method will be to have the cap sitting on 15" tall stud-frame walls with doors in the four corners. My fantasy is to look into the space from the back end and identify which corner the ducks decided to lay their eggs. Open the corresponding door. Remove eggs. Close door.

This part of the post fits with the first part because a lot of us newbie small-holders start with a hodgepodge of facilities and stop improving them as soon as they work almost-good-enough. 

Jonesing for some cattle

I am seriously wanting a couple of calves. I have about four acres of grass going to waste. Actually, worse than going to waste. It is festering with mice, ticks and other undesirables.

I could mow it, but that takes money out of my pocket and is hard on the local reptiles.

I found a neighbor with a livestock trailer. He will let me use it if I replace the rotted-out floorboards. Looks like a win-win to me.

The next task is to figure out what is wrong with the wiring harness on the truck and to fix it.

Their asking price is a little bit optimistic.

Then, I have to find a couple-three 400-to-600 pound calves that are less than $2k each. They are out there but I might have to drive 300 miles to get them and they might be beef-dairy breed crosses.

Subsistence peoples videos

Some folks like to jabber about "systemic racism" that is so pervasive that "we cannot see it".

I have my own thoughts on that, but the premise that our perspectives are flattened when our optics are within the same plane as what we are observing is a valid point.

I enjoy watching videos of "subsistence" cultures: People surviving on dacha in Ukraine, remote ethnic groups surviving in the Siberian wilderness, people in Alaska. However, I have to keep reminding myself that many of the things they do have "net-return-on-energy-invested".

Remember Oncle Horst who traded his water-soup for sawdust-bread to survive? That was a net-positive-net-return-on-energy-invested". The hot water had almost no energy (Calories) while the bread, crappy as it was, had significant energy.

Even though the videos are entertaining, riding two, 100 hp snow machines for hundreds of mile to bag a couple of caribou or to go ice-fishing or to collect a couple of pine marten for their fur is a black-hole for net-energy.

One prepper fantasy is that they will eat game to survive.

Suppose you live in a township like Eaton Rapids Township with 100 people per square mile. Suppose that we have a population density of 40 whitetail deer per mile. Furthermore, suppose that when brought-to-bag, each deer yields 30 pounds of lean meat at 500 Calories per pound. At an energy budget of 2500 Calories per person per day, how long could the population of Eaton Rapids Township live solely on the energy stored in the deer herd?

That is 600,000 Calories per square-mile on-the-hoof divided by a daily human Calorie burn-rate of 250,000 Calories per square-mile. The answer is: Less than three days.

A single milk cow in the summer can produce more than 6 gallons of milk a day. Between the fat (7,000 Calories), carbs and protein (another 7k Calories) a well-fed, lactating cow is producing almost as much food-energy as  dead deer EVERY DAY.

In seven weeks, one milk cow (which can be grazed on one acre of pretty-good, mid-western pasture) can produce more food energy than the meat from all of the deer on a square-mile (640 acres) of good deer range.

Fat is always a limiting factor in survival situations. If the milk is the only source of fat, then the milk provides enough fat to supply eight-and-a-half people with enough fat to supply 1/3 of their daily calorie needs.

I know one family that shares a cow with three other families. They have assigned days to milk the cow. If they cannot make-the-date, the family assigned the day has to make arrangments to get the cow milked. There are a lot of ways to skin that cat.