Boosting the signal

 

I saw this at Mostly Cajun.

Meat

In 2018 California passed a ballot referendum requiring that meat marketed in California be afforded "ethical treatment" while being raised and during the slaughtering process.

What is unusual about this law is that it requires meat from animals raised in states other-than-California conform to these laws. Since meat is fungible once it enters marketing channels, the only way to enforce this is to require meat raised in all states conform to California law.

Hithertofore, this kind of legislation has been seen as an encroachment on Federal jurisdiction and in violation of laws protecting inter-state commerce. The Federal courts have not seen fit to rule on this law even as it takes effect.

Expect your bacon and sausage and hotdogs and everything else to get even MORE expensive than it would otherwise given the cost of feed inputs and labor.

There has never been a better time to find local food producers and get cozy with them. A Community Supported Agriculture group can thumb their noses at California laws as long as they don't market their food outside the group.

Bonus

On Ash Wednesday I sat behind one of our parishioners who raises and markets Freezer-ready beef. After Mass, he was telling me that his phone has been ringing off the hook. He is getting LOTS of inquiries.

Due to business and feed constraints, he can only market X number of beef carcasses a month. One of those constraints is the number of slots at the local slaughterhouse. His regular customers get higher priority. Extras are either put on stand-by or allowed to place a deposit on some month in the distant future.

The point being, the potential customers are not focusing on the cost. They are focusing on the availability. That is feeding-frenzy behavior and is potentially very profitable.

That could come back and bite my friend. Peter Senge in his book The Fifth Discipline talks about how people respond to shortages. They might order beef or place deposits with three or more different suppliers with the intention of cancelling the extra orders when the first actually delivers OR honoring the second two suppliers and "scalping" the product on the open market. That is one benefit to demanding a hefty deposit. It discourages that kind of speculative behaviors.

It is also an advantage to putting excess demand on "stand-by". Customers who renege on their commitments are not a big deal as long as their is another customer ready to step in and purchase their beef.

College degrees don't signal what they used to

Talk about destroying the "Brand".

"...Employers routinely report that college grads lack basic skills they look for in new hires. (See here, here, and here, for example). In fact, less than 10 percent of employers think colleges do a good job of preparing students for the working world. (Study cited here.)

A lack of useful skills is only part of the problem. Grads are saddled with debt, often taught absurd ideas from professors disconnected from the real world, and encouraged to see themselves as victims. Add to that binge-drinking and increasingly draconian policies around health and politically correct speech, and campuses have become a place to pick up bad habits and bad ideas."

A few years ago, I talked to a business owner who turned down a candidate I passed along because he had a Master’s degree. He told me, “He seems smart and has some skill, but he’s been in school too long. It will take me too much time to get those habits out of him. Plus, I’ve found people with advanced degrees tend to be entitled and assume they’re worth more than they are.”

Source 

Dis, dat an da udder-ting

Monge Lilac

Today was a little bit of working on the guest bedroom, a little bit of caring for the cattle and a little time in the orchard.

Cattle and water

The weather is ideal for maple sap running. Below freezing at night. Above freezing during the day. We are in a three day period where the temps are staying high and the pasture squishes when I walk across it.

I had been trucking water out to the calves which are a 1/4 mile from the road. Obviously, I did that in the morning while the ground was frozen. That didn't seem like a path to success with the ground not frozen and I didn't relish humping water that far.

So I stretched a hose as far as I could and humped it the rest of the way. I really didn't count but I figure it was close to 90 gallons that I moved, 10 gallons per trip. I could fib but it was only 75 yards from the end of the hose to the fence where the stock tank is located. I have a LOT of hose.

I carefully drained the hose after moving the water. I don't need to have it freeze and split.

Orchard

The day was warm and sunny.

Mrs ERJ and I made a date of it and we dragged wood from pruning out of the orchard and stacked it in the garden to be burned.

Once upon a time I tried to cut the wood and compost it in-place just like wood that fell in the forest. The downside was that it was hazardous to pick fruit in the fall. The branches from fruit trees tends toward being crooked and I could never cut it short enough to have it lay flat. Consequently it became a trip-twisted ankle hazard.

With all the talk of rising food prices, I am getting serious about harvesting as much fruit as possible and that means making the orchard floor user-friendly.

I still have some "holes" in the orchard. I know that a few of them are from where yellow jackets had nested below ground. I was fretting about where I was going to get dirt to fill those holes when I realized that the ever-lovely and industrious Mrs ERJ wanted to the drywall that we had taken out of the bedroom we are re-doing. I think the orchard is about to get some gypsum applied to it.

Lilacs

eBay has a seller, dogwooderitternet, who marks down last year's stock and sells it cheap this time of year. Plants go for about $8 each and he combines shipping costs if you buy multiples.

I bought lilacs from him/her last year and I am buying some more plants this year.

The plants are pot-bound and you need to make vertical slices to cut the roots that circled the pot but you will not find a better price on high-end, hybrid lilacs.

For the record, they will be planted up-wind of the house and will have a backdrop of White Pine trees. I picked Monge (reddish-purple), Betsy Ross (white) and Katherine Havemeyer (lilac colored). They should be visually spectacular and fragrant.

My goal is to never have to buy flowers for Mother's Day.

Zeus's saddle-bags

Himal Outdoors Dog Backpack

This was a good purchase. Zeus seems to strut when he is wearing it.

BPA

Brutus commented on an earlier post "Regarding plastic, how do we know that the plastic won't be leaching hormone disrupting chemicals (BPA, etc.) into your food supply."

There are several different kinds of plastic. BPA is a monomer or precursor to polycarbonate. Monomers are like links in a chain and with the aid of a catalyst, the monomers join together to form polymers. Not every molecule of the monomers is consumed. It is a statistical thing. As more dance-partners pair the unpaired dancers become more scattered and some don't find a partner.

Consequently, polycarbonate will leach out some BPA that was not consumed in the polymerization.

Vinyl is notable for being responsive to plasticizers. Vinyl (PVC) can be rigid like in water pipes or it can be flexible like your shower curtains. The primary difference is the amount of plasticizer compounded into the finished product. 

PVC is not my favorite polymer from an environmental standpoint because the plasticizer smells and it out-gasses over time. PVC contains chlorine in the polymer and burning PVC has been documented as emitting dioxin which is a powerful carcinogen. From a personal standpoint, I worked in a shop that did a lot of resistance spot welding and the safety department LOVED PVC curtains to contain the sparks. Over time, the sparks vaporized the curtains and the safety department added more.

Most garden mulch is polyethylene. Polyethylene is also available in nearly rigid forms and in very flexible forms. The difference between PVC and polyethylene is that the variation in flexibility for polyethylene is controlled by the length of the polymer chains (molecular weight) and by the degree of cross-linking between the chains.

Polyethylene is also widely available to manufacturers as "post consumer" pellets. That is, recycled milk jugs. No material is "free" from an environmental standpoint but recycled milk jugs pigmented with carbon is pretty close.

Random thoughts on the morning's news dump

 

The fringes of the Mainstream Media are openly mocking Kamala Harris's inability to accomplish anything.

Tit-for-Tat is the oldest game in negotiating. Graham just told Putin that activating sleeper cells to take out high-ranking politicians is fair-game and in-play.

Pity about old Lindsey. He isn't going to like his new tats.

More like "a bullet dodged" rather than "oh, what might have been)

One of Biden's first acts in office was to cancel Trump's roll-back on insulin prices. I wonder which one of Biden's contributors will get gouged by this and I wonder how many roadblocks will be thrown in front of Civica Rx.

And we can all use a reminder that humans are capable of empathy and mercy. If I were Nike, I would make sure he had Nike apparel for the remainder of his natural life.

I wonder if the woman put the duds on eBay.

Margin Retreat

 

Margin retreat is a well studied marketing phenomena that happens when younger, more nimble, lower cost competitors enter a market and the older, less flexible, higher-fixed costs competitors abandon the "low end" of the market.

For example, a company like McDonalds might virtually abandon marketing simple hamburgers in favor of multi-patty gussied up versions due to pressure from Hot-&-Now and other purely drive-through burger joints. Those rising competitors also lack bonus-eligible executives, stock dividends and huge corporate headquarters.

In the 1970s, the domestic automakers made a couple of feeble stabs at producing economy cars but realizing they could not compete with VW and the rising Japanese automakers they virtually abandoned the market. Their reasoning was that since they could not profitably produce and sell economy cars that they would "give" that segment of the market to the Germans and Japanese and focus on more profitable segments.

Do the names BMW, Mercedes, Lexus ring any bells? The interlopers were not satisfied with the crumbs.

Hey, don't look now but the Koreans are pushing the traditional Japanese marques. It never ends.

National Economies

You can make a credible case that the same thing happens with national economies.

Mining? Dirty, dangerous, loud and polluting.

Manufacturing? Boring, dirty and low-status. Lowers property values.

Agriculture? Ok, but only the parts that can be automated.

Because of the high fixed-cost of labor, entire industries decamped from First World Countries. In light of current conflicts, you could substitute NATO + Japan, South Korea and Oceana for "First World Countries".

Key point: Countries with high fixed-costs must run their remaining industry 24 hours a day, seven-days-a-week to cover those costs. That is how you deal with high fixed-costs, you dilute it with volume. 

Countries with lower fixed costs can get by with running during daylight hours. Said another way, First World Countries cannot survive on the intermittency of Solar and other "Green" energy sources. Ironically, countries where the median monthly wages* are less than $1000 can.

First World Countries largely abandoned the lowest level of Maslow's hierarchy and fled to the higher levels of Maslow's Hierarchy. We now manufacture "pronouns" and "Self-Esteem". We think we add-value by taking inherently simple and robust inventions like diesel engines and tacking on layers of complexity simply because the complexity exists and it signals our concern for the climate or marginalized peoples or something.

The accounting systems in First World Countries have become so Byzantine and non-traditional sources of revenues-and-costs so dominate operations that it is impossible to determine if a product or service is fundamentally profitable or a black-hole for resources.

One potential "blow-out" for the Russian conflict is for China to side with Russia and then every other country with median wages of less than $1000 a month joins against the First World Countries. They will demand a Debt Jubilee and if they stick together we wouldn't have any choice. If push-comes-to-shove, we need their potash, lithium and nickel and manufactured goods more than they need our new pronouns-of-the-month.

*Yes, I know your economics professor told you that wages are a variable cost, not a fixed cost. That may have been true in 1937 but it is no longer true in First World Countries. Wages are a fixed cost. Furthermore, high wages drive management to increase investment in automation which your professor did agree is a fixed-cost.

Bonus data of a select sampling of countries. Source

Rank	Country	Average Monthly Net Salary (After Tax)
4	United States	3612.85
21	France	2501.83
27	Saudi Arabia	1783.99
28	Oman	1749.39
29	Italy	1594.78
39	China	1078.18
46	Poland	903.34
49	Greece	820.90
50	Malaysia	808.13
64	Mexico	556.57
71	Guatemala	476.52
73	India	462.07
75	Ukraine	444.68
81	Brazil	394.72
82	Argentina	392.37
83	Russia	384.38

Vermont Tech Butchering Short Course

 Apologies for the short notice.

Link

This training will cover the basics of whole-animal butchery with both instruction and hands-on demonstration. Participants will learn how to break down beef, pork, chicken, and lamb into primals, subprimals, and case-ready cuts. Value added processing, such as sausage, smokes hams, and bacon will also be covered, with an emphasis on food safety, sourcing, and maintaining high utilization of whole animals.

Butchering Basics can be taken as a three-part series or individually by animal interest.

Introduction to Butchering

This training will include an introduction to HACCP planning. Participants will begin their butchering skills by focusing on chicken fabrication and a lamb breakdown. 

Mar 26-27, 2022; or
Sep 3-4, 2022

Registration

Pig Butchery

This session focuses on the breakdown and various cuts of a pig. Participants will be introduced to value added production such as sausage making, hams, and bacon. 
Apr 23-24, 2022; or
Sep 24-25, 2022

Registration

Beef Butchery

This session will focus on the breakdown and various cuts of a beef half. Participants will practice and feel confident breaking down a half beef into steaks, roasts, stew meat, etc. 

Mar 26-27, 2022; or
Sep 3-4, 2022

Registration

COST

Intro to Butchering: $500

Pig Butchery: $500

Beef Butchery: $500

LOCATION

Mad River Food Lab
Butchering Lab
151 Mad River Canoe Rd
Waitsfield, VT 05673