It is a problem. On one hand, they do check for various diseases like chronic wasting, mad cow, pseudorabies, etc. on the other hand it significantly raised costs and drove all the small slaughterhouses out of business because they have actual vets do the meat inspections. Other countries aren’t subject to the USDA requirements. IF you say have USDA certified butchers, that are trained to do the meat inspections, hired by the slaughterhouses, then it would be abused. But it is something that needs to be solved.
The cover crop issue has to be solved as well. I am not sure what the solution is to that either. But I am a little peeved that the one senator was trying to push Bayer, which is a German chemical company.
Yes DonM making up an inverted Vee-angle grate would be entirely possible.
My previous larger (TOO Large) woodstove was a Jotel Firelite
It’s cast iron grate was showing this same heat first raise warping too. Then cracking. Finally oxidizing burning.
The fellow I sold it to; a millwright/welder did eventually make up a replacement grate from re-bars rods.
Cheap. Easy to replace out every 2-3 years.
The ash shielded Vee-angle would probably last longer. And lower mass; not transfer out heat onto the cast iron floor ledge. This must be protected from heat damage at all costs. Even to the tune of a $100+ new factory cast iron grate.
This sinuous pathway updraft wood stove is different from a downdraft gasifier. Gasses do not have to flow down through the grate. Only ash downward.
And at cold lilting up I do up-flow some booster air from the ash bin door. upward thru the grate. In the owners-operator manual as a No-No, Never. But hey. Works slick. Never any from cold getting up to heat front glass smoking-up then. Sooting up the front glass as one of my wife’s favorite tricks.
With the metal cast grate any char chunks falling down from above to below the grate did get burnt up too. Primary stove air in is at the lower center cast horn. So air allowed pulled downward below the gate if the hot char was available.
I wait to see if this still happens with the insulating shielding brick grate.
Interesting. The restricted primary air will run to the easiest area to oxidize. Smoke to flaming first. Above grate charcoal second
Any below grate char last.
Operated long cycle as a charcoal heater with this years true dry wood has been a eye opener.
S.U.
Henry and Sean the funny thing about Federal Top-down regs and initiatives . . . .
functionally in our families farming histories they take away far more then they can ever give.
It is the State and County actions and enforcements that are the real daily problems.
County Vegetative Management patrolling enforcers.
County Environmental Services patrolling enforcers.
County Tax assessor drive-by enforcers now using Drones.
WA State mandated County Archeological folks out inspecting if you start moving earth.
Demanding to see your pre-dirt moving survey.
Dare selling eggs and meats then the WA State Dept of Agriculture demanding inspections, licenses and fees per unit sold. To pay for the mandatory inspection. Their salaries. Their benefits and retirement packages.
Offer up produce, eggs, meat as “Organic” then slammed with WA State Department of Ag. regs requiring full chain of proof of evidence of all of your farms Inputs. With certification site inspections mandatory then.
Feddie initiatives cannot help with this.
That Clinton Era Feddie regulation the ALL sources electrical generation MUST be let into the Grids . . . worthless down at the local level.
Only the BIg players get to play. Can afford the State and Federal level lobbyists to squeeze a chair at the table.
S.U.
Bayer offers payments to farmers who commit to minimum tillage or the use of cover crops. The commitments generate credits that Bayer will use to offset some of its own emissions or potentially be purchased by other companies.
“We’ve tried to structure our program for simplicity at this time,” said Lisa Streck, carbon business model grower lead for Bayer Crop Science. “We’ll continue to reevaluate our program as we learn more.”
My teacher for appropriate technology just back from "Peace Corp " Talked about walking across fields to deliver butter to neighbors to avoid government agents . The farmer who used to own this farm and seed corn business may have lost it because he was operating an illegal slaughterhouse .
I tried USDA NOP completed application but withdrew before inspection . Just to complicated .
I think velvet bean would be good cover crop
The seed corn business was mostly gobbled up because of the hybrids. You can’t collect hybrid corn seed and regrow it with the same results, but part of that is also like patent law for like ‘round up’ ready.
The slaughterhouses disappeared in part because of the diseases that started appearing but also in part because of the animal rights lobbyists like PETA and the humane society. No it is inhumane to shoot an animal in the head for a nickel, because you might miss and need a second shot, instead you need to use electric paddles which cost 5k. These are the same folks driving the vegetarian movement. and the anti-peanut movement. Peanuts happen to be one of like 2 plants that provide all the essential amino acids.
This was actually started as a carter administration law, which led to net metering. The utilities wouldn’t let -anyone- do self-generation and if they caught you running the meter backwards, they shut off your power. permanently. They also wouldn’t let any utility sized generation onto the grid, because they wanted to profit from generation because they wanted 100% control over the grid.
It evolved more in the Bush/Obama years. Namely in part because the grids aren’t that well managed, and we are increasingly reliant upon them. It is small step changes vs one massive and costly overhaul. In part because they were just sucking the profits off the top and not reinvesting in infrastructure or new technology.
I looked at it then realized, I wasn’t going to be over the income limits for needing the certification. It was like 3k for the certification. It just means I would only be able to sell end products to consumers. It wouldn’t break the bank if I was doing that much business.
The bayer stuff is kind of interesting but not a whole lot different then the organic/non-gmo that say cereal makers are encouraging. Most no-till is dependent upon heavy chemical usage like round-up. I don’t know if they are ‘rewarding’ for increased diversity, but I doubt it. I don’t think they have a good full solution and may end up pushing farmers away from a more viable solution in the longer term.
I think the key is really to fix the organisms in the soil. Plant diversity and carbon help achieve this.
I don’t know if we have a full solution with competitive yields without chemicals that is applicable to row crops and scales easily to large farms.
dry beans nay pea organic . So I did grow these and planed to process package and sell . Then I got a letter from the state demanding sales taxes NOW or fines would be imposed . I called the State and said I do not actually have a business and dissolved the business . I wish I handled it in another way . I was just in shock .
I make biochar and store it . I have only used it to melt snow . I have been thinking of cutting a dozen or two dozen trees to make a retaining pound and dumping the biochar in there .
I was into small ponds. Was going to harvest some of the pond soil/gunk to use for compost. Some times pond soil can poison ground plants, so composting cures that. Like your charcoal idea.
Direct application of charcoal , adsorbs nutrients and also act as a hormone trigger to grow fast .
Putting Charcoal in retention pound gives it time to become charged before it becomes soil .
I’ve seen a lot of different percentages for water and urine Bruce. Some as high as one to seven, so that would be a quart of urine for a two gallon mixture. Seems dangerous to me. I mix about half that. A pint to two gallons. Not real fussy about the epsom salts. Never weighed it but I’d estimate a cup of epsom salts, a cup of wood ash and about a quarter cup of bone meal to a two gallon container. I let it steep a few days in the sun with an aquarium bubbler in the pail and then strain it through a paint strainer. That is for the folular spray. For the mix that goes into the bottom of the planting hole I take the dregs from the above mixture , mix it with powdered char, bone meal, gypsum and a slurry of food scraps like egg shells and banana peels . Mix that with worm castings and put about a cup in the bottom of each planting hole. Nothing scientific about the proportions. I just toss stuff together and mix it. Then I watch for leaf color. It will tell if something is lacking. For instance if the leaves have a little yellow in the veins or start getting tiny brown spots then you are low on magnesium and can hit them with a epsom salt spray a little stronger than the normal folular spray. To get real data you have to talk to pot growers. They measure amendments down to the milligram and keep records on everything.
I have not used commercial fertilizer in my garden for years but I have been using biochar only not inoculated with anything and then I read that the following year the biochar sucks nutrients that the plants want and then don’t give it up until the next year? So yesterday I did an experiment in a 4 gallon pail and one gallon of water which I dissolved a quarter cup of 12-12-12 and then added 3 gallons of biochar until the water was all soaked up. I will do one row with and one row without and see how this goes.
Urine and biochar are a perfect match. We use biochar completely saturated with urine with great results, no need to go weak. The only urine danger when combined with biochar is contamination with pharmaceuticals if the donor is on meds.
I found that charcoal can be used to clear algae in ponds
If your pond has been growing murky because of contaminants, activated charcoal can be a part of your cleanup solution. Activated charcoal is charcoal that has been treated with oxygen in order to open pores between its carbon atoms. Once activated, the charcoal electrostatically attracts organic impurities in the water around it. Placed in the water flow of your pond, it serves as a filter for your pond water. The impurities are kept in place by the charcoal while clean water flows through the filter you create, leaving the pond water cleaner overall as the charcoal operates.
The ROHN came with house . Scratches in wall came with house .
Basically I heat with propane . I use this stove two weeks a year .
I fired wood boiler for about a month . I did not use wood chip gasifier at all .
I think the wood gas boiler is more efficient then propane boiler and converting power pallet to propane and running exhaust thru wood gas boiler would be more efficient .
The genset is same as winco PSS30 that has 30 Kw three phase output .
I have been cutting wood . I cut one tree in middle of wood lot and it took 6 months to get it down from being hung up in various other trees . I think I will cut trees from edge that will fall down .
Have not used this in decade . Every morning I would go outside pick up a handful of twigs and cook a skillet of baked beans .
There was talk of electric stove on battery power from inverter . There was a person with an off grid house that had to connect to grid just for his wife’s electric stove .
I am hearing about move to ban gas stoves . I have propane stove and electric water heater that is also wood heated in season . Getting ready to clean and treat rust in wood gas boiler .
Maybe not optimal if your small acreage is surrounded by lib-tard neighbors but for me, part of homesteading is self sufficiency and that means providing as many of your needs as possible from your own efforts. One thing that is handy is making your own black powder. Perhaps you are a reloader. one use. Another is stump removal.
There are a lot of videos about making black powder. The all use the same recipe passed down from the Chinese.
75 per cent Salt peter. Potassium nitrate.
15 per cent Charcoal
10 per cent sulfur
Adding 5 per cent dextrin as a stabilizer is recommended.
If you explore this you will see people talking about having to grind this mixture in a ball mill for endless hours. Not necessary. If you buy powdered ingredients.
The dextrin is just corn starch.
A lot of discussion about what wood makes the best charcoal. Willow, pine, I don’t know. I just use what I get from hardwood fuel making. When I screen the fuel the dust that settles is screened through a fine screen. That’s it.
Ammo is hard to come by now and sometimes girls just wanna have fun.
a. Chemicals To identify chemicals that might be targeted for theft or diversion as weapons of mass effect (WME), the Department looked to the DOT hazardous materials regulations and considered gases that are poisonous by inhalation (PIH). In proposed Appendix A, DHS listed all DOT Division 2.3 PIH gases including those in Hazard Zones A through D.32 In this finalized appendix, the Department has not included Hazard Zone D PIH gases (including carbon monoxide.
So you produce carbon monoxide ? You need to pay U.S. for protection for that .
The subject was potassium nitrate . firm doing solar thermal storage used potassium nitrate in salt and needed to hire protection .
The company doing this was also incinerating birds out of the air
In response to the rising concern of the American public over illegal bombings, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms asked the National Research Council to examine possible mechanisms for reducing this threat. The committee examined four approaches to reducing the bombing threat: addition of detection markers to explosives for pre-blast detection, addition of identification taggants to explosives for post-blast identification of bombers, possible means to render common explosive materials inert, and placing controls on explosives and their precursors. The book makes several recommendations to reduce the number of criminal bombings in this country.
