Month: July 2009

Free Ball-Point Pens: A Lesson in Bad Advertising

A while ago, Staples had a promotion that entitled me to a box of fifty ball-point pens. So I took them up on it and soon I had these pens all over my house. The only problem is, they don’t write. Okay, sometimes they write, but not often, and not for long. They don’t like some kinds of paper and they tend to just balk for no reason.

Now, I’m not stupid, and that means that I’m going to avoid Staples store brands for the rest of my life. From now on, every time I try to use a pen that doesn’t work, I will think of Staples. Even if the pen is someone else’s! In spite of many positive experiences over the years, they’ve convinced me that their company is run by the kind of morons who are happy to put their name on junk.

So I ordered a box of Bic Round Stic pens from Amazon.com, which is where I’m doing all my shopping these days because of Amazon Prime, which give me “free” second-day shipping if I pay $79 a year. I already bought enough stuff on Amazon that I’d save money on the deal, but it’s pretty wild that now I can buy a lens cap of a box of pens and have free shipping. I live in the country, and a trip into town is time-consuming. Hooray for mail-order!

But back to my story. So my Bic pens came in, and on the side of the box was the following statement: “Quality Promise: Bic Does Not Make Store Brands.”

What does this mean? I think it means that Staples is not the only group of idiots in charge of advertising and promotion, and that many, many companies are dissipating their customers’ goodwill by handing out inferior pens with their name on it. Why not put your competitor’s names on crummy pens, you dimwits! Or maybe pay the extra two cents and get a pen that writes.

Bic, on the other hand, makes a good-though-unpretentious pen that lives up to its motto of, “Writes first time, every time.” If I pick up a Bic pen that’s been lying around with its cap off for a few years, it usually writes perfectly. And on their boxes, they go to the trouble of distancing themselves from their so-called competition. If you buy a pen that doesn’t say “Bic” on it, they imply, you’re asking for trouble. Fair enough.

Sometimes people ask me about competition, and my answer is always, “What competition?” I think you can see why. Hardly anyone has Bic’s good sense. They’re mostly like Staples.

The Glove Trick for Clean Water

My livestock water is pumped out of a brook that have the usual kinds of crud in it — bits of plant matter, bugs, silt, etc. These tend to clog livestock waterers and also the foot valve at the bottom of the inlet pipe. Sure, the foot valve is screened, sort of, but the screen is too coarse, and sometimes I have to pull the twigs and crud out of it.

So I got tired of this and looked for a finer screen. My eyes fell on an old orange string glove. Bingo! I pulled it over the foot valve and held it on with a zip tie. The water is running cleaner and the foot valve probably won’t clog for a year.

This is probably the weirdest improvised repair I’ll do all year.

Update, August 15, 2009: The glove clogged with silt and I removed it. It didn’t look a lot different when clogged, so I’m going to replace it with something that looks a lot different when clogged — window screening, perhaps. It sure worked while it lasted, though!

Outsmarting Pastured Pigs When Moving the Fence

Grass-fed pigs at Norton Creek Farm

Our six pastured pigs are getting awfully big, and they have minds of their own. Every few days, Karen has to move their electric fence to give them access to a new swath of pasture, since grass-fed pork is the name of the game here. Once the fence is off, they can escape if they want to. They’ve done it before. How can you deal with this problem?

I was out mowing and I watched Karen work her magic. She had a trick all worked out: the pigs were hungry. They look to her for food. So their first impulse is to follow her around, not to leave and go foraging on their own. As she worked, she’d pause once in a while to fetch a few hard-boiled eggs from the pickup, and give these to the pigs. This kept them close at hand and totally under her control until she was done. Then she gave them the last of the eggs, stepped over the fence, turned on the juice, and was gone. A job well done!

A feed bucket can do more than any amount of yelling or pleading.

By the way, we take all our cracked or otherwise unsalable eggs and hard-boil them for the pigs. During the off-season, when we have no pigs, we fill up a chest freezer with hard-boiled eggs. Pigs will gladly eat frozen eggs, shell and all. If the eggs are stuck to the carton, which they usually are after having been frozen, we feed them carton and all. The pigs have nothing but time, and will happily separate the eggs from the carton on their own.

Grass-fed, egg-fed, pastured pork is like nothing you can find in the store. Feel free to envy us.

Tractor Trouble: Watch the Electrical System

A long time ago, someone, probably my dad, told me that “80% of all carburetion problem are really electrical.” In other words, your engine doesn’t run, and you suspect a fuel or carburetor problem, when all the time it was an ignition problem.

This happened to me over the last week, when my tractor (a Ford 640) would not start. I wasn’t the one operating it, and the issue became confused because he didn’t use the fuel shut-off, so we really did have a carburetion problem — the carburetor was flooded.

I messed around with various stupid and irrelevant actions until I finally woke up and brought a voltmeter into play. I discovered that the ignition fuse had voltage at both ends, but the fuse HOLDER had no voltage at the far end. It had corroded and wasn’t making a good connection. I burnished this up a bit, the voltage magically appeared, and the tractor started right up.

This, by the way, is what you get when you use inferior parts. When I converted the tractor from 6V to 12V operation, I added an el cheapo fuse block. I should have bought a marine-quality one. Never again!

Another take-away is that, if you allow things to go downhill, it’s hard to tell what’s going on. I was down to one working headlamp, and then zero. With working headlights, I can use the lights as an impromptu voltmeter, because the way things are wired, the ignition is getting voltage if the lights are. But with both of them burned out, I had to go find my multimeter. Life is simpler if only one thing is broken at a time!

Nevertheless, I designed a T-shirt this morning, commemorating old iron, which you can see below. After all, my tractor is older than I am!


create & buy custom products at Zazzle

Heritage Chickens

When we were starting out, we believed that old-fashioned breeds of chickens would do better on old-fashioned farms. A lot of people believe this. The idea is that heritage breeds are best, while modern commercial breeds are suitable only for factory farming.

Alas, that’s not how it works. For starters, there has always been a distinction between show birds (which are supposed to look pretty) and utility birds (which are supposed to turn a profit through their meat or eggs). Never the twain shall meet. Once heritage breeds were supplanted by modern hybrids, that was the end of the heritage utility breeds! You’ve basically got a bunch of low-producing show birds on the one hand, and high-producing modern hybrids on the other. The middle range, with some exceptions, has gone extinct.

And even utility breeds of yesteryear are nothing to write home about. I did extensive work with California Grays and Rowley New Hampshires, both of which were cutting-edge in the Fifties, but modern hybrids ran rings around them in our hyper-old-fashioned pastured environment. Hmmmm…

In fact, the hybrids are just better, period. They grow fast and have low mortality. The egg-type hens lay huge numbers of high-quality eggs, while the broiler produce enormous amounts of high-quality meat compared to the heritage breeds.

Last time I did the math, I figured that, to sell heritage broilers instead of modern Cornish Cross broilers, I’d have to charge three times as much to make the same money. Not only were there no takers, but I myself was far from convinced that the old-timey birds were worth even the same price per pound.

So my advice is the same as always: test, test, test. We tried everything, and settled on what worked for us. The things you’re told and the things that work are never the same things, so you have to test.