Time to Double-Check Your Winterization

The thermostatically controlled heat lamp in the pumphouse wasn’t on last night, though it should have been. It reminded me that I need to make the rounds and make sure all the pipe heating cable is warm as well. Let’s all be careful out there.

If you use heat lamps, I recommend clear ones, so you can tell at a glance, day or night, if they’re on when they should be.

I was surprised to discover that some people don’t use plug-in thermostatic switches for heat lamps in these applications. Mine have always worked perfectly, and save me a ton of money.

Where Does Performance Come From?

On the one hand, I think that most people are way too snobby — they think that most people (except those like themselves) are idiots. (Why, I don’t know. I can’t see it from where I’m standing.)

But there are some cases where the distance between the superstars and everyone else is huge. Night and day. My first job out of college was at Activision, back in its glory days in the Eighties. I learned that there were two kinds of video game designers: the ones who could write games that were fun, and the ones who couldn’t. There was no known technique of turning someone who wrote boring games into one who wrote interesting ones.

For the last twenty years or so, I’ve been in the high-performance business — high-end semiconductors, network accelerators, stuff like that. And the same thing is true: A few people know how to make stuff that’s fast, while everyone else only knows how to make stuff that ought to be fast, but isn’t.

Sure, little changes like using memory with a faster cycle time can give you some incremental changes, but when you look for big improvements, like making it two times or ten times or a hundred times faster, all bets are off. You get multiple bottlenecks. Performance leaks that weren’t worth worrying about before now become must-fix issues. Life becomes strange.

So a performance project lives or dies based on a single factor: whether the project was shaped from start to finish by a performance engineer. Other considerations hardly matter at all.

When I was at WEITEK, we had a particularly sharp engineer named Bob Wallis, who looked at the problem of 3-D shading and recognized that it could be reduced into a series of very simple operations, all alike. The operations were so simple that it was easy to implement them in hardware, so we designed a chip with seven fixed-point adders on it, which pretty much did all the necessary calculations at the full speed of the video memory, which means that we were running as fast as it was possible to go. The chip was so simple that it only took six weeks to design, but it was way faster than anything else ever created. It cost only $22 to manufacture. Retail price: $750. We sold millions of dollars worth of products using that chip.

That’s what performance engineers can do.

We always had competitors, but they never did very well. They needed a group of performance engineers, or maybe just a single performance engineer, but they don’t have any.

Performance engineers are very rare, and most employers don’t even know that performance engineering is a distinct specialty, so they don’t even look for them. Their performance projects are doomed.

Since the hallmark of performance engineers is that they can make things that are impossibly fast, often without increasing their manufacturing cost, such people are a gold mine: well worth prospecting for. Better yet, unlike the knack of designing fun games, performance engineering can be taught. Probably not to just anyone, but the people around performance engineers tend to become performance engineers themselves.

This is a key concept, and it’s going to make someone billions of dollars someday. Many companies become rich and famous through the efforts of a single performance engineer (usually a founder). As the company grows, the founders get sucked out of the lab and become unavailable for new designs. Since no one else knows how to do the performance thing, the product line becomes stale. It runs on autopilot for a while and then crashes.

So there are two opportunities for big money, which can be done together if you want. The first is to have more performance engineers than your competition — two to their one, one to their zero — it doesn’t take many. You have to unleash them to work their magic, though. They have to be more or less in charge. Ordinary levels of management will kill the goose that lays the golden egg. (When I was at WEITEK, many of the best products started as conspiracies. The performance guys would work on an idea on the sly, and when they had it pretty much figured out, they’d demand that management fund it.)

The second opportunity it to train up legions of performance engineers so you can simply overwhelm all possible competition. Half a dozen in a single design group would be enough to make you world-class. That’s about the most I’ve ever seen in one place.

The Golden Age

So when was the golden age of American farming?

I think the answer is different if you’re thinking from the point of view of the farmer or the consumer. If you’re the consumer, the answer is obviously, “The golden age is now.” You’ll see why in a minute.

For the farmer, we need to separate what’s picturesque from what’s good. Some aspects of the bad old days were:

  • Being connected to town by dirt roads that were often impassible.
  • Farming that was so labor-intensive that you couldn’t get along without hired help. (Even in Ten Acres Enough, Morris had to hire two people year-round on his little farm, and more at harvest season.) Let’s face it: the American farmer has never been a good manager, and never liked dealing with hired help.
  • No understanding of disease — the germ theory of disease wasn’t widely believed until the 1860s and wasn’t proven until the 1870s. This resulted in a generally low level of health in both man and beast.
  • Not being able to give your kids a high-school education unless they boarded with strangers in town.
  • Travel that’s so expensive that the local general store had a monopoly over your business — and mail-order hadn’t been invented yet.
  • No mass communication except newspapers and no free public libraries, leaving rural folks at a huge disadvantage in education.
  • Produce traveled to market via unrefrigerated slow freight, resulting in almost unbelievably low quality in the city.
  • An unbelievably high level of fraud and double-dealing at all levels of society, not just by politicians and CEO’s, resulting in low levels of both quality and trust.
  • Horses were essential, but many farmers weren’t good with horses. Few things are more dangerous than a team of horses hitched up to farm machinery and handled by a farmer who doensn’t have a close working relationship with them.
  • Farming is dirty work, but hot water for bathing and a room warm enough to bathe in were scarce.

So I figure that the Golden Age had tractors, paved roads, Rural Free Delivery of mail, high schools that could be reached on a school bus, radio, pickup trucks, tractors, refrigerated freight cars, the Sears Roebuck catalog, free public libraries, and labor-saving devices that allowed the hired help to be given the boot. So the Golden Age for farmers started around 1910 and ended roughly around 1960.

When I was a kid, people hearkened back to simpler times of horse agriculture and houses that lacked bath soap, but I think that such times are receding into the mists of antiquity — it’s a lot easier to relate to farmers with running water and a tractor than those of earlier times. And it’s easier to emulate them successfully as well.

Golden Ages sow the seeds of their own destruction. What’s good for the farmer isn’t necessarily good for the consumer. For example, eggs used to move from farm to city by unrefrigerated slow freight. In The Dollar Hen, Milo Hastings reports that eggs actually hatched in transit during the summer of 1901. Since incubation takes three weeks, this gives you an idea of how awful the distribution chain was back then!

Factory farms took over the egg business quite suddenly. Farmers with operations relatively close to town and who had walk-in refrigeration could guarantee the freshness of their eggs. Midwestern farmers whose eggs traveled by slow freight could not. In the Fifties, the market was taken over in just a few years by farmers who offered end-to-end refrigeration. The market price for eggs shipped the old way fell to unprofitable levels, and, just like that, eggs from diversified farms were a thing of the past.

Which goes to show that running a picturesque, old-timey, poltically correct operation counts for nothing if the eggs are bad. Lots of people don’t understand this, and when they start a little farm of their own, they skimp on quality six ways from Sunday, with the idea that they can do no wrong because they’re politically correct. It doesn’t work like that. As my Engineering professors liked to say, “Partial credit will not be given if the bridge collapses.” Only suckers give you credit for good intentions. Everyone else wants results.

Fortunately, in this day and age, results are at every farmer’s disposal, large or small. On-farm refrigerated storage is no longer a novelty, even on the smallest farms. Nearly a century of extending paved roads, telephone lines, and rural electrification mean that isolated farms are at no particular disadvantage except travel time. The nature of commerce ensures that most farmers and processors are focused on commodities and ignore niche products. If you play your cards right, this is a second Golden Age — and one that is more easily shared with your customers.

What’s it Take to Eliminate Factory-Farmed Eggs?

Let’s do the math. There were 76 billion eggs laid by US chickens last year (not counting hatching eggs), laid by 280 million hens (23 dozen eggs per hen). The vast majority of these hens are in factory farms. Suppose we wanted to get rid of factory farms. What would it take?

Well, before factory farms there were ordinary farm flocks. Between about 1900 and 1950, a typical “egg farm” held steady at about 1,500 hens. Some had more, some had less, but a farm family making most of its income from eggs typically had a 1,500-hen operation.

This makes sense when you realize that studies of labor efficiency on old-fashioned egg farms measured productivity at 2.0-2.5 hours per hen per year. A 1,500-hen operation would take between 3,000 and 3,750 hours of labor, which will soak up the time of two wage-earners.

Factory-farm techniques allowed the number of hens per attendant to increase to the current astronomical levels (around 150,000 birds per henhouse, with multiple houses per installation, and only one attendant per henhouse.)

280,000,000/1,500 = is about 187,000 egg farms that would have to be created, providing jobs for 187,000 new farm families. A 1,500-hen flock should lay (at 23 dozen eggs/hen) 34,500 dozen eggs per year.

Now, the median household income last year was about $50,000. Presumably, we can’t get rid of factory farms without paying an average wage, so we need to extract $50,000 of wage income per 1,500 bird flock. $50,000/$34,500 = $1.45 per dozen (as opposed to only about $0.0145 per dozen for the factory farm). That pays the farmer. Because the farmer only receives about half the retail price of the eggs, the consumer will have to pay about $2.90 extra for non-factory-farmed eggs.

This cost premium is more than the price of a dozen factory-farmed eggs (around $2.25 the last time I looked). Various other economies of scale that benefit factory farms won’t be available to smaller farms, so I figure that, in rough terms, non-factory-farmed eggs will triple the cost — in round numbers, $7.00 a dozen.

That’s for old-time confinement operations, which would have eggs that taste just as bad as factory-farmed eggs. Real free range eggs (not the fake kind that produces the eggs in the stores) cost more to produce. The labor efficiency isn’t that much worse, but production plummets in poor weather and there are predator issues. I figure that the costs will work out to around five times as much as factory-farmed eggs — $10-$12 a dozen.

True free-range farmers are thin enough on the ground that most of them can sell all their eggs locally, which is why you can’t get them in the city. Eggs are cheaper in the country, so eggs you buy from me for $5 would cost you $10 in the big city.

Power Outage Tips

I don’t know about you, but here in Western Oregon, all the power outages happen during the winter. They vary from flickers that last less than a second to outages of around three days. Here are some tips that work for us:

  • Have a wood stove you can cook on and heat the house with. I have two! If you have propane or city gas, pilot-light-style ranges, water heaters, and some kinds of furnaces will keep working when the power is out. (I don’t have gas.)
  • Have a ridiculous number of flashlights and lots of batteries. Trying to get anything done during a nighttime power outage is very difficult without a flashlight! Everyone in the family needs a flashlight, and you need a bunch more because they get misplaced.
  • Pick your poison where lamps are concerned. I’ve settled on propane Coleman lanterns even though they are expensive to run. They’re convenient, bright, and clean-burning. Gasoline Coleman lanterns set off my smoke alarms. Kerosene lanterns are too dim for area lighting. I’ve put hooks in the ceiling in my living room and bathroom just for the lanterns.
  • Have your water situation figured out. I have a generator and can run my water pump during an outage. Your situation might be more complicated.
  • Get a Honda generator. It’s sort of fun to go without electricity for a couple of days in the summer, but it’s a pain in the winter, especially when your basement floods without a sump pump, you have freezers full of chicken, or, worst of all, if you brood chicks with heat lamps during the winter. Honda generators are good. Some other makes are probably just as good, but I don’t know which ones they are. Figure out how to use your generator before the power goes out. Remember to have some gasoline. Buy plenty of extra-heavy-duty extension cords and multi-outlet adapters and store them somewhere sensible.
  • Use APC Smart-UPS UPS systems. These are the only ones I know of that work well when plugged into a generator. Put them on your computers and your TV/DVD/Tivo setup. There’s a “sensitivity” adjustment on these to determine how eager they are to switch to battery power. Set the sensitivity to “low.” Your equipment won’t mind. I always buy used units, since the systems themselves last forever, though the batteries (which are replaceable) rarely last beyond five years. See if you can find a local source for both UPS and batteries: they’re expensive to ship.
  • Have a good library. Even if you keep the Tivo running during the outage, the loss of power restricts your actions.
  • Have a method of brewing good coffee. This is essential! A Melitta one-cup coffee maker and a stack of filters will see you through until the ol’ Mr. Coffee starts working again.

There are plenty of other ways to do it, but these work for us.

We’re probably going to get a super-insulated electric water heater this winter, and we’ll get one that’s twice as big as we need, so it will take a long power outage to run out out of hot water.