BBC:
Semen from prize-winning animals can command a very high price.
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Semen storage is a specialised industry and as one farmer put it to me: "You don't mess around with liquid nitrogen."
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that cold temperature makes it very dangerous, which is why those using it for artificial insemination storage must be trained and registered.
And the tanks must be topped up several times a year to keep them functioning.
Found this hidden gem near Yuanshan station. A defunct stadium (中山足球場) turned into an urban farm. pic.twitter.com/jtzlshv3Ap
— Daniel Yu-Kuei Sun, Ph.D. (@DrDanielSun) December 3, 2022
Yes, we were there for the German Christmas market, and found the entrance to the farm by accident. Wonder why there wasn't any promotion of such a cool place. pic.twitter.com/6O5Nij95lY
— Daniel Yu-Kuei Sun, Ph.D. (@DrDanielSun) December 3, 2022
the 2017 Cooke Aquaculture net-pen collapse ... released some 260,000 nonnative Atlantic salmon into the sea
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“It’s about the disease vectors and how that can escape into wild populations”
(Longer article on such fish farming)
Related, Reuters from February:
In an experiment a decade in the making, biologists are releasing hatchery salmon onto flooded Northern California rice fields, seeking to replenish endangered fish species while simultaneously benefiting the farmers' business model
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Now, for the cost and inconvenience of flooding their fields, rice farmers are earning goodwill and betting that a healthy salmon population will avoid new regulations to protect wildlife and keep adequate water flowing.
In recent years, biologists discovered that as rice straw decomposes in flooded fields it creates a broth rich in fish food. They call it "zoop soup."
"The zooplankton are so big and they're so juicy, it's like filet mignon"
And yes, that is corn-themed Doom running on a John Deere touchscreen. @sickcodes really went all out for this. You can harvest corn to raise your health or go hunt down the piggies!
— Kyle Wiens (@kwiens) August 14, 2022
AP:
Gov. Janet Mills vetoed the proposal Friday with a message that said she could not “subject our farmers to a complicated new set of laws that would require them to hire lawyers just to understand.”
Mills said she is a “committed supporter of collective bargaining rights for workers generally,” but that Maine farms are primarily small, family-run operations and workers don’t need the same protections they would in areas where agriculture is dominated by factory farms owned by large corporate interests.
Speaking of labor:
the thing that the pandemic has made evident is that academics are barely white collar workers anymore. have to do dangerous in person jobs, unionize to get even barely humane benefits...
— csz (@cszabla) January 8, 2022
Agricultural equipment maker John Deere has announced its latest piece of autonomous farming kit: a package of hardware and software that combines machine learning with the company’s GPS-powered auto-steer features to create a “fully autonomous tractor.”...“We’re not going from no tech all the way up to an autonomous machine,” says [a John Deere vice president]....Although John Deere is presenting this as an autonomous system, it’s worth noting that there are humans in the loop, and not just farmers. When the company’s algorithms spot something unexpected, images from the cameras will be sent to “tele-operators” — essentially a call center of third-party contractors
Super dope. Respect to artists that give their inspirations a shout. Pharrell is really big on that so it's dope that he got the exclusive. lol pic.twitter.com/3N3POZ9Sg2
— Factions2BetaTester (@CR00K__Gaming) June 30, 2021
Just met a very concerned walker who was convinced the #fatpony had died.— PintSizedFarmer (@PintSizedFarmer) November 2, 2018
I swear Candy does it deliberately to mess with passers-by. pic.twitter.com/wRCOuLjrEa
— PintSizedFarmer (@PintSizedFarmer) April 29, 2019
The #fatpony eats everything and anything EXCEPT when the farrier is coming & I need her to swallow her pony paracetamol.— PintSizedFarmer (@PintSizedFarmer) February 7, 2020
She's grumpy as she can't go out until she finishes her breakfast (molasses, mollichop, apple juice & a TITCHY amount of bute)
We may be here some time... pic.twitter.com/qn91xhzG0B
The brewery on our farm (@highhousebrew) has leftover barley mash after every brew. A bucket of warm mash is the #fatpony's favourite winter food altho she can only have a handful as its like supersonic rocket fuel for small ponies. pic.twitter.com/Q3uie5epkF— PintSizedFarmer (@PintSizedFarmer) January 28, 2020
this is one of the most coherent explanations of the actual ranching business model that has ever been givenhttps://t.co/zUfHBhLH06— Dr Sarah Taber (@SarahTaber_bww) February 12, 2020
There is a bull semen company in my Montanan hometown and a few years ago I was added to their mailing list. Favorite 2020 bulls are as follows: pic.twitter.com/6xSPxnkcSu— Ted Geoghegan (@tedgeoghegan) January 27, 2020
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have dazzled stockholders and consumers with visions of fully autonomous vehicles that can wander out to work as robotaxis when not needed by their owners. But this version of a no-humans-required future of transportation is likely still years, perhaps even decades away. Instead of sleek Teslas or robot Ubers, the first truly driverless vehicles are more likely to look like James’ tractors: rolling placidly over a cornfield at a max speed of 7 mph.
The early version of James’ tractor, called the Rabbit, disperses seeds for cover crops, which farmers plant in between their cash crops to improve soil health. Other early versions of small autonomous farm robots focus on dispensing fertilizer, mowing and slashing, and weeding. Often they can be outfitted with different attachments so that the same tractors perform different tasks.
These small autonomous tractors won’t revolutionize transportation, but they do aim to solve an important problem in agriculture.
Three months into his tenure, which began on Halloween of 2017, Mr. Overly attended a meeting of some raisin industry players in the back room of a restaurant in Fresno, Calif. This introduction left him shaken. “I’m not saying this lightly, because — you can read about this in different spots — people kind of think there’s this raisin mafia out there and that kind of stuff,” Mr. Overly said.Related:
He said that he asked the group how they thought they could work together. “And the answer I got back was nothing short of collusion,” he said. While no one was proposing they take action, the anti-competitive tactics discussed in that back room, he said, were “completely illegal.”
As he tried to make changes in the raisin industry and at his own company, Mr. Overly said he faced intimidation, harassing phone calls and multiple death threats. With his spouse in the last trimester of a pregnancy, Mr. Overly found a note shoved into a crack of his front door that warned: “you can’t run.”
Mr. Overly installed a security system at his house in Fresno. At Sun-Maid headquarters, he and other executives discussed the necessity of active shooter trainings. As rumors about Mr. Overly’s motives swirled among raisin farmers, raisin packers and raisin bureaucrats, he became increasingly concerned about the safety of the raisins themselves. He feared that the current crop, drying from grapes to a wrinkly, shrunken state in bins on the Sun-Maid campus, would be set ablaze. It was their destruction by “fire, specifically,” that worried him, he said.
PepsiCo has offered to settle its lawsuit against four Indian farmers who grew the patented potato variety used in its Lays chips without the company’s permission.
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The company offered to drop the lawsuit if the farmers become part of its collaborative potato farming program. The farmers would have to buy seeds and sell the produce back to the company at predetermined prices.
“In case they do not wish to join this program, they can simply sign an agreement and grow other available varieties of potatoes.” PepsiCo said.
In order to guarantee a steady supply and maintain the price, Costco fixed its eye on Nebraska as the best place to start raising and processing its own supply of chickens, and “break free of the monopoly” held by companies such as Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride, much like it did for sausage and hotdogs with its Kirkland plant in Tracy, California.
In June, the company broke ground on a giant new poultry processing facility
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“Here you have a retailer who will now — from cradle to grave — have complete control of the entire production system,” says John Hansen, farmer and president of the Nebraska Farmers Union. “They’ll own the birds, they’ll control all of the particulars of the birds’ genetics, the production. They’ll own the feed mill and they’ll have control of the processing plant.
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Costco clearly has its reasons for bringing the first large-scale poultry operations to Nebraska — such as relatively abundant sources of water and corn, as well as a population that is literally and physically removed from the negative experiences other farmers have had in the industry