TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee")

A new version of the world’s first raspberry-picking robot, a four-armed machine powered by artificial intelligence and able to do the job at the speed and effectiveness of a human, is to be employed on farms in the UK, Australia and Portugal over the coming 12 months.

The developers claim that Fieldworker 1, nicknamed Robocrop, can detect more accurately than previous models whether a berry is ripe, and can pick fruit faster because its grippers have greater reach and flexibility...

 “It has superhuman vision capabilities, and what we’re doing with that is detecting the spectral frequency of the state of berry ripeness,” said David Fulton, chief executive of Fieldwork Robotics. “Depending on the state of the berry ripeness, it emits a particular spectral range that allows us to get improved accuracy.”..

Moving along rows of bushes, the wheeled machine’s four arms pick berries simultaneously and drop them into punnets, ready to be transported to supermarkets. The robot, close to 2m tall, can now harvest between 150 and 300 berries (more than 2kg) an hour – the same rate as a human picker – but can run day and night.

Photo credit: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images, via the "Best Photographs of the Day" at The Guardian.

"When the first Chub Wub was slaughtered due to an untreated hernia, the farm children wept for their favorite pig, asking to be fed his heart in an act of compassionate consumption." (xii)

"After all the males are operated on... I empty a bucket of testicles in the woods: a magnified pile of lima beans.  The pigs return to their pen with gentle steps." (xv)

"As their replacements are born, every Wednesday pigs are taken away for slaughter.  The farmer brings me the unsalable pieces to eat.  I butcher the heads of three red pigs for their cheek meat, lifted by leathery ears and sawed away at on my kitchen table.  I place each medallion of jowl into a Ziploc bag and peel away the white gristle that helped to bind the face together.  I dig a hole in the woods and place the three cheekless heads in it..." (xvi) 

(from an old Shaker journal) "Work made me well.  Used to be I'd milk twenty cows and cut a cord of wood every day... been cutting wood over forty years and lost only two toes." (7) 

"The tie between us is very fine, but a hair never dissolves" (quote from Emily Dickinson) (8) 

"Part of the job is losing oneself in nature.  Cast out into the farm amongst the plants, animals, machines, I feel unindividuated.  Of course, I act upon the world.  But the work is so elemental as to be impersonal: animals fed, dirt plowed.  The weather acts; I accept.  If I leave, another will surely take my place... The seasonal work is a kind of stasis happening year after year.  There is no ending and no beginning to an agricultural story, only a descent into a repeating cycle." (17) 

"We  prepare a home-made dinner for Brother and Sister, their last meal.  I make sweet white flour cakes with caraway seeds and dried cherries, taken from Sarah's baking cupboard... I jam a pig-shaped cookie cutter through the flesh of a beet, summer squash, a cucumber, a collard leaf, a block of cheese, a tomato.  I press the assortment of vegetal pig silhouettes into the creamy brown faces of the cakes.  A friend brings a forty-ounce bottle of beer from E-Z Mart in town to go with the cake.

    Sarah and I walk the food down the road... through the hayfield and brambles to the pig pen to serve them.  They eat in a more measured, urbane manner than normal on account of the peanut butter sticking to their thickly ridged mouths.  As usual, one discovers the goodness of the beer before the other and Sister sucks most all of the malt liquor down as fast as she can in slurps that would be applauded in any beer hall.  After her bowl is drained she stands stupidly, looking out at the surrounding mosaic of leaves.  The pigs are handsome and we size them up, admiring, with some solemnity, Sister's spots and Brother's fat.

    At noon the next day we shoot them.  Ethan rolls plantain leaves and puts one in each ear.  Brother is shot over his grain bowl when I'm not looking... (41)  [continues with details of the butchering]

The pig bodies, now reduced to meat, bone, and four hooves, are slipped inside contractor bags and lowered from the tractor into the truck bed.  We drive them to the vegetable farm's walk-in cooler, where they will hang to cool overnight.  At the farm, I pick herbs to put in the sausage we will make.  My fingers, soft with fat, smell faintly of iron and the crisp oil of lovage and bitter parsley, the diesel of thyme and oregano, so sensual that I unabashedly pass the softened and perfumed palms of my hands over my nose and cheeks, sniffing politely as one who does not deserve that which I am given and that which I have taken away." (44) 

"One morning, fifteen minutes into the workday, Sam cuts his right pointer finger with an angle grinder in the dirt driveway of the trailer.  He was lying beneath the giant mower, tool spinning above his face, when he started to swear, words that mixed into the sound of the grinder's motor.  He came out from under the mower's metal housing holding his hand to his chest and I gave him my seat in the truck about to leave for our river field.  Diana ran out from the trailer with a roll of paper towels for the car ride to the hospital, but there was hardly any blood and there was no blood in the dirt beneath the mower either.  Sam's finger was cut in a neat, surgical V, which exposed the white fat and bone on its inside.  It didn't bleed because the heat of the grinder cauterized as it cut.  By the afternoon Sam is back driving the tractor with his finger pointing up against the steering wheel and covered in a cocoon of gauze.  Suspicious of the townspeople's proclivities - babies here are ten times more likely to be born addicted to opiates than in other states - the hospital didn't give him any pain meds." (82)  

"By the waxing sun of early afternoon, with everything edible in the pen sucked up, the pigs escape into the neighbor's lawn.  They walk through a bed of burning coals dumped from a woodstove and are unharmed.  Red sparks fire around their hooves before they lower their snouts into the embers and eat the mineral-rich wood ash." (161) 

"My family's seven-fish dinner comes on a day of beautiful sun.  It is the Italian tradition for Christmas Eve... After sunset, Graham and I drive to my grandparents' house for fish soup, smoked fish, shrimp calamari, anchovies, and fried smelt with lemon - missing the seventh fish altogether.  In the old days, there were live eels in the bathtub..." (190) 

"The spring has its own self-made viriditas, unstitching the seams of the bathhouse..."  Greenness (or freshness/youthfulness), from the Latin viridis.  Cf verdant.

"Root harvest is the hardest work of the year, pleasurable in its finitude when the weather turns cold, and the reaping heavy and repetitive before the stoppage of all work and growth.  Our fingers crack as their moisture is sucked away by the dirt's thirst..."  The state of being finite; limitedness.  "Finitude is rather formal and used in philosophy, while finiteness is used in mathematics; however, infinitude is used in mathematics more than infiniteness. Less formal is to reword to use limited: “(the fact that) life is limited” rather than “the finitude of life.”"

"I go to my grandparents' house at night for my mom and her sister's birthday party.  Irish twins, born a little less than a year apart, they grew up celebrating together."  Either of a pair of siblings born less than 12 months apart, especially if born within the same calendar year or school year.  Term used in the nineteenth century to mock the fertility of Irish families, often used in a derogatory sense to imply loose morals. 

Human urine... is full of the same nutrients that plants need to flourish. It has a lot more, in fact, than Number Two, with almost none of the pathogens...

At first, collecting their urine in a jug was “a little sloshy,” Ms. Lucy said. But she was a nurse and he was a preschool teacher; pee didn’t scare them. They went from dropping off a couple of containers every week or so at an organizer’s home to installing large tanks at their own house that get professionally pumped out...

Toilets, in fact, are by far the largest source of water use inside homes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Wiser management could save vast amounts of water, an urgent need as climate change worsens drought in places like the American West...

Chemical fertilizer is far from sustainable. The commercial production of ammonia, which is mainly used for fertilizer, uses fossil fuels in two ways. First, as the source of hydrogen, which is needed for the chemical process that converts nitrogen from the air into ammonia, and second as fuel to generate the intense heat required. By one estimate, ammonia manufacturing contributes 1 to 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Phosphorus, another key nutrient, is mined from rock, with an ever dwindling supply.

But now that I’m a bit too hoary

To lose myself in a bed-time story,

I’ve slightly altered my firm conviction

Regarding my furry friends from fiction;

And might not weep at a grim autopsy

Of Peter, Cotton-tail, Mopsy, Flopsy.

All of whom plus countless dozens

Of nameless ravenous rabbit cousins,

Pay frequent calls on my straggling garden –

Mr. McGregor, I beg your pardon.

A neighbor dropped off this carton of locally-sourced eggs for us this morning.  They provide a nice example of the proper use of the adjective "motley."  They also have the advantage of being unwashed - which gives them an extended unrefrigerated shelf life (because washing removes a protective film on eggs, potentially facilitating the entry of oxygen or bacteria).  They were also quite tasty, as judged by the first three. 

Older hens tend to lay bigger eggs its one of the reasons that egg producers get rid. This is because larger eggs cause blockages. Also if you zoom in on the older eggs you'll see more discolouration and wrinkles in the eggs also happens more when the hyper modern breeds get older as they struggle to get enough calcium to keep up with their production.

Here is an example of an egg she laid that suffered from the lack of calcium you speak of. It's not that she's not fed calcium, it's that she's too old and absorbed less

TIL in OP’s linked post that some chickens will discover they love the taste of their own eggs if you feed them to them without disguising what it is first.  Then you end up with an ‘egg eater’ who goes around and pilfers all the good eggs in your coop before you can get to them.

Chicken raiser here. You don't have to disguise eggs to feed them back. Some hens will develop egg eating habits, but most will not. I feed eggs back all the time and mine will only eat eggs with a broken shell. I've raised hundreds and hundreds of birds with only a couple egg eaters in the mix.

We have chickens and we were horrified by this fact when we first learned it. What made it ok is the reminder that these goofy creatures are descended from dinosaurs and they are omnivores. They'll go bananas for scrambled eggs - a helpful thing to know when teaching them to come when called - but we had to be ok with that whole idea before we could begin training. Also, I made a roast chicken one night (not one of mine) and I gave them the carcass. The last I saw of it, they were happily rolling it down the hill picking what they could off of it. I suspect they ate bones and all; I never saw any of it after they were done with it. Chickens are metal.

Chickens are basically pigs with wings. Between the two animals we basically have no organic waste on our farm. They eat it all.

By the 1930s, five sixths of the original indigenous animal population that existed in the United States when the Europeans arrived had been wiped out. Seven eighths of the original woodlands had been cleared. One sixth of the topsoil in the United States would shortly blow away in the ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl.

The dust storms were very much a man-made disaster, the result of the heedless booms and busts that had succeeded one another for decades on the High Plains...

Unlike the dirt-poor farmers of the Tennessee Valley, the plowmen of the High Plains were able to obtain the latest motorized combines and tractors, thanks mostly to cheap bank loans, and during the wheat booms of the 1920s they used their machines to tear apart the fragile ecosystem of the land around them. As prices kept declining due to the glut of crops they kept producing, they ripped into even more marginal lands, still funded by the local, undercapitalized banks that forked over loans with low interest rates on almost no collateral...

“The tractors had done what no hailstorm, no blizzard, no tornado, no drought, no epic siege of frost, no prairie fire, nothing in the natural history of the southern plains had ever done,” Egan noted.

They had removed the native prairie grass, a web of perennial species evolved over twenty thousand years or more, so completely that by the end of 1931 it was a different land—thirty-three million acres stripped bare on the southern plains.

Before long, the dust began to blow. There were 14 dust storms in 1932, another 38 the next year, a record 134 in 1937...

A fresh storm blew up on May 9, 1934, this one out of the freshly turned earth of Montana and Wyoming, an estimated 350 million tons of dirt suddenly airborne. It dropped more than 12 million tons of grit on Chicago, then covered the East Coast from Boston to Savannah. In New York City, it cut the sunlight of a lovely spring day in half for five hours. Nor did it stop there, since there was nothing to stop it. The duster did not dissipate until it had blown over three hundred miles out over the Atlantic Ocean, startling sailors when it rained dirt on the decks of their ships...

When birds and snakes all but disappeared from the Dust Bowl, they were replaced by a biblical plague of locusts, unseen in the West for decades, with as many as 14 million of the ravenous grasshoppers to a mile. At least one state government responded by sending out the National Guard to coat the land with up to 175 tons of insecticide per acre, thereby finishing off any life the drifting dirt or the grasshoppers might have left behind...

Along with the men from the Agriculture and Interior departments, the federal government sent out boys from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)—a huge new program created to absorb the thousands of destitute, homeless young men who had previously been riding the rails, living in hobo camps, and idling in cities, with nowhere else to go.

Many criticized this and other New Deal programs as socialist or fascist, but the CCC paid the three million young men it employed over the years thirty dollars a month (twenty-five of which they were required to send home to their families) and provided them with decent meals, a good place to sleep, education, exercise, and some training in woodcraft. In return, they planted thousands of acres of new buffalo grass and other, experimental drought-resistant grasses garnered from around the world. Before the program ended with World War II, they had also constructed more than eight hundred state parks and planted nearly three billion trees, many of them in the shelterbelts FDR had insisted upon, to tie down the soil. Together with Bennett’s experiments they had restored more than half of the damaged land by the time the war began.

"Once Olaf was in Ireland on some warlike expedition with his fleet.  And when they required to make a raid on the shore for food, some men went on land and drove a great number of cattle down to the shore.  Then a farmer ran after them and prayed Olaf to let him have the cows he owned, and Olaf told him he could have his cows if he recognized them, "but don't delay us."  The farmer had with him a large cattle dog.  He pointed him into the flock, where many hundred cattle were being driven.  The dog circled the whole herd and drove away as many cows as the farmer said he owned, and they all bore the same mark, so they believed that the dog had recognized them properly, and they thought the dog marvelously clever.  Then Olaf asked the farmer if he would give him the dog.

"Gladly," said the farmer.  Olaf right away gave him a gold ring in return and promised him his friendship.  That dog was called Vigi and was a most outstanding dog.  Olaf kept him for a long time afterwards."

If there’s a plant perfectly suited to outcompete the farmers, researchers and chemical companies that collectively define industrial American agriculture, it’s Palmer amaranth. This pigweed (a catchall term that includes some plants in the amaranth family) can re-root itself after being yanked from the ground. It can grow three inches a day. And it has evolved resistance to many of the most common weed killers...

The plant in his hands was a Palmer amaranth descendant that had demonstrated resistance to 2,4-D, one of two active ingredients in compounds used to defoliate forests during the Vietnam War...

Superweeds — that is, weeds that have evolved characteristics that make them more difficult to control as a result of repeatedly using the same management tactic — are rapidly overtaking American commodity farms, and Palmer amaranth is their king. Scientists have identified a population of Palmer amaranth that can tolerate being sprayed with six different herbicides (though not all at once), and they continue to discover new resistances. By now, it’s clear that weeds are evolving faster than companies are developing new weed killers...

It’s hard to estimate exactly how much damage has already been wrought by herbicide resistance; the weeds are gaining ground faster than scientists can survey them...

Palmer amaranth benefits from incredible genetic diversity. It mates sexually (obligate outcrossing, in biology-speak), and female plants produce hundreds of thousands of seeds each year. The plants that sprouted with random mutations that inadvertently equipped them to survive showers of herbicide lived to reproduce with one another. Then, once applications of Roundup annihilated all the weeds in a field except the resistant Palmer amaranth, the pigweed could spread without competition...

Ultimately, Roundup was no match for the pigweed’s evolutionary vitality. Roundup-resistant Palmer amaranth populations quickly spread through the South, then moved north, hidden at times in cottonseed hulls used for animal feed. Once consumed, the tiny seeds passed intact through the digestive systems of the cows that ate them. Farmers who sprayed the contaminated cow manure on their fields — a common practice, as a cheap form of fertilizer — unwittingly assisted the weed’s spread. Palmer amaranth, the ultimate opportunist, now grows in at least 39 states.

A study published last month in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology adds to the evidence for the industry that produced this dog wool, as well as its ancient roots. The analysis by Iain McKechnie, a zooarchaeologist with the Hakai Institute, and two co-authors examined data collected over 55 years from over 16,000 specimens of the dog family across the Pacific Northwest. It suggests the vast majority of canid bones from 210 Pacific Coast archaeological sites, from Oregon to Alaska, were not from wild wolves, coyotes or foxes. Instead, they were domestic dogs, including small woolly ones that were kept for their fur...

By going back over numerous earlier studies, the team discovered that British Columbia was a pre-contact hot spot for domestic dogs. And on the south coast of British Columbia, smaller dogs that would have had woolly fur outnumbered larger hunting dogs, and “seemed to be a long-term, persistent part of Indigenous community life for the last 5,000 years,” Dr. McKechnie said.

These knee-high wool dogs weren’t combed like modern pooches but sheared like sheep.

Indeed, journal accounts from a Hudson’s Bay Company fur trading post at Fort Langley, British Columbia, in the early 19th century described canoes from people of the Cowichan tribe that were filled with “dogs more resembling Cheviot Lambs shorn of their wool.”

More at the New York Times (with pix of dog and pelt), and lots of data and discussion at the primary source link.  Here's the study area:

Farmers have always planted and prayed.  In the past they prayed for good weather and minimal pests/plant diseases.  Now they pray for other farms to fail.

Corn farmers are throwing another government-backed Hail Mary this year, planting more of the crop than in 2019 even though prices are near the bottom of a six-year slump. 

“They call it plant and pray,” said Al Kluis, a commodities broker in Wayzata. “What you want is a disaster in some other part of the Corn Belt or some other country.”.. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture now projects a record corn harvest in 2020... Demand can’t keep up with supply. Corn futures hovered around $3.15 per bushel last week, nearly a dollar less than a year ago... 

Farmers came into the spring with a large inventory of corn in storage, and demand for the commodity has been hit on multiple fronts since the onset of coronavirus. 

Ethanol plants have shuttered due to decisions by the Trump administration to exempt oil companies from ethanol standards and, more recently, the cratered demand for all types of fuel caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Ethanol production is running about 70% of capacity, Kluis said. 

Meanwhile, the shutdown of restaurants and idling of meatpacking plants that have led to farmers euthanizing chickens and hogs means the need for corn to feed livestock will probably drop about 20%... 

He acknowledged that the best thing for Minnesota corn farmers would be a weather catastrophe in some other part of the Corn Belt or Brazil or Argentina. 

“That’s a disheartening part about production agriculture right now, is you only really have success if some other farmer has a bad year,” he said... 

Also, crop insurance, which is 60% taxpayer subsidized, sets guaranteed revenue for corn at $3.88 per bushel this year.  “Without crop insurance, there’s not a bank around that would loan any money to a farmer,” Thalmann said.

Every spring I'm pleasantly startled when I visit our local Farm and Fleet store for hardware and supplies, and find livestock for sale.  Pictured above are the Rhode Island Red pullets ($2.99 each).

I would love to have purchased some for the back yard, but they would quickly have become food for the raptors or the foxes in the woods.

Reposted from last year because they are already available at Farm and Fleet, still $2.99 each.  Here's a menu of the breeds available.  I'm sorely tempted.  In any case they are a cheerful reminder that spring is coming.

(I posted this earlier today under the title "I'm puzzled by this road sign.")

A photo I encountered while digitizing the family memorabilia.  Two unknown-to-me-but-probably-distantly-related young women posing by a roadside sign.  Approximate date based on other photos would be early 1900s.


Assuming two letters are obscured by the young lady's hat, the only words I know that would fit are explosives, expensives, and expansives.

As much as I would love to learn that my ancestors planted fruit trees using explosives, I would have to think they were advertising "expansives," but a quick Google search doesn't reveal any such use of the term.

This is totally unimportant, but sometimes readers here have ideas or resources or interpretations that escape me.

Updated:   The puzzle was solved by readers Kara and Bob and Rob from Amersfoort and David and The First and some unknowns:

"Subsoil broken up by blast making easy path for roots."  Progressive farmers are "using dynamite for removing stumps and boulders, planting and cultivating fruit trees, regenerating barren soil, ditching, draining, excavating and road-making.  Write now for Free Booklet - "Tree Planting With Dynamite, No. 290.""

It makes sense (and I wouldn't have minded having a little dynamite when I first hand-tilled our tomato patch out back).  In retrospect the reason I ignored this possibility was that I thought there was no evidence on the sign for the top of a letter "L" behind her hat.  Now I realize her hat had a white peak.

Dynamite for gardening.  You learn something every day.

Addendum:  And here's that Du Pont booklet, located by reader Paul and others.

The video takes three minutes and is worth a watch.  Unfortunately I don't know how to embed it, but you can watch it at this BBC page. [addendum - here's a somewhat messy embed] -

As I searched for the YouTube version, I discovered that Will Harris' White Oak Pastures farm is well known and has been the subject of lots of videos.  I'm going to embed a seven-minute one entitled White Oak Pastures: Our Story -


I come from several generations of Norwegians and Norwegian-American farmers who raised milk cows, chickens, hogs, corn etc in the old "family farm" fashion, so this video spoke to me.  Mr. Harris has taken the process to the next level in terms of recycling farm "waste."  Very impressive.

Addendum:  For those who prefer reading to watching, here is a very good longread about Mr. Harris and his farm.

A factory farm.  Image source not provided (probably PETA), via.