Prior to heading up to Cotton Hill Lean-To I grabbed a bunch of scraps out of the paper recycling bin at my apartment for fire starting. I didn't want to leave a pay stub with other paper I brought up to the lean-to, so it went up with the rest of the camping trash.
Taken on Sunday March 21, 2010 at Fire.Milking a camel isn't all that much different from a dairy cow or goat.
I have lately gotten this idea of the parameters of my homestead that I’m putting together.
Having these parameters is fine, but in many ways I am pulling these numbers fairly arbitrarily based on some preconceived notions I have i my head that isn’t based on hard data. As a podcast on building an off-grid cabin notes, anchoring oneself to a series of numbers is dangerous because it risks you spending too much or thinking your vision is impossible.
Moreover, I’ve realized many of these numbers might as well be pulled out of thin air and my own biases. But I needed somewhere to start, and as cost and availability data come to be clearer, I will adjust my plan appropriately.
After a fresh February snow, a satellite about the size of a shoebox, busy snapping photographs as it circuited the planet at 17,000 miles per hour, captured something dark in Wisconsin.
About 56 tons of livestock bedding and manure had been spread atop Mark Zinke’s frozen alfalfa field.
The image eventually appeared on the computers of Stanford University researchers, who relayed it to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
Zinke, a Brownsville dairy farmer who cares for a herd of more than 1,300 cows, had forgotten about the whole thing until he later heard from the agency.
“Oh s—,” he recalled thinking at the time. “I guess we f—ed up. We gotta man up to it, right?”
Imagery collected by inexpensive satellites is ushering in an era of real-time monitoring. Some environmental advocates want the department to look down from the sky as it regulates livestock manure, a potential water contamination source.a