Rose Valley Vineyard WA

07/27/2024

07/26/2024

Now for something truly controversial:

Clerestories are architecturally superior to skylights, not to mention a more-sound engineering solution.

06/21/2024

"What about wealthy farmers?" Someone asks on the thread where I found this image.

Fundamentally, most Americans fail to understand the difference between wealth and being wealthy.

Wealth is stored value, assets, etc. You can have a little wealth, or a lot. A person with shoes may appear wealthy to a person without.

This is the problem with the "tax the billionaires" crowd: Musk is filthy rich, ok. But he has millions available to use, not billions. If Musk were taxed as if his *net worth* were *income*, it would destroy thousands of jobs, hundreds of businesses, and a great deal of it would evaporate never to be recovered. Not hidden, but destroyed as surely as if it had been burned up. Because a great deal of the value in things is perception of their value. Dump millions of shares of Ford stock, EVERYONE's Ford stock takes a hit. Cashing out Musk's wealth means liquidating assets, selling equipment, facilities, foregoing investment in development. It's killing and eating (consuming) the goose rather than collecting the eggs.

Farmers sometimes have high dollar value assets such as land and capital equipment. These are not readily convertible to cash, and definitely cannot (say in the case of a multimillion dollar harvester) have their purchase value recaptured by sale; only by using them over the course of years can one *eventually* recoup the cost of depreciating equipment. Think of it like buying. Anew car. A day after you buy that car off the lot, it's a used car. It has lost the "new car" portion of its value. The older it gets, the less it's worth. Maybe it was a $50k car when you bought it. A year later it is worth nowhere near that. Farm equipment depreciates to a certain level and then has a low minimal value as long as it still works. Like a car that runs has a certain minimum value, but if you sell it you can't get to work, and if you try to sell it quickly you won't even realize the nominal blue book value.

Land can't be immediately sold for full value. It either takes time or it goes at a discount. In either case, selling these things eliminates the farmer as a going concern. The capacity to produce value is destroyed or at best transferred to someone else. Usually such a transfer also results in at least temporarily diminished production capacity.
But the popular narrative has no understanding of effects, much less of second and third order effects.

06/17/2024

This is what Kim and I have been working on in our "spare time".

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61561222285255

Welcome to The Castle on Secor (originally known as the Cozy Castle). Bookings available!

05/11/2024

Being ill has forced me to work in short spurts, but at least it finally got the weeping willow planted by the pond, and the red Japanese maple too.

05/05/2024

Today has been a day of electrical wonders.

Got the south wall of the workshop wired with electrical outlets, and replaced the clunky 1950s/Dr. Frankenstein light switch.

Then I worked on the big mixer motor that came with the 300 gallon dairy stainless steel tank.

Completely rewired the hi/lo speed switch and replaced the cord and everything works great. I wasn't sure if it would, when I picked up the entire lot.

05/03/2024

Most of Cowlitz County is not served by any of the statewide network of centers Cascadia Tech is part of, but the new satellite program, which is set to begin

04/26/2024

Lobb's or gummy gooseberry (Ribes lobbii) spotted blooming today in a clearcut near the eastern Columbia River Gorge. This is quite the nice native shrub for our backyard habitats. Your hummingbirds will definitely like it! Gummy gooseberry has a wide distribution from the Cascades west to the coastal mountains in both Oregon and Washington.

03/30/2024

Savor Southwest Washington Wine will serve pours from 20 Clark County wineries and tasting rooms such as Rezabek Vineyards and Brian Carter Cellars, as well as bites from Tommy O’s, Say Ciao, Frontier

03/27/2024

At WSU with WA Dept. Of Agriculture today. Learning about soils and soil sampling techniques at the D.F. Allimender Center in Puyallup.

03/06/2024

See what's happening in our local vineyards and tasting rooms!

02/26/2024

Did not expect snow today. It came down in a thick flurry for a little while but did not stick, thank goodness.

02/20/2024

Ag work is a little different from most, in that it comes in bursts, and entails a lot of down time in between. If prices on the consumer end don't rise, there won't be enough margin for small farms to continue, only massive monoculture industrial farming. There is a place for that in mass producing food for the world's maringal economies, but there are ALSO structural and quality benefits to massively paralllel small scale production from family farms.

If mandatory overtime pay means that more people get hired to do a little less work each, at the low pay that is typical of unskilled or low skilled farm work, then the people this is supposedly designed to help, will see less overall pay in their pockets, and more part time help will not see a "liveable wage" (for whatever value that particular moving target holds) either. Some of these people will prpbably end \up work ing full time at lcoation A and part time at locaiton B, whiule other do fulltime Location B and part time location A. Shuffling the hours to keep their overall income up while not incurring a wage penalty to the employer.

Of course having two jobs means more commute time, hav ing more part time employees means more overhead for employers, and more people who just generally need multiple jobs to make ends meet is less desirable than people who have to work hard at one job for somewhat more hours. But none of it changes the underlying value proposition of the labor, or makes it more efficient. It just results in more costs being passed to consumers.

https://www.wenatcheeworld.com/news/our-voices-are-not-being-heard-in-olympia-red-apple-orchards-shutters-due-to-rising/article_cb091aba-cc58-11ee-89ce-e7df67dc7c08.html?

ORONDO — At a Washington Senate Labor and Commerce Committee hearing last month, April Clayton, owner of Red Apple Orchards, a second-generation-owned farm in Orondo, tearfully told lawmakers her family

02/19/2024

Incremental progress update... managed to get the mounting post for the wireless bridge installed at the barn, and we now have WiFi in the barn, which gives us WiFi calling, a must with no cell service here.

02/04/2024

When you gotta get s**t done, and don't have any gel available, nothing beats the beauty of having mechanical advantages. Tools, leverage, the block and tackle built civilization, in some part

01/21/2024