There will be a glut on the market for fullsize/oversize/jacked-up pickup trucks very soon.
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Sunday, January 10, 2016
Idea 1 - Reduced tillage modification for paper pot transplanter, plus bigger scale.
Hey.
Our garden is tiny, and all raised bed. But I think about small-scale farming from time to time. When I do think about it, I tend to research it in depth and some pretty obscure subjects, and I like to combine seemingly disconnected ideas to make new things. Two of the things that have caught my eye are reduced-tillage techniques and paper pot transplanters.
Reduced tillage techniques seek to improve soil conditions while simultaneously reducing inputs (herbicide, labour, tractor fuel, fertilizer, etc) by incorporating cover crops and just not ploughing as much - or at all on some farms. For example, in the fall after a field has been harvested the farmer would plant a mix of fall rye and clover which would grow until it is killed off by frost, mechanical action, or herbicide . Once killed off, it is left undisturbed, adding carbon and nitrogen back to the soil and acting as mulch to block weeds from growing. Come spring, the field is planted with a special seed drill which sweeps the planting rows clear of "trash" (cover crop debris) then cuts a channel more aggressively with a sharp fluted opening disk then plants the seed and rollers compact it in. Most zero-till seed drills are huge units for industrial-scale farms - though there is a unit manufactured in Canada for 5' wide planting with a small tractor.
On a totally different scale - paper-pot transplanters are a system for transplanting a single row of closely spaced seedlings (originally rice, now many plants) into soft, loose, trash-free, well-worked soil. They are pulled manually while another person loads trays of seedlings. The seedlings are growing in little paper cells in a honeycomb pattern which tear apart in strips as the transplanter is pulled along. A regular angled opener opens a furrow in the soil for the seedling strip as it is pulled along, the seedling strip is pulled out the back, and little wheels close the furrow around the seedling. Because the transplanter is being pulled by a person it would be too hard to pull if it had a row sweep or disk opener required to plant into soil with a lot of old roots.
A handy farmer could rig up a paper-pot transplanter to a small tractor and add a trash sweep/hoe and heavy fluted disc opener - but then he'd be running the tractor (paying for fuel and labour) to very slowly plant a single row of crops... which are plantable at very narrow spacing so he'd probably prefer to plant many rows or interplant several crops at the same time...
Well, fortunately the paper pot transplanter is mostly flat and at an angle... so if the feed were set up to come off one corner of the tray rather than the middle of the end, several rows of them could be stacked staggered - just like mouldboard ploughs are - to plant several rows while still having access to load trays from the front/top.
So there you go - a multi-row paper-pot transplanter which might be able to plant into zero-till fields.
Add a roller-crimper in front and you can kill off the cover and transplant your crop in a single pass.
Our garden is tiny, and all raised bed. But I think about small-scale farming from time to time. When I do think about it, I tend to research it in depth and some pretty obscure subjects, and I like to combine seemingly disconnected ideas to make new things. Two of the things that have caught my eye are reduced-tillage techniques and paper pot transplanters.
Reduced tillage techniques seek to improve soil conditions while simultaneously reducing inputs (herbicide, labour, tractor fuel, fertilizer, etc) by incorporating cover crops and just not ploughing as much - or at all on some farms. For example, in the fall after a field has been harvested the farmer would plant a mix of fall rye and clover which would grow until it is killed off by frost, mechanical action, or herbicide . Once killed off, it is left undisturbed, adding carbon and nitrogen back to the soil and acting as mulch to block weeds from growing. Come spring, the field is planted with a special seed drill which sweeps the planting rows clear of "trash" (cover crop debris) then cuts a channel more aggressively with a sharp fluted opening disk then plants the seed and rollers compact it in. Most zero-till seed drills are huge units for industrial-scale farms - though there is a unit manufactured in Canada for 5' wide planting with a small tractor.
On a totally different scale - paper-pot transplanters are a system for transplanting a single row of closely spaced seedlings (originally rice, now many plants) into soft, loose, trash-free, well-worked soil. They are pulled manually while another person loads trays of seedlings. The seedlings are growing in little paper cells in a honeycomb pattern which tear apart in strips as the transplanter is pulled along. A regular angled opener opens a furrow in the soil for the seedling strip as it is pulled along, the seedling strip is pulled out the back, and little wheels close the furrow around the seedling. Because the transplanter is being pulled by a person it would be too hard to pull if it had a row sweep or disk opener required to plant into soil with a lot of old roots.
A handy farmer could rig up a paper-pot transplanter to a small tractor and add a trash sweep/hoe and heavy fluted disc opener - but then he'd be running the tractor (paying for fuel and labour) to very slowly plant a single row of crops... which are plantable at very narrow spacing so he'd probably prefer to plant many rows or interplant several crops at the same time...
Well, fortunately the paper pot transplanter is mostly flat and at an angle... so if the feed were set up to come off one corner of the tray rather than the middle of the end, several rows of them could be stacked staggered - just like mouldboard ploughs are - to plant several rows while still having access to load trays from the front/top.
So there you go - a multi-row paper-pot transplanter which might be able to plant into zero-till fields.
Add a roller-crimper in front and you can kill off the cover and transplant your crop in a single pass.
Sunday, January 3, 2016
2016 - Expanding the topics to be covered
When I started this blog I wanted to write primarily about my experiments in setting up a domain server using Ubuntu - but work obligations took my attention away from that project.
Now it's 2016 and it looks like the Zentyal CE project is a better solution than mine for most use cases - maybe I could do a few things better ... but the people on that project have a lot more time to consistently work on it.
A while back I expanded to include anything related to small heterogeneous networks... But I didn't have much time to devote to that either as my work schedule is pretty erratic.
At my wife's urging I have now decided to expand the topics covered to include my invention ideas. Some of them are ideas for new products - some changes to existing products - and some are process ideas or comparisons of different ways different companies do things. She probably is tired of me coming home saying ... truck designs are bad, they should be like this... and ... small business server designs are ill-fit, they should be like that, and small retail site networks are unnecessarily complex, they should be like that.... etc but then never telling anyone else about it.
I often come home telling my wife about how x-company does their network (inefficiently) or the like and it should be like this - her response is usually that I should blog about it (without naming names) in the hopes that someone who is in a position to change things reads it.
Some of the posts may not be new ideas - just explanation of existing ideas that are not implemented often enough because people are just too rushed to do them - for example a planned post about mounting wall-mountable electronics to your desk to cut clutter. Others are not often done presumably because of corporate inertia or contractual obligations.
Anyhow, hopefully people find my ideas interesting. Also I intend to learn a few skills to experiment with my ideas - drafting with sketchup, exporting for CNC/3D-Printing/Lasercutting etc, and sewing would be super handy to create diagrams and/or proof-of concepts pieces.
Currently I have a list of 27 ideas to blog about, I'm sure I will come up with more over the year.
Also I'll likely have occasional posts about how to do things computer/network wise...
So, here's a few from my current list:
Now it's 2016 and it looks like the Zentyal CE project is a better solution than mine for most use cases - maybe I could do a few things better ... but the people on that project have a lot more time to consistently work on it.
A while back I expanded to include anything related to small heterogeneous networks... But I didn't have much time to devote to that either as my work schedule is pretty erratic.
At my wife's urging I have now decided to expand the topics covered to include my invention ideas. Some of them are ideas for new products - some changes to existing products - and some are process ideas or comparisons of different ways different companies do things. She probably is tired of me coming home saying ... truck designs are bad, they should be like this... and ... small business server designs are ill-fit, they should be like that, and small retail site networks are unnecessarily complex, they should be like that.... etc but then never telling anyone else about it.
I often come home telling my wife about how x-company does their network (inefficiently) or the like and it should be like this - her response is usually that I should blog about it (without naming names) in the hopes that someone who is in a position to change things reads it.
Some of the posts may not be new ideas - just explanation of existing ideas that are not implemented often enough because people are just too rushed to do them - for example a planned post about mounting wall-mountable electronics to your desk to cut clutter. Others are not often done presumably because of corporate inertia or contractual obligations.
Anyhow, hopefully people find my ideas interesting. Also I intend to learn a few skills to experiment with my ideas - drafting with sketchup, exporting for CNC/3D-Printing/Lasercutting etc, and sewing would be super handy to create diagrams and/or proof-of concepts pieces.
Currently I have a list of 27 ideas to blog about, I'm sure I will come up with more over the year.
Also I'll likely have occasional posts about how to do things computer/network wise...
So, here's a few from my current list:
- A new class of work truck
- Simple kit for humanitarian relief for hard to get to areas
- New (slightly different) form factor for small retail/branch office server
- A line of work clothes - because most workwear companies assume you're in construction OR a mechanic OR a lawyer, with little in between
- Changing network scope on SOHO RouterOS routers (Routerboard) - there is a trick to it.
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