cinerion on Nostr: Coming to the countryside as a chem eng has been enlightening. I was used to shiny ...
Coming to the countryside as a chem eng has been enlightening. I was used to shiny steel equipment, fully specified in their capabilities, and very performant. Ofc that's not affordable for a farmer. Primary production has very low profit margins, which leaves almost nothing to invest in further processing equipment, which is why it's not done as much, so farmers here remain poor for all their lives (There's also the fact all their money somehow ends up in the bartender's pockets, but let's forget about high time preference cultures for a second here)
I can't accept that. I refuse to sell produce as is out of the plants and let others make all the profits without risking skin cancer or snake bites. So I need equipment. Yet there's no money for equipment... except there is. Shiny equipment is good and all, but 80%, if not 90%, of their performance can be achieved with makeshift equipment, made out of wood in many cases.
This is not new, that's what farmers built for centuries to process their produce. Yet I see very little of that here, nor I was told about those archaic technologies, much cheaper and easier to make now compared to modern tech, thanks to the ubiquitous availability of powertools. We're only told about the new at the classroom, while old is still perfectly fine to use. It also doesn't help that there's increasing regulation forbidding the use of older tech bc "dangerous" or "not certified" or some other bullshit.
What I've been doing is to think of the many unit operations I learned, and then ponder, "can I make this out of wood, screws and maybe a bit of metal here and there?", turns out the answer is yes quite often. If the answer is no, I take a trip to the hardware store to look for inspiration.
This beats supervising a control panel in an industrial plant or crunching numbers into python for research every time.
I can't accept that. I refuse to sell produce as is out of the plants and let others make all the profits without risking skin cancer or snake bites. So I need equipment. Yet there's no money for equipment... except there is. Shiny equipment is good and all, but 80%, if not 90%, of their performance can be achieved with makeshift equipment, made out of wood in many cases.
This is not new, that's what farmers built for centuries to process their produce. Yet I see very little of that here, nor I was told about those archaic technologies, much cheaper and easier to make now compared to modern tech, thanks to the ubiquitous availability of powertools. We're only told about the new at the classroom, while old is still perfectly fine to use. It also doesn't help that there's increasing regulation forbidding the use of older tech bc "dangerous" or "not certified" or some other bullshit.
What I've been doing is to think of the many unit operations I learned, and then ponder, "can I make this out of wood, screws and maybe a bit of metal here and there?", turns out the answer is yes quite often. If the answer is no, I take a trip to the hardware store to look for inspiration.
This beats supervising a control panel in an industrial plant or crunching numbers into python for research every time.