AgriCulture-TURKANA FARMS

November 9, 2019

WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK:

It seems that what's new is the cold. And colder it will get. This may be your last chance for swiss chard, in now limited quantities. Kale is still chugging along, however, in both curly and flat varieties. Egg production is diminishing fast as the light fades, but we still have enough for our individual customers.

The arc of electricity that crosses Lasher Ave. (Photo by Mark Scherzer)

Hi all, Mark here.

Getting ready to come up to the farm Thursday, gathering my things, I realized that up near the top of the hierarchy of items I remind myself I must bring, at least as prominently as my wallet and far ahead of my belt, is the charging cord for my phone. It turns out that the wonder of wireless connectivity, which I use so intensely that I lately seem to need to recharge the phone twice a day, is anything but wireless. My life, and our kitchen, our office and even our bedrooms at the farm, seem entangled in a snarl of wires for all the wonderful electronic devices we use.

Electricity is a blessing. The wires that carry it, somewhat less so. The recurrent deliberate blackouts California has endured recently were initiated in order to avoid wildfires being ignited by sparks from the high voltage wires that carry power from generating plants to transformers. I don’t understand the scientific process, but my friend Paul tells me that high voltage and an exposed wire in the proper conditions can cause the electricity to arc out of the wire and set off fires. We all know how critical electricity is to us: saving labor, transmitting information, saving lives. A recent feature on NPR reported how agriculture was particularly acutely affected by the outages. Cows can’t just suspend being milked, and electric milking machines, during the outages had to be run off gas generators. But the farmer interviewed for the story said the loss of power and additional expense was something he could live with in order to preserve the lives and property of his neighbors. It was a nice recognition of our interconnection in a larger community.

My mind has been heavily focused on wires lately, because we are ready to bring electricity out to the new barn.

As you all know, the barn structure got finished a couple of weeks ago. It was of course not as affordable as we had hoped. The cost of the structure itself, around $38,000, was only about $8,000 more than the insurance proceeds we received from the burning of the old one, and when we got the estimate the whole replacement process seemed manageable. The builder, Henry Kriz, did a great job. But it turned out there were lots of ancillary costs we didn’t mentally factor in when thinking we had the replacement licked. Emergency repairs to the water tank and pump were about $2,000. Debris removal was $4,000. We moved the location of the barn rather than pay to demolish the old concrete slab it sat on, but we decided we needed a new concrete floor, which added $9,400 to the cost. And then moving the water tank and pump to the barn’s new location added another nearly two thousand. Now we are working on getting the interior mangers built, interior gates, door handles, etc. It will all add up. But we managed, thanks to good timing on resolution of cases I was working on in my legal practice.

I was ready for another not insignificant expense for electrical work, and hoped to get the barn on a separate account (at agricultural rates) from our home account. But when we got the estimates, from someone whose work for us in the past seemed very fairly priced, it was rather stunning. Nearly $20,000, half the cost of the building itself, and that was without counting whatever National Grid, our electric utility, would charge us for running power across the street from where the lines currently run to our side of the street and instituting service.

“Didn’t