A bleak but musical weekend

What a bleak and dreary weekend. It is nice to see blue sky today.

The Iroquois Harmonizers had their annual show on Saturday. They sang and entertained for the first half of the show.

 After the intermission Wolffgang, a women's vocal ensemble group from Hobart High School sang. (The director is named Wolff, hence the name.) They were not a-cappella, which I thought broke the theme of the evening.

Closing out the show was another woman's group, Spot On. They were wearing crowns because last year they were crowned the 2013 Harmony Queens (Champions) at the Harmony Inc. International Quartet Contest. What was strange is that they were not living close to one another but rather in Indianapolis, Chicago, Saint Louis, and Louisville.

On Friday I noticed that workers were pouring a new entranceway to the Jasper County Historical Society Museum on Clark and Van Rensselaer. The Jasper County Historical Society has its monthly meeting on Tuesday night. The program, starting about 7:00, will feature Fuzz Kohley and his collection of Indian artifacts. If you are interested in who was living in Jasper County for the ten thousand years before the first white settlers, you might find the program interesting.

I think I forgot to mention last week that the city does not want sticks mixed in with the piles of leaves in the streets. The sticks clog the leaf vacuum. Please separate the sticks and branches and everything else from the leaves.

This coming Saturday will be the last farmers market on the court house square. That strikes me as strange because it is harvest time for gardens. Though the tomatoes are long gone, I still have sweet potatoes, kohlrabi, carrots, and beets left to harvest. I suspect that the unpleasantness of sitting in the cold is a bigger factor in closing the market than a lack of things to sell.

It is not just the garden that needs attention. I  have a lot of outside work to do to get ready for winter, so if I do not post much for the next few weeks, the change of seasons will be my excuse.

IBEC

The Chamber of Commerce held its monthly luncheon at Indiana Bio-Energy Company (IBEC), located in Pleasant Ridge. As I drove into the parking lot I noticed that a new 750,000 gallon storage tank was under construction. When it is completed, another one will be built.

 The lunch was in the new maintenance building. The table decorations were the three products that IBEC produces, ethanol, dried distillers grain (DDG), and corn oil. Several people could not resist making jokes about who had sampled the ethanol

 The maintenance building is not quite completed. It will replace a much smaller space in the main building.

After lunch we heard about IBEC, which was built in 2007. It is a fuel-only facility--the ethanol is only produced for fuel. When it was built, its capacity of 50 million gallons a year was large, but now plants twice as big are being built. The DDG is about 1/3 of the corn--it is what is left when all the starch is removed. The corn oil is the fat and is used for animal feed or for a source for biodiesel.  The plant began producing E85 a few months ago and, as reported in some other posts, IBEC will soon install a pump open to the public selling E10, E15, E30, and E85. (Everyone can use E10, cars after 2001 can use E15, but only flex-fuel cars can use E30 and E85.) The cost of the corn is about 80% of the cost of production.

Then it was time for a tour. The tour was probably the reason that this was the best attended Chamber lunch ever.

 We entered the main building and saw the control room from which the entire operation is run. All the equipment can be monitored and controlled from this room and its banks of computers. Every few hours a sample of output is taken to make sure that what is on the computer monitor is what is happening and any adjustments necessary are made to the process. Most of the time life is boring in the control room, but at those few times when there are problems, it can get very exciting.

 We then entered the production area outside the control room and this was an area in which photographs were not allowed. In this area was equipment that ground the corn to a fine consistency and then mixed it with hot water and enzymes to break down the starch. The starch molecule is made up of sugar units and it must be converted to sugar before it can be made into alcohol. Then the mix goes into three huge fermentation vats where yeast produces a corn beer with about 18% alcohol. When we were outside later we could see the vats. The three vats are used continuously and when the brewing is completed, the beer is piped into a fourth large tank.

The next step is to distill the beer, separating out the alcohol. It is done with heat which works because alcohol has a lower boiling point than water. The vapor flowing from the first tank to the second is about 100 proof. A bit more processing in the second column, called a rectifier, and the result is 190 proof, which is the best one can do with distilling.

 I asked what this smaller tower did and was told that it extracted alcohol from the vapor that came out of the second tower. It is complicated.

 190 proof is pretty potent, but for fuel the alcohol needs to be 200 proof--pure alcohol. The three tanks shown below do some kind a process that I did not quite catch, filtering out the water molecules. Though the guide did a good job, the crowd was large and the equipment in many places was very loud, so it was hard to hear.

 We then left the alcohol story and moved on to see what happened to the part of the corn that was not starch. It was dried in two very large drying bins that rotated. This room was hot because the air in the bins was very hot. The water vapor extracted here went through a heat exchange to recycle heat and then it was vented trough the stack. This water vapor is one of the most noticeable things you see when you drive past the plant on the highway, especially in winter. (You can see the water vapor behind the vats in the sixth picture of this post.)

 The DDG is taken by conveyor to a large, dark room where it is dumped into piles. From there a loader moves it to a hole and from there it can be loaded onto trucks. The plant sells the DDG to distributors who then sell it to farms for cattle and poultry feed.

 All of the corn used in the plant is produced locally and all of it arrives by truck. About half of the ethanol is shipped via rail and about half via truck. When the alcohol is shipped out, it is mixed with 2% gasoline. That changes its tax status and makes it undrinkable.

 As we left the building with the piles of DDG we passed by some cooling towers. They are used to control the temperature of the fermentation vats.

One odd thing mentioned on the tour: Goose Island Beer, a small brewery in Chicago, sends its waste beer, the part of the vat that has all the yeast, to IBEC and IBEC distills it.

Dine and Discuss

On Thursday afternoon the Culp family invited a number of community leaders and a few bloggers to a Dine and Discuss event on their family farm. As I walked from my car to the reception area, I passed by a combine with a price tag in the window. The point of the price tag, I think, was to point out that farming is a high-tech, capital-intensive enterprise. Many people who do not come in contact with farms and farmers have an outdated view of farms, a view that reflects farm life many decades ago when their ancestors may still have farmed.

 There was a reception tent with crackers and cheese and wine from Carpenter Creek Cellars. People mingled and networked. I recognized a lot of people who I have seen at various county and city government meetings. Then it was time to get started with the main menu. The attendees were divided into three groups by the color of their nametags, and they were invited to view three presentations about different aspects of modern farming. My first station was the technology exhibit.

 Here we heard about autosteering, the ability of modern farm equipment to drive without a human at the steering wheel. One of the advantages of this technology is that a farmer can program all the farm equipment to take exactly the same path in the field, minimizing the amount of soil that is compacted. (Compacted soil is not good for crop growth.) There was a brief discussion of soil sampling, which allows the farmer to see exactly where in the field fertilizers need to be applied and in what amounts. Related to this, modern combines produce yield data as they combine so the farmer can see not just what the field as a whole yields, but can map out within the field how the yield varies. Areas of the field that have low yields can then be examined to discover why they did not perform well and remedies can be applied.

The presenter then turned to scouting, which can be done with individuals walking the fields and observing where there are problems. However, there is a new, high-tech way to do this using a remote-sensing vehicle or quadcopter (or drone--a name which may have bad connotations). This was without a doubt the highlight of this and perhaps all the demonstrations.

 The quadcopter can be remotely controlled or it can have a preset path programmed into it. If remotely controlled, it should have a home set so that if contact is lost it will come back. It should also have a beacon that broadcasts GPS coordinates so that if it unexpectedly lands in the middle of a corn field, it can be found. The vehicle has a camera attached and what it can detect depends on what camera and the software that analyses the images can detect. The model demonstrated cost about $4500, but that is less than what more primitive models cost just a few years ago.

Our fifteen minutes were up and it was off to the livestock exhibit area. The Culp farms raise pigs and beef cattle. They no longer breed their own pigs but buy the young pigs when they are seventeen days old from a farrowing operation. (The Pig Adventures at Fair Oaks Farms is a farrowing operation.) They raise the pigs for about five months and then the pigs go to market to become pork chops, bacon, and other delicious meats. The price that the pig brings depends on the quality of the meat, so proper genetics and proper care matter a great deal.

We learned that pigs like their food ground up finely but cattle digest rough food better than finely-ground food. Plus cow stomaches are designed to handle cellulose, while those of pigs are much more like ours, which cannot digest cellulose.

The Culp farms have about 200 head of cattle. The cows are brought into heat for the Memorial Day weekend, when they are artificially inseminated. Some that do not seem to have good genetics have embryos implanted and become surrogate mothers (if the implant takes). The presenter for this station was Dr. Kenneth Culp III who resides in Kentucky and teaches at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

 The last station was about corn and soybeans, the two major crops of Jasper County farmers. (Jasper County is the number one county in the state in terms of total agricultural sales, with White County second.) The break-even point for a farmer growing corn is a price of about $3.60 per bushel, which is a bit higher right now than the market price. Although the yields may be very good this year, it may be a bad year for farmers. (Any good economist would tell you that that is because the demand curve for corn and other farm products is inelastic.) One of the presenters was from the IBEC, the ethanol producer at Pleasant Ridge. He said their plant uses 17.5 million bushels of corn a year. The starch in the corn is turned to alcohol, and everything that is left over is turned into DDG, dried distillers grain. It is mixed with other ingredients to produce livestock feed.

There was some discussion of GMO crops, another area in which technology has altered agriculture. GMO is the acronym of genetically modified organism. Humans have been genetically modifying plants and animals since the dawn of agriculture by preserving some traits and discarding others and by selective breeding. However, in recent years scientists have found ways to directly manipulate genes by inserting genes from one species into the DNA of another. It is only these organisms that are considered GMO. Round-up ready corn and soybeans were produced in this way. There are some in the US who are convinced that anything GMO is bad, though this view seems more common in Europe. About 90% of the corn grown in the US is GMO. The presenters pointed out that GMO crops reduce the need for cultivation, herbicides, and pesticides.

 Then it was time to dine on food products produced in Jasper County: pork, sweet corn, green beans, melons, and homemade blueberry pie.

After dinner, Kendell Culp gave some closing remarks. He remarked at how important science is to modern agriculture, reinforcing a message that was clear from the three earlier presentations. He also commented on how rapidly agriculture was changing. Farmers today are doing almost everything in different ways than they were done in the past. For example, the pigs now live indoors where they are protected from extreme weather, predators, and disease spread from humans. People around the world are interested in what is happening to agriculture in the Midwest because it affects the prices that they pay for food. In the drought year of 2012, television crews from four television networks, including one from China and Al Jezeera, interviewed him as a typical American farmer because their viewers wanted to know what was happening to food prices.

He also talked a bit about property taxes. Although property taxes have fallen for most people, they have risen for farmers because the value of farm land has tripled in the past ten years.

He thanked the FFA students who helped serve food and park cars. He thanked the Indiana Soybean Alliance for their support for this event. (I talked to a representative of the Indiana Soybean Alliance and discovered that he also worked for the Indiana Corn. The two different groups have the same staff.) And then as the sun set, the event ended. It was an informative and enjoyable afternoon.

Nature, Parks, and Gardens

    Last week I was surprised to see a frog attached to a window. It did not seem to mind when I took a flash photo of it. It may be an eastern gray tree frog, which can change colors to some extent to match its background.

For the past few years I have been trying to get some prairie flowers growing along the street by my house. This year I got yellow coneflowers big enough to bloom--a lot of prairie perennials do not bloom the first year.  In the background are false sunflowers.

 I walked through the high school prairie area last week to see how their plants were doing and noticed that there was a lot of giant ragweed and wild carrot invading their fields. I thought that natural prairies were resistant to invasion by these interlopers, so I wonder if their planting is not balanced quite right.

I have been traveling a lot recently, one reason posting has been erratic. One place I stopped was at a Lebanon city park where they have a hill as an attraction. Such a simple thing yet kids enjoy it. Two boys were using the hill to launch kites while I was watching. They would run down the hill with their kites and that would get them up into the air. There are a lot of things kids can find to do with a hill.

 Another simple park feature that many communities are adding are splash pads. They can be quite small or fairly elaborate. Often they are activated by pressing a button and then they stay on for a few minutes. To continue playing, the button has to be pressed again. They are like fountains but people are encouraged to play in them instead of staying out of them.

The Rensselaer Republican had an article on July 14 about the RBI softball league's new home, a field that volunteers and parents built behind Bethany Free Church. I finally got out there to see what they had done.

 While I was on the east side of town I took a look at the raised bed gardens that CDC Resources had installed last year for their consumers. One of the beds was mostly beans and cucumbers and they were doing well. They were a bit surprised at how much cucumbers spread.

The raised bed gardens were constructed last year by the Teen Mission group. This year they laid the foundation stones for a small greenhouse. The foundation is visible above the garden.

If you want to do a cheap version of a raised bed garden, find some five gallon plastic buckets, cut off their bottoms, place them on the ground, and fill them with good soil. Plant whatever you want to plant and see what happens. My daughter-in-law tried sweet potatoes last year and was surprised by how much they yielded.

This evening I noticed a drilling machine next to Lincoln Street. My guess is that it is doing drilling cores to test for the foundation of the storm water treatment plant that the city is required to build. It has gone beyond the talking.

Do you know what a banner stone is? If you collect Indian artifacts, you certainly do, because banner stones are highly collectable. However, the purpose of these objects remains the subject of controversy. They almost certainly were associated with atlatls, the dominant weapon and hunting device prior to the bow and arrow. The banner stones were developed only in North America (though atlatls were used throughout the world). Rensselaer resident David Volken has had an article published in an archeology journal that argues that banner stones were not attached to the atlatl or spear thrower itself as many in the field believe, but to the dart or spear to give it more momentum and thus striking power.

People today think that we are much smarter than people in the past (after all, we have cell phones), but despite all of our technology, there are bits of lost technology that we are still struggling to understand and recover.

(The frog likes my window. It is back again tonight.)