Letters
To Farm & Country
Beating the bug
Robert Irwin's "Millennium Bugged" (Sept. 21) offered much for farmers to think on.The Year 2000 Problem (y2k) stems from the fact that most software programs were written using the date format: MM/DD/YY. What will surprise some observers, especially those outside of the IS (information systems) community, is that this was a purposely made, economically sound, engineering decision at the time.
When applications were developed decades ago, an important goal was to conserve hardware (e.g., disk space, memory, registers, etc.) at a time when these resources were very expensive. In the 1950s and 1960s, when legacy - or mainframe - system programs were being written, computer memory was in short supply and very expensive. This represented a serious challenge to computer program designers, who had to seek creative ways to squeeze their programs into limited, expensive storage space. Their way out was the two-digit date.
Think of your chequebook and the imprinted date. It will usually be in the form __________,19__. You usually fill in ONLY the last two digits for the year. In the same way, computers are hardwired to recognize only the last two year digits. The Year 2000 Problem is essentially the result of a shortcut and money-saving trick that has turned into a shortsighted and expensive nightmare.
Following are some practical examples that illustrate the Y2K problem:
* I was born in 1961. If I ask the computer to calculate how old I am today, it subtracts 61 from 98 and announces that I'm 37. But what happens in the year 2000? The computer will subtract 61 from 00 and will state that I am -39 years old.What does this have to do with farmers when Jan 1. 2000 rolls around? Worldwide brownouts are a given, and it is highly probable that we will be experiencing major blackouts for extended periods of time. One just has to spend a few moments to imagine what this means. No water, no heat. Disruption of the food supply chain...the list goes on. Just imagine an eastern Ontario ice storm - only much much worse and much longer. The Canadian Forces are already planning to pre-position emergency equipment and supplies as 2000 approaches.* In 1990, a 107-year-old woman in Denmark received a letter from the local school system welcoming her to first grade. Her age was read as 7.
Farmers must be alerted to some practical things that need to be done. The sad fact is that many in the country are sitting on gold mines, while at the same time they are utterly dependant on grocery store chains for food or city water.
Are they able to heat their houses without electricity? Or turn their sump pump on? Generators are good only for emergencies and for the short term. They will not last long in a serious y2k scenario.
Prudence and wisdom are in order. Farmers must get their wells going, complete with hand pumps. Every farm house should have a wood stove. What about a few chickens? Or sheep? What about keeping some grain back - not waiting for higher prices but to eat? Does this sound drastic?
Better to be prepared. Farmers have all the resources they need to provide their families with some independence in the likely case of y2k disruptions. But planning must begin now.
The Internet is the best place to find information on the subject of y2k, as well as the preparations one can take. Here are some of the best web sites that you can go to:
www.garynorth.com, www.year2000.com/y2karticles.html
For, preparation, two sites stand out:
www.millenniabcs.com/prep.htm,
www.waltonfeed.com/self/default.htm
Brad Sayers,
Wyoming
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AGRI-BUSINESS
Nuts & bolts
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On the seed side, Hoechst Schering AgrEvo GmbH (AgrEvo) announced last month that it will acquire most of Cargill Inc.'s North American seeds assets for US$650 million. The purchase of Cargill's North American hybrid seed business creates "secured access to elite germplasm [fueling] the market expansion of our Liberty Link, StarLink, SeedLink and other technologies," said AgrEvo chairman and CEO Dr. Gerhard Prante. Cargill's Canadian seed distribution house, which operates as Cargill Seeds, remains in Cargill's hands.
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UNEARTHED
Notes from All Over
RAM, rain and ranting
New definitions for computer terms, courtesy of Farm Journal magazine.
Log on: Make the woodstove hotter.Log off: Don't add wood.
Monitor: Keep your eye on the woodstove.
Download: Take the firewood off the truck.
Megahertz: What happens when you drop a log on your toe during downloading.
Floppy disk: What you get from piling too much wood.
Hard drive: Getting home in a snowstorm.
Screen: What you need for the mosquito season.
Byte: What the mosquitoes do to you if you don't have a screen.
Modem: What you did to the hayfields.
Mouse: What eats the grain in the barn.
Random Access Memory: You can't remember how much that new rifle cost when your wife asks.
While El Nino produced drought conditions in some parts of Ontario, it induced abundant rainfall in California, stimulating testing and sales for new crop protection products, especially fungicides, reports AgriMarketing magazine. "It was a good year to experiment with new products...Some of the newer chemistries have gotten a good shot," said Dan Malcolm, editorial director and publisher of several California-based magazines, including American Vineyard. "If those products prove themselves, 1999 will be a good marketing year. I'll bet we hear about product successes in the wake of El Nino in next year's advertising campaigns."
South Dakota Gov. Bill
Janklow had better know more about politics than he does about
modern
animal husbandry.
The six drugs that he blasted Canadian beef producers for using in cattle sold into the U.S. are the wrong ones, says an official in Ottawa. Claude Lavigne, director of animal health in the food production division of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, told the Manitoba Co-operator that the drugs Janklow instructed his state troopers to look for in imported cattle are approved for use in the U.S., but not necessarily in Canada.
Janklow had complained that "Canadians make us do extra testing on grain and they depress our cattle prices by dumping their excess cattle on our markets, so I'm going to make sure they are following our federal and state laws."
One of the drugs listed by the governor's office in a press release isn't a drug at all but describes a family of drugs encompassing two of the other five substances named by Janklow. Two other drugs listed are not approved for use in Canada.
Another drug is approved by regulators in both Canada and the U.S. - but testing shows it hasn't been used by Canadian producers for three years, Lavigne said. Another drug, Dimetridazole, is licensed in Canada for use in hogs and turkeys, but not cattle.
Reckon he knows that Americans annually consume $31 per capita worth of Canadian food, while we fill our faces with $216 worth of food imported from the U.S., according to Keystone Agricultural Producers? farming by the numbers Farming by the numbers The following world agricultural economy indicators were gleaned from a Purdue University-New Holland conference last month on the Purdue campus at West Lafayette, Indiana. n Increase in world global cereal production over the past 30 years: 100 per cent; drop in cereal prices: 50 per cent. n Annual growth rate of world cereal production in the 1960s: 3.3 per cent; in the '70s: 2.6; the '80s: 1.8; the '90s: 1.4 n World soybean acreage: 158 million acres; increase over the past decade: 20 per cent n Average percentage of Indonesian diet that is dairy and meat: 2; of U.S. diet: 20. n Percentage of U.S. farmland owned by "non-commercial" farmers with sales of less than US$100,000: 49; of U.S. livestock farms: 85. n Percentage of New Holland tractors sold to part-time farmers: 50; of New Holland combines sold to custom cutters: 60. n Number of tractors sold in Canada in 1997: 13,588; in India: 242,000. n Percentage of the corn crop expected to go to consumer products such as sweeteners by 2000: 25. n Percentage of U.S. pork production controlled by top 40 firms: 31. n Percentage of 1998 food sales controlled by top 10 U.S. integrated wholesale-retailers: 60.
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