Industrial Food Processes

Here’s the link backstory to my article on Wired Science about the industrial processes used to manufacture traditional Thanksgiving foods. Aside from Jon Snyder’s tremendous photo (seen above), the best part about the story was digging through old food process patents to see how food makers think about their goals.
Energy efficiency and technical rationality are [...]

More About Egg Production Than You Want to Know

A model one million hen in-line egg production facility
(tags: eggs)

Commercial Egg Production and Processing
"[In-line] Egg producers commonly deliver eggs to retail outlets within one week of lay. The second type of layer facility is the off-line facility. This facility functions nearly identical to the in-line facility except that the eggs are transported out [...]

Precision Farmers — And the Trade Magazines That Love Them

NASA – Snapshots From Space Cultivate Fans Among Midwest Farmers
(tags: precisionfarming)

PrecisionAg.com – Ag Technology’s Leading Indicators
(tags: precisionfarming)

Robert Blair talking about managing data
2009 Precision Ag farmer of the year
(tags: precisionfarming)

Precision Pays
Precision agriculture website.
(tags: precisionfarming)

Precision Pays
"According to a report in Mid-South Farmer magazine, Bill Robertson of the National Cotton Council says Randy Taylor, Oklahoma State University will [...]

Americans Use More Energy in 8 Hours Than All Pre-Farming Humans Did in a Year

“In view of the fact that the earth in its natural state could hardly support more than about ten million food-gatherers, the maximum consumption of energy by humans in preagricultural times probably amounted to no more than the equivalent of about four million tons of coal annually.”
— Harrison Brown, “Energy in Our Future” from the [...]

Distributing Food on the Multiuse Roads of 1903 New York

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzZF2PvQXlw]
Here’s a look at a food distribution system from 1903, as filmed by Thomas Edison. This market is thought to have been on New York’s lower east side, where more than 1,500 pushcart vendors plied their wares to a largely Jewish community.
“The precise location is difficult to ascertain, but it is certainly on the [...]

250,000 Tiny Greenhouses, Each Containing One Head of Lettuce

The homefront during the world wars is a great place to look for strange technology and new social practices.
So, permit me a brief digression from green tech into the gender-bending agricultural and industrial story of Britain during the war told in the pages of the aforementioned 1918 National Geographics.
Judson Welliver tells us, “Everybody knows how [...]