05 Mar 2004
Fleece so valuable it's locked in bank vault

Read how they did it - in the "Wooldorf Astoria". I thought our sheep were pampered! Sheesh!

On a serious note, however, this does say something about animal husbandry that's rather important, and often overlooked in today's factory-style feedlot agriculture. The better you treat your animals, the better your production quality. Stress does make a difference in livestock handling.

Two Australian sheep farmers have produced the world's finest wool, a mere 11.9 microns thick or about one-fifth the diameter of human hair, with a bale of the super fine wool now under armed guard inside a bank vault.

(link) [CNN]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

A Plea for a Transparent Burger

Interesting piece on tracking livestock from a food safety perspective. As a producer, I'd be more than willing to participate in a program like this.

Here's how it might work. Mothers of food animals would get DNA-fingerprinted; offspring would receive an identification number. The producer would keep a database, accessible to anyone over the Web, tracking the burger-to-be according to what the calf ate, what health concerns it faced, and what herds or ranches it came into contact with. An ear tag or an implanted radio-frequency ID chip would keep things simple. In the end, even plastic-wrapped cuts of beef in your Safeway would be labeled with its ID number. People with Web access near their dinner tables could actually read about what they were chewing. Morbid? Maybe, but it beats finding out some years later that your brain is melting.

Follow that cow! Tracking beef from birth to plate is the only way to guarantee its safety. By Don Tapscott from Wired magazine.

(link) [Wired News]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

The Mac's 'ultimate remote control' leaps forward

This looks pretty nifty ... if only we could get a Bluetooth phone! We've tried, and they're as rare as a spotted mongoose in these parts. Perhaps someday we'll be able to give a 'hands on' report.

Salling Clicker arrives on Series 60

(link) [The Register]

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link