Behind the scenes

I have a huge fascination with learning how things are built and how things work, and I'm a huge nerd. As a result some of the places I've toured are gas plants, a heavy oil production facility, a tar sands plant, a water treatment plant, a wastewater treatment facility, the ice plant at a bobsled track, and a locomotive repair facility.

In a month the international airport in my city will be finishing construction on it's new 5km long international runway and before they open it to air traffic, they are allowing the general public onsite to walk around on the runway. I signed up for this as soon as I heard about it. The scale of this thing is probably going to be so much larger than I expect.

FOCUS: What sort of places have you been behind the scenes? Work at, etc?

 

I work in a steel-producing factory and have been to foundries. Foundries, where iron is alloyed into various steels, is a type-A example of power and danger. When they liquefy the steel to separate it, scrap iron is dumped into a giant cauldron and an unprecedented amount of electricity basically fries this solid metal into white-hot liquid faster than you can say "Robert Patrick". It's so powerful the factory in Port Hope dims the street lights at night when it fires the cauldron. It is unreal.

I also had the disgusting honour of being in a McDonald's food factory, where they basically make you sign an oath to not talk about or record what you see.

Well, fuck the oath and fuck them. This is the most grossest thing I have ever even heard of referring to food. This place could have wrote Upton Sinclair a clinic on revolting food preparation. I can't really explain it other than it looks like they dug through people's garbage and turned into fast food. It was a mind-altering experience. And unhygienic as fuck.

 

Clutch is absolutely right about animal comfort. At dairy farms we install mattress systems that can cost up to $500 per bedding stall, barns are built so that stalls can be large enough to accommodate the size the cows will grow into and allow for a natural lunge (the way cows stand up) as well as natural resting positions. This comfort allows animals to produce milk for more years and after the third (I think) cycle they are paid for and making money for the farmer. High pressure farms have a higher mortality rate and thus make less money because they are culling high producing animals and not just those that are at the end of their productive life.

I haven't spent a lot of time on high density feed lots but I do work with a lot of beef farms where they use pack bedding. Basically manure mixed with corn stalks to hold it together while the moisture is pushed away to the manure storage facility (compost barn, manure pit, or slurry store). It is a low cost bedding that saves on labor and isn't as "dirty" as it seems.

Herd management is I think what you're talking about and there is a lot to that. With the advent of robotic feeders and milkers farmers may have a bit less physical labor but the management takes on a different roll. They have to force themselves to see which calf or calves are eating less (cows visiting the robot to be milked less) to see which might be ill. Some probably over use antibiotics so they have to spend less time managing the herd while others actually use the data the robots provide to pull out sick animals and treat them individually. Ideally they would treat them individually but that attention is harder to give when they aren't going out to hutches or pens to feed animals one at a time and can identify ill animals immediately. Same goes for grown cows in the robotic milker barns. It's not so much a big farm vs. small as it is well managed herds vs. poorly managed.

 

Monsanto makes Round-Up, the weed-killing plant arsenic that's horror in a spray bottle. To prevent weeds from growing in their fields (big fucking deal) they give their corn a Frankenstein-esque makeover to be immune to Round-Up.

You can see where this goes: they HOSEtheir entire field, the weds die and the corn stays. The corn drinks the Round-Up, it goes into the corn and is picked and eaten with cancer-producing poison in it. That's what people don't understand about agriculture: just because something is now dead doesn't mean the horrible shit the stuck inside it isn't there. It's COMPLETELY there. Like antibiotics in pigs.

 

Honestly, once you sort through all the nerd boners and stupid attempts at trying to make fun of porn by guys who watch hours of it, she's actually pretty fucking funny. As for actual content, its limited. There was a true AMA with a male porn star (not a gay one you jackals) awhile back that was actually far more interesting.

 

I got the opportunity to take a tour of the wind tunnels at NASA in Sunnyvale California. At the time they were the largest in the world.

I also got to tour the NORAD complex outside Colorado Springs. This was before 2001 when there were a limited of amount of tours allowed into the mountain. It was very sobering sitting at a conference table and seeing the red phone right next to you.

 

Clutch, you should host an Ask A Farmer thread. Given the current debate about agriculture/GMOs, etc, it'd be interesting to get the perspective of our rural Idiots into what's real, and what's sensationalized Facebook hype.

 

Having toured a number of feedlots in a number of conditions, I can say the following. I'm also scientist, whose area of expertise happens to be beef cattle.

Most feedlots are very hygienic. Sure, it can get muddy when it rains, and then animals can get dirty for a brief period sometimes - but animals get sick whether they are out on pasture or in the feedlot. Generally if they are in the feedlot, they can actually treat the disease at an earlier stage, as animals on pasture aren't checked as frequently. However, most pens are built according to pretty strict specifications for drainage and a bunch of other things. There's also generally a lot of room in the pens. It looks crowded, like Clutch says, when they're all up at the bunk feeding, but there's plenty of space for laying down (and bedding during the winter) and moving around. They aren't all jammed together like sardines or hip deep in their own shit. That's just not true of any of the feedlots I've been to in Canada and the US.

As for antibiotics, illness is treated. I think people get confused by various products that can be used to improve growth and then use the whole "pump them full of" statements. First off, the bulk of growth promotant products used in beef cattle are never used in human medicine, and therefore present no risk. Secondly, in the U.S. any other antibiotics which have a growth promotant claim are currently being withdrawn from the marketplace under FDA guidance 213. This mostly affects chickens and pigs. Thirdly, the CDC states that the largest contributor to antibiotic resistance in people is misuse and over use of antibiotics in people. The bulk of research in beef cattle shows that most of the antibiotic resistant bacteria in cattle are to drugs with low importance in human medicine, and resistance to the drugs of the most importance to human medicine is about 1%. There is a good blog about this kind of stuff if you're interested, unfortunately the author just recently died, but the link still works for now. <a class="postlink" href="http://hurdhealth.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://hurdhealth.com</a>

As for whatever Crown was ranting about re: Roundup - I am not the biggest fan of Monsanto, but Roundup Ready crops have actually decreased the amount of other much nastier herbicides that persist in the environment/plants for much longer. Roundup actually degrades very quickly into non-toxic components. If he was trying to talk about Bt corn - humans don't have the enzymatic pathway that the insects do, which is why eating Bt corn is fine for people.

EDIT: I should also say I grew up on a beef/grain farm, and if there's interest in an Ask A Farmer thread I'd be happy to throw my $0.02 in.

 

Factories and production lines fascinate me... like I could watch the show "How It's Made" nonstop.

My uncles who run a dairy farm recently switched from using shredded newspaper to line their loafing barn beds to sand. It's a little more maintenance but the coliform bacteria numbers in their milk was already meeting standards and that move further cut them down. Of course they still do use antibiotics to treat certain cows when necessary but the point of the story is they are not just greedily throwing antibiotics at them and willingly take the extra steps for the health of their herd.

I saw a lot of behind the scenes stuff when I was a security guard at an art museum. I watched the exhibits being built and witnessed artists' egos run amuck, saw the bullshit politics in the upstairs office, and became keenly aware of how poor the security seemed for a museum that housed some valuable stuff. It was an easy job and much more interesting at times than I expected but I'm mainly glad I'm not around that museum crowd anymore.

My girlfriend's dad is a manager at one of the main air traffic control stations in the US and we got an in-depth tour once. We saw all of the flights being passed from person to person and zone to zone, and the nonstop flurry of activity and chatter between controllers and pilots. There's a lot more planes in the air at one time than I ever imagined. I think the most impressive part was a little video they had showing all of the flights over the United States on the morning of 9/11, and how quickly every single one of them was grounded after the attacks.

 

Is it true that most of the planning and slotting for planes leaving and landing is still done manually on boards with plastic placards representing planes?

Go on...