Solar monitor

I'll start with the obvious: Our farm is a "solar sharing" farm, so it consists of two parts:
1. power generation (solar panels) and 2. food production (free range chickens).

But for the past year, almost all posts on this blog were about chickens - the food production part. Apparently chickens are more interesting to write about because they move and fly and sing and do all the funny things that a bunch of cute mini-dinosaurs should do. The well of chicken topics will never be exhausted.

Birds survived dinosaur extinction because of their fluffy bottoms. 

Solar panels don't fly or sing so they easily get overlooked, but in economic terms they are essential because they financially support the whole farm. And (sadly) economic terms matter. Because revenue from electricity sales subsidizes our chicken business, it's safe to say that without panels, there would be no chickens at all.
(For the chicken business to be self-sustaining [= able to pay the labor costs], we would either have to increase the number of chickens fivefold, or increase the price of an egg five times. The first option would produce many unhappy overcrowded chickens. The second would produce outrageously expensive, unsellable eggs. If there is a third way other than subsidizing, we haven't discovered it yet.)

All this means that panels deserve some attention too! Especially as this blog has "solar sharing" in its title. So here's a yesterday screenshot of Solar monitor, the online monitoring service that we use to check our farm's power generation status.

 Power generation status on Jan. 15, 2017, 10:44 am.

For explanation of the categories, check this older screenshot with English notes.

Click to enlarge

Solar monitor is not cheap (3250 jpy monthy fee) but it is quite useful. Frequent checking of the generation status helped us notice suspiciously low performance more than a year ago which led to the "discovery" that 10% of panels were malfunctioning. (Now fixed.) 
Despite Solar monitor's importance I only mentioned it once on this blog, and that was already two years ago.

Yesterday was a perfect weather day for solar power  - sunny, cold and windy. Icy wind does not make the day too pleasant for humans, but solar panels are happy - the wind cools the panel surface and performance goes up. Thanks to these conditions we recorded the best daily performance in more than a year: 224.5 kWh of electricity/day.

What's funny is that Solar monitor also makes performance predictions for the next and the next-next day, based on the weather information, but yesterday, the prediction went amusingly wrong.
We were supposed to have clouds and even snow in the afternoon ...

... but a picture taken at the farm just at that supposedly cloudy-snowy time, was this:

Jan. 15, 2017, cca 3:30 pm

Well, I was not disappointed. We'll  happily wait for the snow until next winter :D

Our farm on Texas Instruments' Instagram!

Our farm had another little moment of fame: Our solar sharing farm was introduced on Nobuo's company's Instagram account.

Texas Instruments' Instagram

Below is the text next to the photo - our explanation of the farm and why we started it.

“The Fukushima nuclear meltdowns occurred in March 2011 – an involuntary turning point for Japan. Suddenly everyone got interested in renewables. Japan's energy policy changed, making it mandatory for electric power companies to buy electricity from renewable sources for fixed (and quite high) prices. My wife and I thought this was a good opportunity to start our own chicken farm and ‘solar sharing system’ – utilizing land for solar power generation and farming. We had no experience. We make a little extra money selling eggs from our chickens. The goats are for fun. Now there are hundreds of solar sharing farms around Japan. We believe solar sharing could be applied in other regions as well.”
---End of quote---

Texas Instruments is a U.S. based company but our farm is in Japan, which means we got attention from as far as another continent. (Last year, we had visitors from Thailand and other countries.) The more people know about solar sharing, the higher the chance that the right person will see it - the right person would be someone with a pioneering spirit, keen on starting a solar sharing project of their own, in their own country.  In any country other than Japan, this would still be something new and groundbreaking - as it was in Japan 5 years ago.

I hope someone will notice the opportunity soon!

What is a "food story."

Happy New Year!

2017 is Year of the Rooster, so here's our Justin, completely oblivious to his newfound fame.

Justin the Rooster (the white one) today morning, watching his girlfriends
play the ice game and probably wishing he was a girl too.

Now to the topic.
A few days ago I read the New York Times article "The Most-Read Food Stories of 2016."  

It's a summary of twelve N.Y. Times articles "that Food section readers found most compelling in 2016."

Like most people who prefer to eat every day, I'm inherently interested in food. I was genuinely curious what the most popular "food stories" of 2016 were.

I clicked on the article, read it, and ended up a little disappointed. So I'm going to write about my disappointment here.

To be clear, I often read the N. Y. Times and I usually find it both informative and enjoyable (like this piece about the chemistry behind champagne bubbles), definitely worth the subscription.  But the Food Stories summary was disappointing. The reason was that its definition of a "food story" was so much different from what I expected.

The article started promisingly: "In a year dominated by the presidential election, the readers of the Food section flocked to articles about the basics."

That's exactly what I expected! Article about the basics.
Except that it turned out to be something else: mostly a collection of recipes and celebrity chefs' career updates, with titles like "How to Roast Cauliflower (the Whole Thing)"  and "Three Steps to Brewing a Better Cup of Coffee," or "Alton Brown, Showman of Food TV, Pulls Back the Curtain."

I naively expected that at least some of the twelve stories would be about where the food we eat comes from - which is what I understand as the basics. There could be perhaps an article about a farm where that roasted cauliflower was grown, or what kind of place those coffee beans brewed in three steps were produced. Introducing the producer (a farmer, a rancher, a fisherman) - without whom there would be no food on the table in the first place - sounds to me like a nice start when talking about the basics.

Just in case the pictures are too incomprehensible:
Farm → Warehouse → Processing/Packaging → Supermarket or Restaurant → Final Consumer
(What's missing are trucks/ships/trains that transport the stuff around. )

Of course, all twelve stories had something to do with food, and some dealt with objectively important issues, often connecting food (or drinks) with culture ("The American Thanksgiving") or history ("Jack Daniel’s Embraces a Hidden Ingredient: Help From a Slave"). And really, any talk about recipes and home-cooking is a good thing. (I admit that and I don't even like cooking.)

So I don't deny the importance and the fun of reading the stories.  Even the one restaurant review that made it to the top of the list was a delightful reading (thanks to the author Pete Wells' writing skills, rather than my interest in the overpriced restaurant).

But if a newspaper's Food section is so concerned about where, by whom and how the food was cooked, doesn't it sound reasonable to be also concerned about where, by whom and how the food was produced in the first place? Having one - just one - story tracing the featured food back to the source would give the selection a bit more balance (if we want to insist that we're talking about the basics.)

(There occasionally are articles in the N.Y.T. Food section about farms or other issues at the start of the food supply chain, normally invisible to the us the food-eaters, such as this story about sheep farms making prize-winning cheeses but not making enough profit to make ends meet, or this story about an animal research center in Nebraska mistreating animals. But these are very, very few.)

So! Here's my suggestion.
The N. Y. T. has a nice 4-star system used for reviewing restaurants. It works like this: "Ratings range from zero to four stars. Zero is poor, fair or satisfactory. One star, good. Two stars, very good. Three stars, excellent. Four stars, extraordinary."

What if the N.Y.T.  had a similar system for reviewing farms?

The red things are stars.

The rating would, of course, include quality of the product (fruit, vegetables, eggs, milk, cheese, meat) relative to its price, but also the quality and integrity of the production process - producer's philosophy, environmental sustainability (e.g. pesticide use), workers' treatment, animal treatment.
Inevitably, such a review would not be as rigorous and objective as various official certificates aspire to be, and also, like with the restaurant reviews, the reviewer would probably focus on farms producing high-end products, but that's fine. Any informed glimpse into a farm would be revealing, especially for the many city dwellers who often treat food like air - it's always there in sufficient quantity and quality, so we don't have to give it a f**k.

Thank you for reading this rant until the end. Chickens would give you a friendly poke if they knew you care. Here are at least some recent pictures.

Office occupancy 90%. (2016/12/30)

New carpet in the house! （腐葉土) (2016/12/30)

Happy Rooster Year! (2017/1/1)