> Thanks for the masterful contribution to the discussion.
Thanks. [blush] I sent it before I received Mike G.'s note saying
that he had read and written over-hastily.
> I kept thinking of my seaweed salad at our local sushi place, and
> wondering where it came from, business-wise.
And I don't know that. [1] None of the 5 or so kinds of seaweed that
piles up on the local beach after storms is eatable (although one or
more may be technically edible.) The bulk is ptilota and desmarestia,
varying in proportion gradually over decades as the population
dynamics of seaweed and (so I'm told by a guy at Bedford Institute of
Oceanography) sea urchins vary with water temperature, disease and
$WHATEVER. Further down the shore they harvest Irish moss, the stuff
carrageenan comes from. But I don't know what they use in sushi. [2]
> Can you say more about what is happening in Nova Scotia regarding
> "being regulated out of existence."
I'd have to spend some time researching it to make a real think
piece. At the anecdotal level:
+ A local business [3] producing really good yogurt closed down
because regulators demanded that they meet in every detail the
standards of megadairy processing plants. This was a mom and pop
biz but not a back-yard, shade-tree operation. They had a proper
plant.
+ There's ongoing action to stamp out any consumption or
distribution of unpasteurized milk. Story in the Globe & Mail in
the last week, I think. (Re. Ontario, not NS.)
+ The supply management regulations for wheat, milk and
poultry. A decade ago, I bought roasting chickens from a
neighbor. When regulators began to enforce the regs more
vigorously, he told me that he could keep more than 20 birds
without getting involved in (I forget, license, quota, inspection,
other) so much bother and expense that he'd lose money on every
bird. So now he keeps a dozen or two for his and his son's
families but doesn't sell any. I'm inclined to think the Wheat
Board is a good idea but dairy and poultry are a very different
thing.
+ Neighbor raising, butchering and selling lamb and mutton,
butchering venison for hunters in season and some other livestock
production on a family-farm scale keeps getting snarled in
regulatory stuff better applicable to meat packing plants that
process a cattle carful of steers every 10 minutes.
> Regarding eutrification and your lake: has the lake shrunk due to
> the build-up of soil/material in it, or lowering water table, or?
Plants growing in from the edges. Very shallow lake, hill on either
side, farm on each hill. Neither farm is a big industrial operation.
It's lost perhaps half its open-water area in 40 years.
The water table doesn't fall appreciably in NS and won't unless the
climate changes very dramatically. [4] We have so much rainfall that,
should the water level in our dug well continue to rise throughout the
winter at the same rate that it rises between September and November,
we'd have a tower of water 60 feet tall by spring. :-)
- Mike
[1] Is that a European swallow or an African swallow?
What?! I don't know that! [Yowwwwwwwwwwwwwww....]
[2] I used to have two friends with graduate training in phycology.
One is dead, the other moved on to other things. So anything I
say about seaweed that I can't easily observe for myself may be
wrong. Corrections always welcome.
[3]
http://www.factsandopinions.com/Report/C2223F1B-C96B-4C36-A273-8769B8908E4A.html
http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2000/04/05/ns_pennisula000405.html
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=8761410&mesg_id=8763064
[4] Not counting what might happen where fracking has been
undertaken. Two spots remote from me in NS. I haven't heard what,
if anything, has happened in those areas.
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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