Backyard chicken owners looking to keep coops and water warm in the winter should beware of Rough Service light bulbs that can be deadly to your flock.
Can organic and sustainable agriculture feed us, all of us? Here’s an investment banker that is betting it can and will.
Backyard chicken owners looking for an alternative to heat lamp bulbs to keep coops and water warm in the winter should beware of “rough service” bulbs that have a coating that makes them shatter resistant. That coating is Teflon or PTFE, and is deadly to your chicken flock. There have been a number of people experiencing this problem, but there remains a lot of folks who have not heard of this yet.
The Teflon gives off toxic gasses when heated. Birds (such as chickens or other poultry) are very sensitive to airborne toxins and can die from the exposure to such fumes. This can happen quickly. There have been a number of reports of small flock owners finding their entire flock dead in the morning after installing this type of light. A large scale poultry research facility has experienced the death of all 2400 birds over the course of a few days following the changing out of regular heat bulbs for the rough service lightbulbs. Sylvania and GE both make these rough service lightbulbs and are readily available, often close to the heat lamps in stores. GE has no warning labels on their bulbs, but Sylvania does have a sticker warning that the bulb can be harmful to poultry.
The Teflon starts to off gas as low as 325F and possibly lower. Many light bulbs will reach better than 500F, creating a lot of initial off gassing when first turned on. This cloud of toxic gas is what kills the chickens and other poultry in their coops on a cold night.
On a side note, this is the same Teflon used to coat the common household pans, with the same off gassing into your kitchen where you and your family are breathing the air!
“It now appears that we are about five years into a chronic global food crisis that is unlikely to fade for many decades…”
These words were written by none other than an investment strategist who looks at what is or will be profitable in the future and he is betting that sustainable agriculture is one of them. Jeremy Grantham has also talked about the finite resources that are becoming apparent to all but those in government, industry and economists. He believes that our most pressing issue we are facing today is not energy or one of many other crises that we are facing, but food. Food, the third most important ingredient for life is, or soon will become center stage of the world’s attention.
Why the focus on food? Won’t GMOs and industrial agriculture feed us all? The fact of the matter is that system is completely unsustainable. It requires massive amounts of petrochemicals and petroleum just to keep it moving, much less expanding. As the cost of those petrochemicals and fuel continue to rise it will simply become much too expensive to grow food in that system, despite any and all subsidies, price protections or trade restrictions. Right now the foundation of the food system is in crises. The farmers are being squeezed while the corporate food manufacturers are still profitable. It is very easy to see the declining grain production (even before the drought of the past 2 years), across the board increases in resource costs and plummeting crop yields from petrochemical fertilizers. The future of industrial scale farming isn’t looking too rosy right now. What happens when the farmers can’t afford to farm? When they can’t afford the costs to run the tractors, buy the seeds, fertilizers, insecticides and pesticides that are required to grow the industrial crops? Who will do the growing then?
From his quarterly letter –
“¢ Grain productivity has fallen decade by decade since 1970 from 3.5% to 1.5%. Quite probably, the most efficient grain producers are approaching a “glass ceiling” where further increases in productivity per acre approach zero at the grain species’ limit (just as race horses do not run materially faster now than in the 1920s). Remarkably, investment in agricultural research has steadily fallen globally, as a percent of GDP.
“¢ Water problems will increase to a point where gains from increased irrigation will be offset by the loss of underground water and the salination of the soil.
“¢ Persistent bad farming practices perpetuate land degradation, which will continue to undermine our long-term sustainable productive capacity.
“¢ Incremental returns from increasing fertilizer use will steadily decline on the margin for fertilizer use has increased five-fold in the last 50 years and the easy pickings are behind us.
“¢ There will be increased weather instability, notably floods and droughts, but also steadily increasing heat. The last three years of global weather were so bad that to draw three such years randomly would have been a remote possibility. The climate is changing.
“¢ The costs of fertilizer and fuel will rise rapidly.
Grantham believes that we will transition to a more or less to a sustainable, organic and largely regional food system in the foreseeable future. This, coincidentally, is almost the exact same argument that organic and sustainable farming folks have been talking about for several years now, although for somewhat different reasons. His thoughts are that we have a choice – we can voluntarily create and adapt the above mentioned sustainable food production model, or we will be forced to do so. Not by any government or corporation, but by scarcity. When industrial, chemical agriculture finally proves that it really can’t feed the world, what then? Organic, sustainable agriculture may be the only player left at the table.
He has bet on organic and sustainable agriculture by establishing foundations that finance research into better organic agriculture methods. Once the best practices and highest productivity methods are known, he wants to directly finance those organic farms. This will take some time, as there is no current infrastructure, training or experience on this scale to draw from and must be created. Current models need to be scaled up and tested to be able to dovetail into an overall system that not only helps to maintain itself, but grows itself as organically as the food it produces.
Rough Service Lightbulbs Can Kill Your Chickens
Backyard chicken owners looking to keep coops and water warm in the winter should beware of Rough Service light bulbs that can be deadly to your flock.
A Banker Bets on Sustainable Agriculture
Can organic and sustainable agriculture feed us, all of us? Here’s an investment banker that is betting it can and will.