jumpinfarmer

MSA packs I can't remember the model but they are about 10 years old. I had always been told they would work under water but no one realy knew for sure. We were told by the MSA rep that they would go into free flow when submerged but that wasn't the case. I just wish I had brought my weight belt so I could get down to the bottom and see how well it worked at depth. The mask had great visibilty better than my SCUBA mask and it was easy to breath. Oh and yes we wore spare turnout gear so our own didn't get soaked. The coats floted even after they were totaly soaked. The only time I had any trouble staying afloat was if I thrashed around but even then if I stayed still again there was no trouble keeping my head above water. Certianly not recomended for diving but it was fun to find out how well it worked.

No thats not a mis spelling I meen SCBA not SCUBA. I've been a vounteer firefighter for almost 20 years now and have always wanted to try an SCBA in water and got the chance to tonight. For drill we went to the high school pool and found out how well we could manage with full turnout gear in water if someone ever fell in a pool or any other water situation. A firefighter in full turnout gear with or without an SCBA floats quite well, better with the SCBA. I couldn't stay down which I had figured since I wasn't wearing any lead but the SCBA functioned perfactly under water to about 7 feet which is as deep as I could get. Not recomended but it was fun as Hell.

I'm a Republican and fairly conservative but can't stand Rush This fucktard has to go or no one will ever take the Republicans seriously ever again.

I know just what your talking about Dave. I've been a volunteer firefighter since I was in high school and it just keeps getting worse. As an example just a few minutes ago I came back home after responding to a call for the smell of plastic burning with no sighn of smoke or fire. I knew when I left home it was a B.S. call but someone has to go. It turned out to be a skunk had sprayed somewhere neer the callers home and she never bothered to investigate herself before calling 911. Her lack of responsibility brought out 21 firefighters two engines and the chiefs car. We, the members, don't get paid except for the free dinners and being able to use the empty bay of the firehall as a car wash. For years now I have been saying instead of having fire prevention day we should have a stupidity mitigation class for the comunity. Over half of the calls we respond to in any year are from people to dumb or in most cases to lazy to solve there own problem.

Unfortunantly I think she probably will be our new senator She has never done anything but be born with a name, and live in the White House as a kid. Untill today when she went on a tour she had never even been in Upstate New York, and she admitted it. How can she represent a state when she hardly even knows it exists.

We normally eat around 4:00 which is early compared to the normal day but not too early. That way you don't have to eat lunch and still have time for some snacks before dinner. We won't have dessert untill 7:00 or so giving time for dinner to settle and be able to enjoy a couple pieces of pie. The other reason for eating a little later than you will be is most of us men will either be out hunting in the morning or picking corn. I sort of like eating dinner at noon and just have lunch at night but that doesn't happen much anymore. When I was a kid when ever I wasn't in school that is what we did so we could work late into the evening and not get hungry or have to come in eat a big meal and then go to bed.

In my area the biggest obsticle I see is from the public it self. Everyone says they want cheep energy and complain about it's cost. Yet at the same time there are several wind farm progects that have been in the planning stage for years now and they never seem to get beyond the homeowners who don't want anything new in there neighborhood. We have had the same problem with two differant planed ethanol plants. The investors finnally gave up and moved on, and that was before all the bad press ethanol has received as of late. Untill people get the mindset that everyone needs to do there part and cooperate we will get no where. As I have said before with the mindset of todays American population. If someone came into your town and said they were going to put rows of ceder poles up and down all the roads and you could hook up to this thing called electric it would never fly.

I don't think it's anything for you to worry about now. There really isn't any food shortage just more media hype. All this talk about rice being rationed at Sam's Club is a bunch of bull. Yes they are limiting the amount you can buy but it isn't even U.S. rice, it's imported rice there is plenty of U.S. rice for everyone. It is true that a lot of money is flowing into comodities including grains but if it was only flowing into oil futures then there wouldn't be any grain grown since it would be too costly to grow. In the last year the cost to raise a crop has almost doubled. While some of this is because the suppliers realise farmers have more money to spend it is also being driven by globle demand for raw materials, fuel fertilizer seed steel land it has all gone up in value for a host of differant reasons.

Well to make you feel real bad I went and looked at some of our old records and in May of 1966 my garndpa bought 1376 gallons of gas for $381.57 or .277 a gallon A little more recently I paid .865 for gas in 1998 and just .48 for diesel. the last delivery we got in the fall of 2007 I gave 3.22 for gas and 2.16 for diesel and paid 1.97 for LP a few weeks ago. So when everyone wonders why there groceries are getting more expensive there is one reason.

Don't feel bad, I would never fly untill I started skydiving. I still haven't ever been in a comercial plane and, only ever landed in a plane one time.

He didn't set the record, he is the record

I'm going in the morning. I'm sort of excited since it's something differant from the nornal routine.

I've been looking to replace mine too. I'm thinking about this onewww.schulte.ca/products_snowblowers_rdx110.htm Just be carefull where you throw the snow.

I know nothing about hemp production but I know how to raise crops and there principals would be similar. There may not be many pests now but, if it is raised for any length of time and in any quanity pests will show up, history proves this. Then to say it grows with no fertilizer is bull crap. Every plant harvested from the soil removes nutriants, the more harvested the more is removed. At some point you have to replace thouse nutrians or your production will drop off dramaticly. Corn can be raised with no fertilizer if you only want 1/4 of a crop but for the last 75 years yields have been rising along with fertilizer use. That said with todays high fertilizer prices less is being used while production still is rising, this is done by more efficiant use and timing.

That Pimentel study is over 20 years old and has been proved wrong by dozens of newer studies, yet it still pops up all the time. Since it's the only one that keeps comming up maybe it's the only negative one out there.

Bill, that's fine as long as you don't give a shit about the rest of the world. There were tortilla riots in Mexico last year when the price of corn began really rising; food production, paticularly carbo-hydrate staples, is a world market and they are all substitutes for one another. If we decide that using food, or food substitutes, or land that used to be used for food, for our transportation needs, then we need to be honest to ourselves and admit that people are in fact going to starve to death as a result of this decision. Maybe not in the US, but somewhere. I haven't seen anyone complaining when land that used to grow crops being converted to non farm uses, housing, comercial, parks, landfills, exc. Hundreds of thousands of acres have been lost to development and no one gave a shit about weather we could feed fuel or cloth ourselves and the rest of the world. On another front if food, corn, wheat, beans what ever it may be had been going up in price with everything else over the years no one would think much of it now. It is for this reason ethanol even came about in the first place. Farmers growing corn were sick of getting the same prices that were paid in the 1940's and created a new industry to try and increase demand. Now people such as yourself want farmers to feal bad because they are making money on there investment of time and capital. The rise in your grocery bill is for many reasons and corn price is only a very smaall part of it. The reason it gets all the attention is it's an easy target for the media.

Say it aint so

While you are at it, Be sure to take your feeler guage and adjust the valves. You do still have adjustable rocker arms dont you? Ahh but can you do it while the engine is running? What about the Sears and Montgomery Ward catologe. My grandparents used to tell about how they used them to wipe with in the out house.

It's not enough to fuel the fuel addiction. Food for fuel is a bad idea IMO, unless you want to kill two birds with one stone and yank the high fructose corn syrup out of damn near every product on the shelf and use that for fuel. That way you get more fuel and fewer lard asses. Of course that's likely to hurt your gains if you own any diabetes monitoring device stocks. True if all the gasoline use in the US was to be replaced by ethanol but, that isn't the case. We produced 13+billion bushels of corn in the US this year 2 billion more than projected use from all sources not just ethanol, no shortage here. Now next year who knows we could have a bad season and grow 10 billion or a real banner and produce 14 or more. If the market is there the potential for a larger crop could and probably will be reached. The trend is for higher yields through technology as has been seen over the last 70 years. If I remember right just a few years ago the media was bashing corn growers for making it to cheep and people getting fat from eating too much Now if you are concerned that ethanol is the reason for higher food prices thing again. Higher fuel prices is most of the reason. It just plain costs more to process and transport food than it did when oil was $30. True grain prices have doubled in the last few years but so have production costs, with out the increase in prices there would have possibly been food shortages from under production. Another reason for your food costs increasing is from the devalued dollar. This has made US grain cheaper on the world market and setts the stage for increased exports. Agriculture is one of the only industries left to have a trade surpluss. Thease are just a few of the many complex issues with why your grocery bill has gone up. Oh and there are several exciting new things being developed, some being tested right now, to produce ethanol without grain for a fraction of the cost of grain ethanol.

Well considering we have a record corn crop here in the US this fall, it's all media hype

I have watched gun amnesty turn in programs on the news for years and always feel as if the government is taking advantage of some people when this goes on. Just saw one tonight and they showed an old women turning in a double barrel 20ga shotgun for a $50 gift card. They just stoled a $1,000 antique gun fron a person who didn't know what she had. I don't think that is right, if they want to get guns off the street fine but, don't just pay a flat fee for every thing that comes in. The real criminals aren't turning in there guns just the people who don't know they have something of real value.

Thank you Misternatural for bringing some sanity back to this thread.

By your thinking we shouldn't even use gasoline sice there is way less energy in a barrle of gasoline than was in the barrel of crude. When ever you refine any energy source you have a net energy loss. The exception is hydo or wind produced electric. If ethanol or bio diesel was a real net losser of energy then there would be no monitary incentive to produce it. As I stated before ethanol has a net gain of energy of 30-35% by most studies, some less and some much more I've seen as high as 60%. Bio diesel is far more efficiant to produce than ethanol since it is offten from a waste source and soybean oil is sort of a by product of feed and food production. Basic crude oil is also being produced from other agricultural waste such as animal by products and manure. Soon ethanol will also be produced from many other sources than grain. I know of one company that is just going on line to use beet pulp and has perfected making it from manure and corn stalks. Also one needs to remember that ethanol made from grain still leaves 25% of the grain for animal feed. Companies are also serching for other uses of distillers grain. Much of the energy used in the production of ethanol is either natural gas or coal which makes it a form of energy conversion just like refining gasoline from crude. How many coal powered cars do you see on the road? As for the energy used to produce the grain there is no way more is used than what is being created. I have seen some studies and compared them to what we use on our farm and the ney sayers figures are way off, some by as much as 2000% Last year I used 6,000 gal of diesel 1,800 of gasoline and 5,000 propane on our 1,000 acres. That was total use for all crops corn, wheat, dry beans, peas, hay, and soybeans. It also includes the gasoline we burned in our vehicles and for other things such as mowing the lawn and the snowmobile in the winter. Use thouse figures against the 47,000bu of corn we produced. If that had bean used to make ethanol it would have produced over 135,000 gallons of ethanol and over 400 tons of distilers grain feed. This is just from the corn not rest of the crops. I know I didn't take fertilizer or transportation after we hauled our crops to market into consideration but still there wasn't that much energy used. I've wrote enough for now.

It may but the real cause of higher prices at the store right now is because of higher costs of production. True some of this has been brought on by higher grain prices since seed and fertilizer companies have been looking for a way to raise prices for as long as farmers. When it all settles out I don't think we (farmers that is) will be any better off than before, just changing more dollers to make the same money. When someone sees the price of corn flakes going up and blames it on bio-fuel that is not all true. In a box of cerial there is about 6 cents of corn double that and it is only going to raise the cost by 6 cents. We all know that isn't the case and someone needs to be made the scape goat, farmers are less than 2% of the population so we are easy targets. it should also be noted that we are now in the middle of harvesting a 13+ billion bushel corn crop in the US the largest in history. There will be no shortage of corn in the next year even with the increases in ethanol production. Corn is just a small part of your food bill, wheat is the crop that is now pushing prices higher and that has nothing to do with bio-fuels. The US had an increase in wheat production this year but, the rest of the world has had troubles of all sorts and came up short. The US is right now the only country in the world that has a reliable supply of food quality wheat to export and the market has gone nuts in the last few months. Production will go up next year but untill then prices will be high. When production goes up the price farmers recieve will likely fall but your food cost will probably stay the same Most people will complain about it but little will be done about it.

No biofuels will never even come close to being a substanteal replacement for fossil fuels. Most of the biofuels produced in north america require more fossil fuel energy to produce than energy that they yield. The only thing that ethanol is accomplishing is raising the price of corn. Ethanol has about a 35% net gain of energy over the fossil fuel used to produce it. I love how everyone likes to bash this point but never says anything about how much energy is used to produce fossil fuels, they don't just come out of the ground ready for your gas tank. Furthermore what is wrong with the price of corn, or any other grain crop going up? True corn is almost double the price it was two years ago but, untill then it was about the same price as in the late 60's. What other business do you know of that produces for 40 years without a price increase. part of the ethanol boom is brought on by farmers themselves. 15-20 years ago when the price of corn was in the toilet and we were basicly living off government payments some forward thinking farmers in the corn belt got an idea to market there corn as ethanol. Whit lots of perservation they were able to get financing and then develope a market for there corn crop. After 9-11 when it became clear that our fossil fuel source wasn't as secure as we thought things really took off. Today about half of the ethanol in the US is produced by farmer owned Co Op's, not mega corporations. So in my opinion any increase in the price of grain was caused by the years of low prices and unwillingness of the population to give a shit about it.