Atlantium: The Smallest Country in Australia

Atlantium: The Smallest Country in Australia from Craig Rasmus on Vimeo.

Latest Dairy Fad Boosts Guernsey Breed

Bloomberg:

In dairy circles, Guernsey cows have long been overshadowed by their heftier, black-and-white cousins.
The reddish-colored breed originally from Guernsey, in the British Channel Islands, has been decimated in recent decades, purged from farms to make room for higher milk-yielding Holsteins, according to South Australian dairy farmer Lyndon Cleggett. His family began breeding pedigree Guernseys in 1964 and is one of about 100 members of the Guernsey Cattle Society of Australia.
Now, Guernsey cattle are enjoying a mini revival, thanks to the popularity of their milk. Golden-colored, it typically lacks a type of protein prevalent in regular milk that some researchers have connected to a raft of chronic illnesses. While scientific proof of the link remains contested, Guernsey cattle breeders in Australia are seeing unexpected interest from dairy farmers as far away as Japan and Thailand.
“I can’t keep up,” said Cleggett, who runs the “Brookleigh” herd of about 330 milkers at Glencoe, about 430 kilometers (267 miles) southeast of Adelaide. “We’ve got back up to the Holstein prices, whereas years ago we were always well under.”
Eight-month-old Guernsey heifers now fetch about A$1,400 ($998), from as little as A$700 a decade ago, while membership of the Guernsey society has stabilized after sliding for years, he said.
Guernseys first became popular on English dairy farms in the late 18th century, according to the World Guernsey Cattle Federation, which counts about 40,000 cows among the breed’s global ranks. That pales in comparison to the 1 million-plus Holsteins in Australia alone.
The renewed interest in Guernsey cows stems from the breed’s renowned docile nature as well as the purported merits of its milk. About 90 percent of Australian Guernseys carry a gene causing them to produce milk containing only the A2 type of beta-casein protein, said Cleggett, a former president of the Australian Guernsey society. Guernseys possess the highest percentage of A2 among traditional dairy cattle breeds, the American Guernsey Association says on its website.
In contrast, Holsteins, which originated from the Netherlands and northern Germany, typically produce a combination of A2 and A1 milk proteins, which scientists such as Keith Woodford, an agri-food professor at New Zealand’s Lincoln University, say may contribute to conditions from heart disease and diabetes to digestive discomfort.

Until today, I'd never heard of the A2 and A1 milk proteins, but Bloomberg has a second story on it here.  It's hard to keep up with food trends.

Portrait of a Skier

Portrait of a Skier from Andy Lloyd on Vimeo.

Massive Ranches

Bloomberg looks at several large ranches, including the King Ranch and the Mormon Church's massive ranch in Florida.  But the biggest is in Australia:

If you don’t have $725 million for the Waggoner Ranch, the world’s largest working cattle ranch is on the market. Australia’s remote Anna Creek Station clocks in at roughly 6 million acres—more than seven times the size of King Ranch in Texas–and its sale package will include 160,000 head of cattle.

6 million acres and 160,000 head of cattle?  Wow.

The Now - Ray Collins

The Now - Ray Collins from Ray Collins on Vimeo.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Here are a few stories for the day:

A St. Patrick's Day Q & A: the real saint, leprechaun lore and how to drown a shamrock - Cleveland Plain Dealer

Everything you know about St. Patrick's Day is wrong - Huffington Post

How America (Not Ireland) Made St. Patrick's Day As We Know It - National Geographic

Guinness Hopes Its Luck Lasts Longer Than A Day - Wall Street Journal

Irish PM Slams Tony Abbott For Offensive St. Patrick's Day Video - Time.  Conservative jackassery isn't limited by national borders.

Recite the Breastplate, reflect on Ireland and the diaspora, drink a Guinness (or Murphy's), and be safe.  Happy St. Patrick's Day.

Mineralogy in the News

An entirely new mineral was discovered in a mine in Western Australia:

Putnisite is a newly discovered mineral that occurs as tiny crystals on volcanic rock. One such crystal, just 0.4 millimeters across, shown here, was recently found at the Armstrong mine in Widgiemooltha, Western Australia.
Credit: Peter Elliott

A new purple-pink mineral that has a chemical composition and crystalline structure unlike any of the known 4,000 minerals has been discovered at a mining site in Western Australia, researchers report.
Now called putnisite, the mineral was discovered in a surface outcrop of Polar Bear Peninsula, Southern Lake Cowan, north of Norseman. While workers with a mining company were prospecting for nickel and gold, one of them noticed the bright-pink grains and sent the mineral to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), and then it was sent to Peter Elliott, a research associate with the South Australian Museum, for examination....
And, sure enough, the crystal was novel.
Elliott added, "Putnisite, a strontium calcium chromium sulfate carbonate, has both a unique chemical composition and a unique crystal structure." (The color of putnisite crystals ranges from pale to dark purple, with a pink streak, according to the researchers.)
Found on volcanic rock, the new mineral occurs as tiny crystals just 0.02 inches (0.5 millimeters) in diameter, and looks like spots of dark pink on dark-green-and-white rock; under a microscope, the mineral appears as cubelike crystals.
"When the rocks in the Lake Cowan area were deposited millions of years ago, they contained small concentrations of strontium calcium chromium and sulfur," Elliott said. "Over time, weathering released these elements and concentrated them, allowing putnisite to crystallize."

At times you would think that everything that could be discovered has already been found.  Then you come across something like this.  I took a mineralogy course in college, but about all I can do is identify quartz, feldspar and mica in some rocks.

First of October Links

A few pieces to browse this morning:

Many Strikeouts, Fewer as Pitchers Gain Upper Hand - New York Times

A Lovable Murderer and Heroic Villain: The Story of Australia's Most Iconic Outlaw - Slate.  Ned Kelly, of course.

A Doctor Unlocks Mysteries of the Brain by Talking and Watching - Morning Edition

Perovskite Offers Shot at Cheaper Solar Energy - Wall Street Journal

Fast Track to a Spill? - Pacific Standard

The Body Electric- Outside.  Surviving a lightning strike.  One man's story here.

Ohio Singled Out for Worst Fracking Waste Disposal Practices - EcoWatch

How One Man With a Lighter Crippled America's Air Travel System - NBC

The Age of Humans: Living in the Anthropocene - Smithsonian.  A large collection of stories of our impact on Earth.

We've killed off half the world's animals since 1970 - Washington Post

"The Most Remarkable Chart I've Seen In Some Time": Rich Gain More Ground In Every U.S. Expansion - Naked Capitalism. Somebody is winning the class war.

Australia's Gold Coast - Timelapse

Australia's Gold Coast - Timelapse from SCIENTIFANTASTIC on Vimeo.

The Band Played Waltzing Matilda

Tiny Sydney

Tiny Sydney from Filippo Rivetti on Vimeo.

Drought Threatens Australian Ag

Reuters:

Drought conditions across Australia's east coast will cut production of key agricultural commodities such as wheat and beef next season and reduce exports, the government's chief commodities forecaster said on Tuesday.
The current season could see Australia, the world's third-largest wheat exporter, produce a bumper wheat crop, with increased plantings and if late season rains materialise.
However, forecasts of a return of dry El Nino weather conditions across the key farming states of Queensland and New South Wales later in 2014 mean the prospects for agricultural production remain uncertain.
Global markets will be watching forecasts of Australia's crop given concerns over Ukraine tensions disrupting supply from the Black Sea area, one of the world's key grain exporting regions.
Australian wheat production is forecast to fall 8.2 percent to 24.795 million in the 2014/15 season from 27.013 million tonnes this year as dry conditions curb yields, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural, Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) said.
ABARES said the decline in production will come despite a 2 percent increase in acreage planted as yields return to historical average levels due to dry conditions.
The yields assumptions are based on a break in the drought, but with forecasts for more dry conditions across Australia's east coast, the commodity forecaster acknowledged further cuts to yields are possible.....
Australia's drought was also resulting in record cattle slaughter rates, prompting ABARES to up its forecast for 2013/14 beef exports to 1.15 million tonnes.
Parts of Queensland, Australia's largest cattle producing state and home to half the national herd, have recorded the driest two years on record.
ABARES said Australia's national herd will fall to 27.1 million head, the lowest since the 2009/10 season, a year also impacted by drought.
But the following season, 2014/15, ABARES, based on its assumption of a break in the drought, is forecasting cattle farmers will begin to rebuild stock, resulting in a fall in beef exports of nearly 7 percent.
If the drought breaks, exports would fall to 1.04 million tonnes, cementing Australia's position as the world's third-largest beef exporter, ABARES said.

There was also an interesting note at the end of the article:

"The duration, frequency and intensity of heatwaves have increased across large parts of Australia since 1950," according to a Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO report on Tuesday.

 In other words, this is what climate change in Australia looks like.

NASA Photo of the Day

Today:

Comet Between Fireworks and Lightning
Image Credit & Copyright: Antti Kemppainen Explanation: Sometimes the sky itself is the best show in town. In January 2007, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught. The photogenic comet was so bright that it even remained visible though the din of Earthly flashes. Comet McNaught has now returned to the outer Solar System and is now only visible with a large telescope. The above image is actually a three photograph panorama digitally processed to reduce red reflections from the exploding firework.

Is Your Grass-Fed Beef Imported?

All Things Considered:

Nobody collects information on exactly how much of the grass-fed beef that Americans eat comes from abroad. Theo Weening, the global meat coordinator for Whole Foods, says his company buys very little. "We probably import maybe 3 percent. The rest is regional, local; that's what we really push for," he says.
But you'll see plenty of Australian-origin beef in other supermarkets. Organic Valley, meanwhile, gets all of its grass-fed beef from Australia. There's also a lot of grass-fed beef coming in from and Brazil.
So why does the U.S., the world's biggest beef producer, have to go abroad to find enough of the grass-fed variety?
, an agricultural economist at the University of Georgia, says some of the reasons are pretty simple. Weather, for instance. In most of the U.S., it freezes. In Australia, it doesn't. So in Australia, as long as there's water, there's grass year-round.
And then there's the issue of land. "If you're going to finish animals on grass, it takes more land," Lacy says. Grassland in Australia is relatively cheap and plentiful, and there's not much else you can do with a lot of it, apart from grazing animals.
As a result, Australian grass-fed cattle operations are really big. In fact, they're the mainstream. Seventy percent of Australia's beef production comes from cattle that spent their lives grazing. And when beef operations are large-scale, everything becomes cheaper, from slaughtering to shipping.
On Monday, the U.S. company Cargill with Australia's second-biggest beef producer — a company called Tey's. Cargill will now sell more Australian beef in the U.S., both grass-fed and grain-fed.

I would figure that most of our potential area for grass-fed beef is instead used for cow-calf operations which send the calves to feedlots at weaning.  So they can raise a lot more calves to sell by keeping more cows on grass and shipping out the calves.  Plus, in much of that region they still have to contend with winter.  Then there is also the extra time it takes to fatten calves up on grass. Overall, it would be hard to produce the beef in the U.S. at a price that is competitive to Australia, Brazil , Argentina or Uruguay.

Resource Bubble Popping Down Under

From Macrobusiness, via nc links:

In early May, I noted how falling mining equipment sales could be a harbinger of a sharper than expected reduction in mining capex.
Over the remainder of May, we then witnessed a spate of mining services firms – Coffey, UGL, Worley Parsons, Transfield Services, and Boart Longyear lower their earnings guidance and/or cut jobs amid slowing mining activity.
The bad news has continued this week, with a spate of job cuts announced by Australian coal mining companies, with Peabody Resources, Downer EDI, and Glencore Xstrata all slashing jobs and cutting output.
Now, heavy machinery dealer, WesTrac, which supplies Caterpillar machinery such as bulldozers and trucks to miners and builders, has today announced that it will cut 350 jobs – roughly 10% of its workforce – amid “challenging market conditions”.

That can't be good for the crazy housing market down there.  I'm getting a bit concerned about the future of the grain markets, too.  Will the farmland bubble be bursting soon?  I'd guess it is becoming much more likely.

Is Australia A Portent for the Great Plains?

Agrimoney, via Big Picture Agriculture:

Australia's volatile climate, which experts warned will produce increasing weather extremes, has already contributed to a loss in farmland the size of Ukraine, a leading analyst warned.

Australia's Climate Commission warned earlier this week of a high risk that the heatwaves, drought, wild fires and cyclones which have reached at least part of the country over the past few months will become more severe.

"Records are broken from time to time, but record-breaking weather is becoming more common as the climate shifts," Tim Flannery, chief commissioner, said.

Yet already Australia's farmland is on the decline, with more than 60m hectares (600,000 square kilometres) - an area the size of Germany and the UK combined, and equivalent to a 13% loss - falling out of production over the past two decades, Luke Mathews, at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, said.

"Some of this decline is attributed to urban encroachment, but more is attributed to retired land because of poor productivity and environmental considerations," he said, flagging "limited water supplies" as a major land constraint.

Much of the land lost will have been of poor quality, used only for grazing, but in some areas, notably parts of Western Australia, extended dryness is threatening what have historically been arable farms too.

Read the whole thing.  If I were in the Great Plains, I'd be feeling a might bit uncomfortable.

Wind Energy In Australia Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels

Bloomberg (via Ritholtz):

This new ranking of Australia’s energy resources is the product of BNEF’s Sydney analysis team, which comprehensively modelled the cost of generating electricity in Australia from different sources. The study shows that electricity can be supplied from a new wind farm at a cost of AUD 80/MWh (USD 83), compared to AUD 143/MWh from a new coal plant or AUD 116/MWh from a new baseload gas plant, including the cost of emissions under the Gillard government’s carbon pricing scheme. However even without a carbon price (the most efficient way to reduce economy-wide emissions) wind energy is 14% cheaper than new coal and 18% cheaper than new gas.
“The perception that fossil fuels are cheap and renewables are expensive is now out of date”, said Michael Liebreich, chief executive of Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “The fact that wind power is now cheaper than coal and gas in a country with some of the world’s best fossil fuel resources shows that clean energy is a game changer which promises to turn the economics of power systems on its head,” he said.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s research on Australia shows that since 2011, the cost of wind generation has fallen by 10% and the cost of solar photovoltaics by 29%. In contrast, the cost of energy from new fossil-fuelled plants is high and rising. New coal is made expensive by high financing costs. The study surveyed Australia’s four largest banks and found that lenders are unlikely to finance new coal without a substantial risk premium due to the reputational damage of emissions-intensive investments – if they are to finance coal at all. New gas-fired generation is expensive as the massive expansion of Australia’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) export market forces local prices upwards. The carbon price adds further costs to new coal- and gas-fired plant and is forecast to increase substantially over the lifetime of a new facility.
BNEF’s analysts conclude that by 2020, large-scale solar PV will also be cheaper than coal and gas, when carbon prices are factored in. By 2030, dispatchable renewable generating technologies such as biomass and solar thermal could also be cost-competitive.
The results suggest that the Australian economy is likely to be powered extensively by renewable energy in future and that investment in new fossil-fuel power generation may be limited, unless there is a sharp, and sustained, fall in Asia-Pacific natural gas prices.

Being close to China has brought Australia a ton of money by selling them coal, iron ore and other basic materials.  Is it also making renewable energy cheaper?  It looks that way.  I'm sure that if the externalities of using fossil fuels were priced in, renewables would be a much cheaper source of energy here in the states, also.  It definitely helps renewable energy in Australia because they have a carbon pricing scheme.

Happy Australia Day

From Wikipedia:

Australia Day (previously known as Anniversary Day, Foundation Day, and ANA Day) is the official national day of Australia. Celebrated annually on 26 January, the date commemorates the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove, New South Wales in 1788 and the proclamation at that time of British sovereignty over the eastern seaboard of Australia (then known as New Holland).
Although it was not known as Australia Day until over a century later, records of celebrations on 26 January date back to 1808, with the first official celebration of the formation of New South Wales held in 1818. It is an official public holiday in every state and territory of Australia and is marked by the presentation of the Australian of the Year Awards on Australia Day Eve, announcement of the Australia Day Honours list and addresses from the Governor-General and Prime Minister. With community festivals, concerts and citizenship ceremonies, the day is celebrated in large and small communities and cities around the nation. Australia Day has become the biggest annual civic event in Australia.

Don't storm your local Outback to celebrate.

Happy Boxing Day

For my former boss and all the Britainers, Canucks and Aussies out there, enjoy your Boxing Day and have fun watching all the rugby, soccer or cricket matches or whatever it is you do on your day off.  I'm headed to work in what was predicted to be a blizzard.  At least I can expect this 3 day week to be pretty damn slow, and we get to wear jeans all week.  Woo hoo, it's the little things in life that get us through.

steve sunk - axe man

steve sunk - axe man from rob norton on Vimeo.