Diary of a Mad Scientist

Today was as overbusy with farm biomass plant discussions as Friday was. On Friday I’d pulled what was literally a 9-5 marathon session of phone calls and email having to do with both ends of biodiesel business. Welcome to small business- it still feels like I’m participating in my hobby or activism, but it’s starting to head into something more concrete. My head hurts from all the talking. I’ll be heading down to the county office to pick up my business license next week.

I had a series of fascinating conversations this weekend with engineers and farmers large and small: two educators, three dairy and cattle farmers, two engineers, an organic farmer, and a soon-to-be Republican candidate for Congress. People interested in sunflower oil, waste oil, sugar beet ethanol, biomass of all kinds, and da Insta-Pro press. And a partridge in a pear tree- that would be me. This idea of collaborating with a number of players is starting to take somewhat of a more concrete shape. Or if I don’t collaborate in a business sense, there’ll be a lot of info sharing that ought to come of my exploration into these farm projects. I’m already trying to connect people with each other and it’s amazing what a good fit some of them are for each other, as far as sharing equipment purchasing research and the like.

It turned out that several people I contacted from the forums, were folks I"d already met in real life, or otherwise had connections with, or who knew each other. There were a lot of “a-ha moments". The homebrew classes are doing their job which I’m now endlessly grateful for- I’ve done a better job of meeting the people, and finding out what information is buried where around the country, than I could have had I sat at home and focused on teaching locally two years ago, which could have had different short-term rewards.

It was really painful doing the tour I did in the fall of ‘03 but now I"m kind of reaping the long-term results to some extent, because of who I’d met and a variety of things I got to learn in the process.

I think my strengths in this business are that a. I have a pretty good handle on troubleshooting quality control problems from a technical standpoint and b. I have a REALLY good handle on where the information is buried, on the net and otherwise, and whom to ask when I don’t know the answer. I’ve worked (intentionally) at building up connections all over the spectrum, and it’s time to call on everybody for information.

For example, today I heard from an organic farmer who came to one of my classes and wants to grow sunflower and gave me a lot of details about his size operation, needs, history, etc. On Friday I had by chance spoken with a farmer/educator who had more or less the answers to everything that the organic guy was asking me today. So I’ll just connect the two of them and let them brainstorm together about some of the solutions that I don’t have good answers for. Maybe the “CSA System"- the little open-source ‘upscaled homebrew’ plant- can evolve with them speaking and comparing notes on a seed press and the sunflower processing equipment.

There was another dairyman I met in one of my classes in the Midwest on the tour up there, with whom I’d chatted briefly with about glycerine feeding to ruminants, which his family farm was going to have a nutritionist analyze. Recently- a year and a half later- I wanted to touch base on that data, so my to-do list said that I was to write to him next week.

On Friday I wrote to what I thought was a Colorado-based engineer who had posted somethign interesting on one of the forums. When he wrote me back, he turned out to be the man I’d met whose family had the herd nutritionist look at the glycerine-molasses replacement (?) possibility. And all these dairy guys are looking at the same seed press, which means there’ll be some share-able data coming out of one of these farms this year about it’s operation.

At this point the missing piece of the puzzle for me is that I"d like to talk with an oilseed researcher. Oh, wait, I know where there is one, in South Dakota…

Anyone else interested in talking?

alovert@b100.org