grouchyfarmer

Warning for OSX users

I’m not sure exactly when this happened, possibly with updating to Sierra, possible during one of the security updates to OSX that took place over the last couple of months, but you want to double check your iCloud settings on all of your iMacs and Macbooks. I didn’t find this out until I suddenly got a warning that I was running out of capacity on my iCloud drive.

I had disabled all automatic storage and backup from from my iMac to my iCloud account because I don’t need it except for photo sharing. I do my own backups to external devices so I didn’t need it for that. I also didn’t want documents, emails or other information being stored off-line out in the cloud because I don’t particularly want things like financial information, tax returns and similar information stored heaven only knows where on some server I have no control over.

Somewhere along the way, perhaps with the upgrade to Sierra, Apple decided to reset all of my iCloud preferences and now everything was turned on. It was automatically saving my entire documents folder, desktop files, contact lists, calendar, and pretty much everything out on the iCloud. Even worse, it had also turned on iCloud for every third party application that has iCloud capabilities – word processors, accounting software, a couple of photo editors — all of them were now storing duplicates of everything out on the cloud as well as on my local drives.

Not only is this a privacy concern, it also sucked up a hell of a lot of storage space, and while iCloud storage isn’t exactly expensive, it still costs money.

So if you use iMacs or Macbook computers, go to your system preferences and check your iCloud preferences so you know what’s actually being stored out on the cloud somewhere.

Important – just found out the hard way that if you do disable Sierra’s ability to “share” your documents and desktop with iCloud, and then delete the documents and desktop folders on your iCloud account, it will also delete the documents folder and any documents, photos, etc you have on your desktop from your iMac’s local hard drive as well.

And, of course, I’d emptied the trash bin before I found this out and had to restore my documents folder from backup (Thank you Time Machine)

Additional note: Apparently just switching iCloud functions off doesn’t actually do anything. After switching it off, deleting the unwanted files from the cloud, I discovered OSX put them right back again. I had to log out of my iCloud account, reboot the computer, then log back in before the changes actually went into effect.

It’s been a weird fall here in Wisconsin

This fall has been ridiculously warm. You’d think we’d like this unusually warm fall up here in the land of blizzards, frozen cars, burst water pipes and children frozen to flag poles. But we don’t. Not really. We’re not used to this.

It’s October 23, and I’m still harvesting eggplant and peppers, for heaven’s sake. I mean look at that box full I picked this morning over there on the left. And there seems to be no end in sight. The eggplant and assorted pepper plants are in full bloom, loaded with baby fruit. I’m harvesting dill for the second time this year. I have a second crop of spring onions about ready to eat. I planted those at the end of September. I have chives coming out my ears. I’d be drying those but we already have far, far more chives than we know what to do with. The greek oregano is going crazy. It’s over a foot tall and in full bloom, for the second time this year. Same with the sage. Some of my hostas have put out flower stalks for the second time this season. I was looking back in the tomato bed that I cleaned out at the end of September and found a dozen or more volunteer tomato plants newly sprouted, some six inches tall already. I’m tempted to pot some of them and see if they’ll grow indoors.

According to the recording thermometer the coldest night we’ve had has been about 41. Daytime temperatures have generally been up in the high 60s to low 70s. The only way we know it’s fall is that the days are much shorter and the trees are losing their leaves.

This isn’t a horrible thing, this extended warm streak. It certainly is keeping the heating costs down. But it’s, well, odd. It doesn’t feel right. And you can tell it’s bothering people. They seem nervous, edgy, waiting for the other shoe to drop. We all have this feeling of mild dread.

I don’t know if it’s our upbringing, or some kind of inherent human trait, but we all seem to share it. We all get this feeling that something is too good. Some malicious deity or force of nature or something is deliberately lulling us into a false sense of security, and then wham, drops ten feet of snow on us, or plunges the temperature down to -30, or — or something is going to happen.

The thing is, we like winter up here. We like the snow. We like the bone chilling cold. It’s part of our heritage. It’s part of our nature.

We complain about the cold, the winter, true. But if you listen to those complaints, you begin to realize that we also take a perverse pride in it as well, pride in our ability to deal with it. And an enormous amount of delight in laughing at the people down south when an inch of snow shuts down the entire metro Atlanta area.

Our complaints about the cold and snow are part of the fun, the bragging about how cold it was, the complaints about shoveling six feet of snow off the porch before we could even get outside to get to the outhouse.

Well, okay, the outhouse thing is a bit outdated. We’ve had real indoor plumbing here in Wisconsin for, oh, two or three years now. But you know what I mean.

What’s the point in living in Wisconsin if we can’t brag about the bad weather any more? Is it really worth putting up with living here if we can’t laugh at the people in Illinois because they don’t know how to drive in the snow any more?

State may expand funding for dairy farm digesters: (Here we go again, GF)

Agency approves $7.7 million for solar and other renewable projects at homes and businesses.

Source: State may expand funding for dairy farm digesters

I’m all for alternative energy sources, but putting any kind of tax funding or other subsidies into manure digesters in the belief that they will somehow help deal with the impact of manure on water pollution, well contamination, quality of life problems caused by manure from CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) is utterly ridiculous.

CAFOs like the mega dairy farms here in Wisconsin and other parts of the country, large animal feedlot operations and pork operations that raise thousands upon thousands of animals, produce such large amounts of manure that it is mind boggling. One single dairy farm here in Wisconsin produces as much manure as a city of 180,000 people.

And, of course, that manure has to be disposed of somehow. One of these days I’m going to have to tell you horror of manure disposal here in Wisconsin. I don’t want to get into that now because if I could probably do a thousand words on just that. So let’s stick to digesters.

The idea behind digesters has been around for a long time. The manure is put into air tight holding tanks. Bacteria is added to the mix. The bacteria thrive in this environment, and as they grow and multiply, they produce, among other things, methane gas. Because the tank is sealed, the methane accumulates and is piped off and used to power engines which drive generators to produce electricity.

It sounds rather logical, I suppose. You can produce electricity from cow poo, or pig poo, or whatever kind of poo you shove into the tank. It sounds all ‘green’ and environmental and good for the planet, doesn’t it, producing electricity from manure. It solves a lot of problem, doesn’t it? Gets rid of the manure, makes electricity to keep all of our gadgets running…

Only doesn’t do any of that. Not really. Especially not the getting rid of the manure part.

These things are ridiculously expensive, first of all. We’re talking millions of dollars even for a relatively small one. Without heavy taxpayer subsidies, no farm could afford to put one of these in. Special holding tanks have to be built, first of all, because they have to be completely sealed to keep the gas in. Otherwise all that methane is going to go straight up into the atmosphere, and since methane is a green house gas that is much worse than CO2.

The gas that comes off these things is highly corrosive. That means all of the pipes, tanks, even the engines used to run the generators, are extremely expensive to make because special materials have to be used to prevent them from just corroding away. Special filter systems have to be installed to remove unwanted elements from the gas, dryers to remove moisture… The list goes on and on.

The whole process is neither efficient, nor is it ‘clean’ by any stretch of the imagination.

Oh, and did I mention they explode sometimes? Like this one that happened at a digester here in Wisconsin. If you click the link to the jsonline article, you’ll note that the project has been plagued with problems from the beginning. And this isn’t the only one that’s had major difficulties. Plug ‘manure digester explosion’ into Google and you’ll see what I mean.

But they generate electricity, right? Well, sort of. Not much. Certainly no where near enough electricity to pay for building and maintaining one of these systems. And it isn’t “clean” energy by any stretch of the imagination because it still generates electricity the good old fashioned way, by burning stuff. Burning methane is cleaner than burning coal or oil, but it still produces waste material like CO2 and other gases.

They’re pushing these things by claiming that they somehow help to eliminate the manure disposal problems CAFOs have. So let’s look at that.

They don’t. I’m sorry, they just don’t. They do nearly nothing to eliminate manure disposal problems.

The digestion process does alter the chemical composition of the manure, I’ll grant you that. It will reduce the amount of phosphorus, and that’s important because it is a major problem around here. Phosphorus runoff causes toxic algae blooms in lakes, causing major fish die offs. We have huge dead zones in the Bay of Green Bay on Lake Michigan that seem to get bigger every year, due to phosphorus.

But that’s all these digesters do, remove some of the phosphorus. And only some of it. About half of it still remains. And the other pollutants in the manure remain virtually unscathed.

And then there’s the quantities involved. You put 100,000 gallons of manure into a digester and what you get out the other end when the process is done is, well, 100,000 gallons of manure. It does absolutely nothing to reduce the sheer quantity of manure.

The single biggest problem with manure is the sheer volume of it, and digesters do absolutely nothing about that. All the digesters seem to be is little more than a lame attempt at ‘greenwashing’, trying to cover up the real problem.

The Echo from Amazon

screen-shot-2016-10-20-at-8-39-44-am I’ve been curious about the Echo from Amazon for a while now, and I finally broke down and bought one, suspecting that like most of the high tech gadgets I end up with, it would be an enormous disappointment. I’ve heard all the ridiculous hype, and in the vast majority of cases, ridiculous hype is exactly what the claims for these products turns out to be. But in the case of the Echo, well, it seems to pretty much live up to all of the hype. I’m having a lot of fun with this thing.

I didn’t really expect much from the Echo at first. About the only reason I bought it was because it’s supposed to be able to link to Amazon music and I have Amazon’s unlimited music service.

So this thing showed up on my doorstep two days ago and I get to work setting it up. Amazon doesn’t exactly make this easy. You apparently can’t just plug it in and turn it on. You have to download an app for an IOS or Android device, and use that to set it up. So right off the bat I’m irritated because I didn’t remember anything in the product descriptions that said you had to have a cell phone or tablet just to use the thing. It turns out that apparently you can activate it from a computer by going to a website. But Amazon never said that anywhere that I could see in the product description either. I didn’t find out about that until I was searching for answers to problems I was having.

I installed the app on my iPad, but not without some misgivings because the app has one of the worst reviewer ratings I’ve ever seen and the first five reviews on the app store claimed that the app either didn’t work at all or had major problems. This did not bode well, as they say.

Still, it did work, and setting it up wasn’t that difficult. The instructions in the app were fairly simple to follow, and after typing in passwords, linking it to my home WiFi network and all that fun stuff, it was up and running.

Now I’ve never had much luck with speech recognition systems in the past. Siri, for example, can’t seem to understand a word I say. I thought it was just me, but apparently she can’t figure out with my wife or sons say either.

The Echo, though, was an entirely different story. The default code word to get the Echo’s attention is Alexa. You say Alexa first, followed by what you want it to do. So I said “Alexa what’s the weather for tomorrow”. And a pleasant feminine voice told me what the weather was going to be.

Damn, this thing actually works?

I tried other requests, using my normal voice, normal pronunciation, at various levels of loudness, and… Well, damn, it just — just worked. The voice recognition on this thing is, for me anyway, amazingly good. And it worked even when the ambient noise levels were fairly high. I run air filters, fans, various equipment back here in the office, and it never seemed to have a problem understanding what I said, even when I was talking quietly.

What I bought it for, though, was easy access to music. I have Amazon’s unlimited music service (extra cost option for Prime members which claims to be able to stream “tens of millions of songs” for just eight bucks a month) and I’d never really used it for very much. So I started messing with the Echo and seeing what I could dig up.

So for giggles I said “Alexa play The Laughing Policeman”. And it did. Okay… Play songs by Al Jolson… And it did. Play the latest Katy Perry album. And it did. Play Court of the Crimson King, and it did. Apparently there really are tens of millions of songs in there.

But back to the Echo, because that’s what this is supposed to be about.

It can answer some questions, not all, but there is a significant amount of information linked into the system.

It’s linked into TuneIn, so it can live stream a large number of radio stations. It has the current weather and weather predictions for every place I’ve asked about. Can read me the news. It’s even linked to my Kindle library and can read my Kindle books that have the audio enabled.

It has other capabilities as well. It can set alarms, links to Google Calendar, and has other “skills” (i.e. capabilities you can add to the Echo via the Alexa app that are usually associated with spending more money, like buying stuff by voice)

This thing is impressive.

Problems? Well, sure, there are always problems.

The Alexa app gave me some problems. After I used it to initialize and set up the Echo, the app refused to re-connect to my Echo. Every time I started the App it would try to go through the entire setup procedure again.

After spending a significant amount of time trying to find answers to that problem, I resorted to the old standby, unplugging the Echo and plugging it back in. Bang, now the app worked fine. once I got that sorted, the Alexa app has caused me no problems at all. If you bring it up it shows a list of voice commands the Echo received, what music you’ve used it to listen to, you can control the volume of the Echo with it, pause the Echo’s playback, other goodies like that.

The only other real issue I have is audio output. The built in speaker isn’t bad, but it certainly doesn’t compare to the speakers in a good stereo system. My big 1980s era Pioneer speakers are much, much better. Even my Bose system’s speakers are better. The Echo has 2 inch speakers, for pete’s sake. I don’t care how good the technology is, trying to get high fidelity sound out of a 2 inch tweeter and a 2.5 inch woofer… well, sorry.

But the Echo has no external audio output unless you resort to buying extra cost options from Amazon. None. Can’t even link bluetooth speakers to it. You’re stuck with the Echo’s built in speakers. If you want to hook up external speakers, the only option is to get something like the Tap or a Dot from Amazon.

The Tap is a battery operated speaker/microphone to listen to/control the Echo. But that will set you back $130, for crying out loud. You might as well spend the extra money and get another Echo for $180.

The other option is to get a Dot, a hockey puck sized gadget which will set you back $50. It seems to be a downsized version of the Tap. It is also battery operated and requires an external charger. The Dot will connect to an external bluetooth speaker or via a standard audio cable. And at $50 it’s a lot less than the Tap, but come on, really?

According to the Echo’s specifications, it has bluetooth capabilities built into it. It can link via bluetooth to receive audio from your phone or tablet, but it can’t send audio to an external speaker without you having to spend at least $50 for the Dot? Really? I’m sorry, I don’t believe that for a minute.

I should point out that the Echo’s speakers aren’t bad, even at high volume levels. Considering how small they are, they are pretty good. But even a mediocre external speaker system would do better.

Overall I’m surprisingly pleased with the Echo. The voice recognition system is amazingly good. The sound quality, while not outstanding, is acceptable for casual listening. It’s great for doing metric conversions like how many feet are in a meter and things like that. It can answer some questions. It does pretty good at math, too. It can give you the news, weather and sports. Ask it sports scores.

Mostly I use it for music and radio. It’s been able to play just about any radio station I want to hear.

Note: Some of the music services require you to have the Amazon unlimited music service. Other music is restricted to Amazon Prime accounts. So what you have access to via the Echo is going to vary depending on whether or not you’re in the Prime program, etc.

Is bloomberg.com the worst designed website ever?

I would really, really like to take whoever designed this website out behind the shed and introduce them to my little friend, Mr. Smackupsidethehead.

Vertical columns that scroll up and down at different speeds from the main columns, inconsistently colored headlines, a refresh system that constantly updates the main page even as you’re viewing it so it abruptly drops you to a different part of the page while you’re still reading. Go off to read an article and click the back button and you have no idea where you’ll end up. Even more interesting, now the story blurbs on the main page are different, moved, some gone, others added. Auto-start videos that you have to manually click to turn off. Only to have them start up again as soon as you scroll. Headlines that needlessly move as you scroll.

Dear lord, my cats could design a better website than this.

Rise of the robot tractors | Dairy Herd Management

Ghost in the machine. A John Deere 7930 tractor rumbles across a canola field, buggy in tow, and eases alongside a rolling combine to collect grain. Speed, distance, and timing are synced in a farming machinery version of a harvest mating dance. Except this is no ordinary two-step. The box is empty. There is no wheelman in the tractor cab.

Source: Rise of the robot tractors | Dairy Herd Management

I’ve been waiting for someone to do something like this for a while now. I figured it was only a matter of time before someone out there came up with a system like this.

Now there are self-drive systems out there for high-end tractors, but they’re complex and expensive. Mr. Reimer here did it for around $8,000. Granted, it certainly isn’t as complex as what is needed to make a self-driving car, but it’s still useful and pretty darned neat. His system doesn’t have collision avoidance systems, radar, video or the other things necessary for automobiles, but the tractor is only used in large fields where there is little or no danger of it hitting something. For this application it works quite well indeed.

There are self-driving tractors out there, but the option is, as I mentioned, expensive, and it’s only available on new, high-end (and expensive) tractors. A system like this could be adapted for use on just about any tractor, no matter how old.

Agrimoney.com | China’s pork imports to ease from record, as domestic output grows

The top pork consuming country will see its imports ease, a bit, next year as the boost to domestic output from high prices works through

Source: Agrimoney.com | China’s pork imports to ease from record, as domestic output grows

The agriculture industry is going to have to begin to accept the fact that in the future China is not going to be the massive importer of food that it has been in the past. Unfortunately it seems that a lot of agribusinesses in the US, South America, NZ and the EU haven’t figured that out yet. This is especially true of the dairy industry which still seems to be betting the farm on the hopes that China will return to the days when it was importing all of the milk and milk products it could get its hands on.

For years now China has been pushing hard to improve its agricultural systems. It has been investing heavily in almost every type of agriculture, from grain production, to meat, to dairy, China has been putting a great deal of money and work into improving and modernizing its farming techniques. The ultimate goal of the country is to be at least 90% self sufficient in food production within the next ten to twenty years.

Whether or not China will succeed in reaching that 90% goal I don’t know. But even if they don’t, it will still have a profound effect on world agriculture. We’ve been treating China as a guaranteed market, a buyer of massive amounts of product that will always be there to help absorb our products. But it won’t. And the effects will be profound, as they were when China abruptly cut back drastically on milk product imports. The result from that was the price of milk and milk products plummeting by almost half, and the dairy industry still hasn’t recovered from that.

There will almost certainly be a China market, but it’s almost certain to be far smaller than it has been in the past. If agribusiness can’t learn to adjust, other agricultural sectors are going to find themselves in the same situation dairy is in now.

“The Good of the Party”

I don’t really comment on politics here, and I don’t plan on starting (Aren’t you relieved? I am.). Unless you are a hermit living in a cave somewhere, you already know what’s going on out there, what a bizarre circus our political system has become. I’m not going to talk about that. I’m more interested in the responses of the GOP faithful to what’s happening, what the politicians, the power brokers, the GOP leadership are doing and saying.

And it’s been interesting, to say the least. I don’t think I have ever seen such astonishing mental contortions, such grasping at straws, so many ridiculous attempts at rationalization in my entire life as these people attempt to defend the indefensible. For “the good of the party”.

I think that’s the key, here, that phrase, ‘the good of the party’. I think that the GOP and the Democrats both, the politicians on both sides, have forgotten one little fact. They weren’t elected ‘for the good of the party’, were they? They were elected for the good of the country as a whole, the good of the people who elected them.

They all seem to have forgotten that, though. They’ve forgotten that they were elected to protect the welfare of all of us. They were elected to protect the entire country. They were elected to safeguard all of the people in the United States, not just those who support a particular political party.

The Magic Bullet Syndrome

Magic bullets. You’ve seen them. We all have. The pill that claims it will melt away pounds while letting you gorge on Big Macs and never exercise. The miracle wrist bands you can get for just $19.95 that will make your joint pain vanish. The miracle nutrition supplement that will let you throw away your glasses, or keep you from getting dementia or cure the ailment of your choice. The miracle food that will prevent cancer. The list is endless.

Every generation has their own unique set, it seems. When I was in college one was laetrile, a quack remedy made from apricot pits that was alleged to cure cancer. It didn’t, of course. Previous generations suffered through a variety of radium cures that claimed to help everything from impotence to ‘female problems’ to gray hair. Or electric cures, or ultraviolet light cures. I could go on listing them all day.

The magic bullet syndrome has infected almost every aspect of society. Medical, nutritional, political. They have the ‘magic bullet’, that if only you’ll elect them or buy them, will be a fast and cheap cure for whatever problem you have.

They don’t work, of course, these magic bullets. They never have. They never will. The frustrating thing is that even though we know they don’t work, that they can’t work, huge numbers of people keep buying into the belief that there is something, somewhere, that will solve whatever problem they need solved, without any work on their part, without them having to make any kind of significant sacrifice or effort, and which won’t cost them much.

And magic bullets almost always make things worse, not better. This belief in a magic bullet masks the real problems and the real solutions to the problems. Often until the situation has become so bad that we can’t hide it, can’t try to ignore it, and finally are forced to do something. And by that time, things have gotten so bad, so out of control, that it’s going to cost ten times more to fix it than it would have if we’d just tackled the problem the right way in the beginning. Or in the case of some of the health scams, you end up dead.

They’re seductive, though, these magic bullets. There is no doubt about that. I can certainly understand the temptation to believe in them despite the fact that I know that, ultimately, they will always make the problem worse than it was before.

But it’s oh so tempting… The magic bullet, well, that means you don’t have to accept responsibility for the problem. You don’t have to change. You don’t have to give anything up. It isn’t going to cost you anything, financially or personally.

As the election insanity approaches its climax, we have packs of politicians swarming around the country, each promoting their own particular magic bullets, they themselves. They are the magic bullet that will solve all of the country’s problems. They can fix the economy. They can create new jobs. They can improve the schools. They can bring peace. They can stop terrorism. They can fix anything and everything.

The root of the magic bullet syndrome seems to be intimately linked to our refusal to take responsibility. No one wants to admit that the problems we are facing are our own fault, and the politicians are taking full advantage of that. They’ve latched on to the magic bullet syndrome’s close relative, scapegoatism.

Scapegoatism is simply a different form of the magic bullet syndrome. Instead of a magic bullet fixing something, scapegoatism is the attempt to blame all problems on an individual or small group. It’s been around as long as magic bullets have been, and it has it’s roots in the same basic human fault that makes magic bullets so attractive, our unwillingness to admit that we are responsible for our own problems.

And like magic bullets, it’s so easy to do, so tempting to blame someone else, isn’t it? It’s not our fault, it’s, oh, immigrants or one’s political opponent, or the government. The list of scapegoats is as long as the list of magic bullets, really. Unions, teachers, students, young people, old people, immigrants, governments, politicians, religions, communists, democrats, republicans, liberals, conservatives, rich people, poor people, middle class people… They’ve all been used as scapegoats.

When are we ever going to get over the magic bullet syndrome? When are we ever going to be able to admit that our problems are largely our own fault? When are we going to be able to admit that there is no magic bullet, that the scapegoat is really us?

The Great Mayonnaise War

It looks like The Great Mayonnaise War is finally over as the USDA issues rulings on the antics the egg board was engaged in that started the war.

If you don’t remember the Mayonnaise War, I don’t blame you. As such things go, it made barely a blip on the media’s radar. But for some it was a very big deal indeed.

The war began when a company called Hampton Creek released a vegan mayonnaise that they called Just Mayo. Unlike ‘real’ mayonnaise, Just Mayo was made without the use of eggs.

Just Mayo was the kind of product that would probably not have made much of dent in the marketplace, to be honest. It might have gotten exposure in places like Whole Foods and other speciality retailers, but it’s unlikely that it would have been all that popular in most mass market grocery store chains. Vegan foods intended to replace more traditional non-vegan options generally don’t do all that well in the mass market.

The egg producers, and especially the American Egg Board, the egg industry’s marketing organization, didn’t see it that way, though. They looked at Just Mayo and went full Chicken Little, running around in circles like a chicken with it’s head cut off, clucking that the sky was falling, and that they had to do something, right now, to shut this down, before they were left with (Oh, no, he’s not really going to say it, is he? Yeah, he is) egg on their faces.

Now, have I gotten all of the chicken references out of the way in this little item? Lord, I hope so. I hate it when I start doing that. Are there no depths to which I will not stoop in order to grab for a cheap laugh? Uh, well, no, not really. Ahem, let’s get on with this.

The egg board went a bit loony, to be honest. It launched attacks against Just Mayo, claiming it wasn’t ‘real’ mayonnaise because it didn’t have eggs, filing complaints with the FDA, USDA and any other agency that had blank complaint forms laying around in the lobby.

But the board’s efforts to derail Hampton Creek and it’s vegan mayonnaise weren’t limited to just legal objections.

An alleged industry consultant, someone named Zolezzi, got in touch with the board and during a strategy session in 2013 claimed he could make a phone call and get Whole Foods to pull the product line from it’s shelves. An offer that was, for a time at least, taken seriously. In a note written to the president of the board, the head of United Egg Producers offered to get in touch with Zolezzi and actually try to do it.

Internal memos and emails showed one instance where it was suggested egg board members pool their money and hire a hit man to take out the founder of Hampton Creek.

This was, they say, a joke.

And it was also a ‘joke’ when another member offered to have his old buddies in Brooklyn to pay a visit to the founder of Hampton Creek with the apparent intent to, I’m sure, have a nice, pleasant chat with him and not at all do him bodily injury.

Investigators from the USDA said that the actions and comments of the egg board were “inappropriate discussions about an action which, if acted upon, would have significantly exceeded the provisions of the Egg Research and Consumer Information Act” that was responsible for setting up the board and defining its duties.

(Good heavens, really? How can an egg board operate if can’t take out a hit on the competition? What’s the world coming to?)

The board did take some action, including trying to rig internet advertising services so searches for Hampton Creek’s products would bring up the board’s own ads. It discussed spending money for “research and coordination with key influential bloggers in food and health/nutrition space, drafting key messaging and coordinating posts”, according to the reports I’ve read. In other words, trying to hire or otherwise influence food bloggers to present a message that was pro-egg and anti Just Mayo.

I should point out that Hampton Creek allegedly wasn’t behaving in exactly an ethical fashion either. An investigative reporter for Bloomberg news filed a report that claimed Hampton was running a covert operation to buy up large amounts of its own products in order to inflate sales figures and make it more attractive to investors.

According the the Bloomberg report (click the link to jump to the story) executives at the company launched a large scale undercover operation to buy back its own products in order to make it seem the company was selling far more than it really was. Five former workers came forward to talk about it, hundreds of receipts, expense reports, cash advance records and emails were discovered by Bloomberg describing how the scheme worked. In addition, Bloomberg claims that the company had contractors calling store managers asking about Just Mayo, requesting they stock it.

Bloomberg’s report also shows contractors and employees bought large quantities of product from Safeway, Kroger, Costco, Walmart, Target and Whole foods around the country. Employees were assigned specific stores, instructed in techniques for making the buys so they wouldn’t be seen buying mass quantities of the product.

The CEO claims the purpose of the purchases was to check quality of product, not to inflate sales. But internal memos and emails from company executives don’t back that up. Emails from from a Hampton Creek vice president actually outlined how contractors should use self checkout lanes or make several transactions at different lanes to avoid appearing to be buying large amounts of product and to avoid wearing Hampton Creek logoed clothing. One email specifically said “this is an undercover project.” according to Bloomberg.

The company was being investigated by the SEC and the Justice Department, but I haven’t heard of any results from those investigations as yet.

But let’s get back to the marketing board, which is what I started out talking about.

The whole thing was just silly, and it points out just how out of control these product marketing boards have become, and how cutthroat product marketing can be.

The whole kerfuffle ended up with the egg board getting a slap on the wrist from the government, and a promise that the board would ‘retrain’ its employees on just what it could and could not legally do.