BQ 'In the Field'

As promised I will detail a bit more about cleaning popcorn. Usually when I talk to someone about this they wonder if I'm lathering and rinsing the seeds. I am not. The more appropriate name for the process would probably be classifying. Like panning for gold. I only want the gold. To do this we start with a machine called a screener / scalper. It is commonly referred to as a 'Clipper'. It takes in the shelled popcorn, scalps out the larger debris with the top screen and screens out the smaller debris with the bottom screen. This model is...

While we were in the Tucson area, we made a pilgrimage to the hippy-nerd mecca of Biosphere 2. You may remember the news sensation this experiment caused in the 90s, or maybe you only know and love it from the Pauly Shore movie Biodome. How there has not been a more serious film treatment of this story I have no idea, because it's just about the greatest story ever told.  Basically, a science-oriented theater troupe teamed up with a Texas billionaire to build a Mars colony on Earth: a totally self-contained 3 acre greenhouse. The troupe would live in it...

  We just got back from doing some solar thermal prototyping in the Arizona desert. We are testing our ground based solar concentrator with 2 dimensional curvature rather than 3d; the 'trough' rather than 'dish' geometry. The ground-based trough is still the spherical geometry that we've used in our popcorn making basins, so the reflector itself doesn't need to track the sun to stay focused.  Linear scalability is the main reason the trough is attractive; a trough can be extended in one direction without the hole getting any deeper. The lamination of reflective material is also simplified, as is the...

At long last our newest flavors Cloudy and Spicy have hit the shelves! It's been a blast being a one flavor company all these six years. It would not have worked without such a great single flavor offering (thank you Classic!), but I also think everyone involved relished the arrogance of it. I remember soliciting advice early on from a co-packer about how to setup a commercial food facility. When I told him what we were planning to do he scoffed and said, "You can't run a commercial facility with a single product!". He also added "I don't eat the shit I make!" We will...

Local farms and food are well into their renaissance across the country. The demands now extend far beyond the sweet corn, apple and pumpkin-centric rural excursions of the 20th century. Today people are seeking foraged ramps and mushrooms, odd varieties of broccoli and squash and a vast offering of interesting greens. Grains on the other hand have been slower to resurge, and for understandable reasons. For one, a freshly picked strawberry is clearly superior to any supermarket offering, but the same comparison cannot easily be made for grains. Secondly, its quite difficult to farm grains on a small scale especially in the economic world we...