Dec 6, 2024 09:15 PM
(This post was last modified: Dec 6, 2024 09:16 PM by C C.)
How big data created the modern dairy cow
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-big...dairy-cow/
INTRO: No matter where you are in the world, there’s a good chance the milk or cheese you’re buying is the product of the US dairy industry. Even if it didn’t come from American cattle, the cow that produced the milk could well have been inseminated by an American bull.
The United States has been the world’s largest supplier of cattle genetics since at least 1992. In 2022, the US exported $295 million in bovine semen, 47 percent of the world’s exports. Few countries even come close to this market share: the next biggest exporters are Canada at 14 percent and the Netherlands at seven.
America’s cows are now extraordinarily productive. In 2024, just 9.3 million cows will produce 226 billion pounds of milk (about 100 million tons) – enough milk to provide ten percent of 333 million insatiable Americans’ diets, and export for good measure.
And that’s despite the fact that none of the cattle breeds the US exports are indigenous to the country. The world’s most popular dairy cow breed, the Holstein-Friesian, hails from the border between the Netherlands and Germany; the Jersey and Guernsey dairy breeds both originate from islands in the English Channel.
In many low-income countries, livestock products, including dairy cows, are critical for providing both nutrition and farming livelihoods. As a result, the US’s role in the global livestock genetics market lends it an outsize role not only in the genetic improvement of cattle but as an arbiter of rural development worldwide.
How did the US achieve this? In a word: data. This is the story of how the power of big data, combined with an ambitious public-private partnership between dairy farmers and the US Department of Agriculture, enabled the US to engineer the modern dairy cow and transform the dairy industry... (MORE - details, no flagrant ads)
Better read the below now, since Hakai magazine is closing at the end of the year. Not sure an archive will remain.
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Conjuring the lost land beneath the North Sea
https://hakaimagazine.com/features/conju...north-sea/
EXCERPTS: Doggerland is not well known outside the field of archaeology. And historically, when archaeologists have discussed it, they considered it a land bridge connecting two more interesting places, used by people to travel between Europe and modern-day Britain around 12,000 years ago. But innovative archaeology is reframing Doggerland as a territory in which human communities lived and thrived for millennia—a place that was known, that was home to generations—until a warming climate and rising seas forced people to leave and it was forgotten. As climate change accelerates in the modern era, the story of Doggerland becomes a story of our future.
[...] What makes Doggerland different from Earth’s many other submerged lands is that Gaffney has found a way to see it ... Doggerland’s low-lying mosaic of fish-rich waters, wetlands, hills, and animal-filled woods was an ideal environment for foragers who thrived where food sources were diverse. So far, little is known of the lifestyles of Doggerland’s inhabitants, but there is plenty of evidence from today’s coastal Mesolithic sites in the United Kingdom and Europe, areas that were the outer reaches of Doggerland before its inundation between 20,000 and 7,500 years ago.
Here, people lived in small bands or larger communities; made tools from stone; felled wood for fuel and construction of simple houses; foraged plants, nuts, and seeds; caught fish in rivers and the shallow sea; and hunted animals, butchered them for food, and used their skins for clothing and their bones and antlers for fishing harpoons, weapons, and ritual objects. When faced with scarcity, mobility is the fundamental survival strategy for foraging people, but when resources are plentiful, they stay put.
Archaeologists have found Mesolithic settlements, as well as burial sites, all around the North Sea’s present-day coastline, which suggests the only reason they have not found them in Doggerland is because those sites are beneath the sea. Gaffney aims to fill this archaeological lacuna... (MORE - missing details, no flagrant ads)
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-big...dairy-cow/
INTRO: No matter where you are in the world, there’s a good chance the milk or cheese you’re buying is the product of the US dairy industry. Even if it didn’t come from American cattle, the cow that produced the milk could well have been inseminated by an American bull.
The United States has been the world’s largest supplier of cattle genetics since at least 1992. In 2022, the US exported $295 million in bovine semen, 47 percent of the world’s exports. Few countries even come close to this market share: the next biggest exporters are Canada at 14 percent and the Netherlands at seven.
America’s cows are now extraordinarily productive. In 2024, just 9.3 million cows will produce 226 billion pounds of milk (about 100 million tons) – enough milk to provide ten percent of 333 million insatiable Americans’ diets, and export for good measure.
And that’s despite the fact that none of the cattle breeds the US exports are indigenous to the country. The world’s most popular dairy cow breed, the Holstein-Friesian, hails from the border between the Netherlands and Germany; the Jersey and Guernsey dairy breeds both originate from islands in the English Channel.
In many low-income countries, livestock products, including dairy cows, are critical for providing both nutrition and farming livelihoods. As a result, the US’s role in the global livestock genetics market lends it an outsize role not only in the genetic improvement of cattle but as an arbiter of rural development worldwide.
How did the US achieve this? In a word: data. This is the story of how the power of big data, combined with an ambitious public-private partnership between dairy farmers and the US Department of Agriculture, enabled the US to engineer the modern dairy cow and transform the dairy industry... (MORE - details, no flagrant ads)
Better read the below now, since Hakai magazine is closing at the end of the year. Not sure an archive will remain.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Conjuring the lost land beneath the North Sea
https://hakaimagazine.com/features/conju...north-sea/
EXCERPTS: Doggerland is not well known outside the field of archaeology. And historically, when archaeologists have discussed it, they considered it a land bridge connecting two more interesting places, used by people to travel between Europe and modern-day Britain around 12,000 years ago. But innovative archaeology is reframing Doggerland as a territory in which human communities lived and thrived for millennia—a place that was known, that was home to generations—until a warming climate and rising seas forced people to leave and it was forgotten. As climate change accelerates in the modern era, the story of Doggerland becomes a story of our future.
[...] What makes Doggerland different from Earth’s many other submerged lands is that Gaffney has found a way to see it ... Doggerland’s low-lying mosaic of fish-rich waters, wetlands, hills, and animal-filled woods was an ideal environment for foragers who thrived where food sources were diverse. So far, little is known of the lifestyles of Doggerland’s inhabitants, but there is plenty of evidence from today’s coastal Mesolithic sites in the United Kingdom and Europe, areas that were the outer reaches of Doggerland before its inundation between 20,000 and 7,500 years ago.
Here, people lived in small bands or larger communities; made tools from stone; felled wood for fuel and construction of simple houses; foraged plants, nuts, and seeds; caught fish in rivers and the shallow sea; and hunted animals, butchered them for food, and used their skins for clothing and their bones and antlers for fishing harpoons, weapons, and ritual objects. When faced with scarcity, mobility is the fundamental survival strategy for foraging people, but when resources are plentiful, they stay put.
Archaeologists have found Mesolithic settlements, as well as burial sites, all around the North Sea’s present-day coastline, which suggests the only reason they have not found them in Doggerland is because those sites are beneath the sea. Gaffney aims to fill this archaeological lacuna... (MORE - missing details, no flagrant ads)