Sweetener

Lovely sunny  but cold day. Off to the local farm co.op in Ottobeuren to get a small trailer of loose shredded sugar beet pulp. Turned out to be 300kg costing just under 60 €uros or as they say here 20 €uros for a "Doppelzentner" . Farmers still use the old, probably medieval, term "hundredweight", which comes from the Latin "Centum" or hundred. For years even in mainland Europe, a Zenther was 100 pounds which though had many slightly different weights. In Germany it was standardised in 1858 to be 100 x 500 gramms = 50kg and a Double Zentner thus 100kg,

Just a few days ago the 2016 Sugar "Campaign" as the annual sugar beet harvest and production is called here, ended. Runs from September to December and called a campaign as it has to be organised along military lines to ensure the factories are kept fed with raw material. They cannot afford to stop the machinery for a single minute during this time, so it is flat out 24 hours a day.

The 2016 harvest and production is the last one to be held under EU quota and funding rules, so as to free up the market. Another test for farmers and it will be of particular interest what happens in the UK if they do Brexit.

The horses couldn't care much about the politics or even the financing. The beet pulp costing 0.20 €uros/kg tastes much better to them than the branded Dodson & Horrell, unmollassed sort we buy for Rosie which costs four times as much.

Day didn't end well when Angie came in, shook her trousers outdoors to get rid of the hay and straw bits and her mobile phone sailed through the air landing with one corner on very rough concrete. It is dead! I spent the evening trying to research, even calling Bliper Nogbad for advice. Oddly I had come to the choice of one that he recently bought, the only problem it doesn't have a FM radio.

This brings me to another gripe. 99% of all mobile phones have the hardware for an FM radio built in but the manufacturers don't let it be accessed. iPhone and Google are major culprits but most follow along. They don't want people listening to radio/music for free. Actually highly irresponsible as in the case of an emergency/disaster which might knock out the mobile cell net, chances are the FM aerial system would still function and keep people informed. And secondly we know there are the odd spots without mobile net coverage!