Sweet Sugar Cane - for Coffee

5 Sugar cane plants in my front yard.

New Stalk to the side of the main stalk.

Becoming a Doctor

I have enjoyed doing my MBA, and have decided to continue with my study. I will be undertaking a Doctor of Sustainable Agriculture.

This consists of a year of course work, and then two years on a Thesis. I do not have to decide my Thesis topic, until the end of my first year.

There are three areas, that I am considering at the moment,

• An Alternative way to grow and market coffee
• Measuring animals in 3D to determine sale value and growth rates
• Determining nutrition load thus animal carrying capacity of fields from UAV's.

Over the coming months, as I get time, I will do a post in a bit more detail about each of the above.

This is my completed application form. I am about to press submit. I still have to provide other paperwork, such as scanned copies of my degrees, although last time, that was not necessary.

The cover of my Doctorate Application form

Acknowledgment of Application

PeeWee - the 'Runt' update

My wife has named the runt, I am not keen on naming them yet, as we do not know if it is a male or a female. It may be a male, that was intended for slaughter for the table, but now if it does turns out to be a male, we will have to sell him as an adult.

We suspect that it is a female, and we will be keeping him and would eventually be giving them a name anyway.

I was down feeding the ducks and noticed that the mini swimming ponds we use for the ducklings was getting a bit dirty - so I emptied them out, washed them and refilled them with fresh water. Pee Wee walked over and had a drink from the pool, and then proceeded to jump in for a swim, within ten seconds of him being in the fresh clear water, he decided to do a crap in there and dirty up the water.

This did not overly surprise me as Ducks need to crap a lot, as they are flying animals and need to be able to get away from predators, so they have a very fast digestion system, and ducks crap all the time, all over the place :).

In the photo below, you can see the mother duck (Crystal) - helping to clean the runt.


This photo shows mother (Crystal) and father (Donald) - watch as Pee Wee has a swim.


Yesterday we separated Pee Wee and gave him his own food and water so that he could eat as much as he wanted and was not pushed off his food, It seems the extra attention we gave him has done him good and he seems to be a bit bigger today, and more confident going in for the food, although we are still keeping an eye on him.

Life and Death with Livestock

This was a sad week this week, as we lost one of our ducklings, we found it drowned on Thursday morning, which was not a very pleasant way to start the day. Somehow it managed to get into a bucket of water, that it was not able to get out of. We were aware that water can be dangerous for small ducklings, as they don't have all their feathers yet and find it hard to get out of some water areas.

I had noticed on Wednesday afternoon, that the old ducklings (about 5 weeks old) - were now able to just reach into the large buckets of water and start drinking from there. So we were very surprised to find one stuck inside the bucket the next morning. We can not determine how since they were only just able to reach in - they were able to get totally in the bucket. We are presuming that it must have jumped and fell in and just managed to get it just right to accidently fall into the bucket.

Due to the heat at the moment, and how clumsy ducks are we have about 15 different water containers for the ducks in the yard, we are careful with the water levels and height of the sides of the containers so that ducks don't drown. I now empty the bucket out when I do the last night check on the ducks and put the bucket upside down, so that no more of the ducklings can accidently fall in there at night time.

Selling some ducklings

On Friday morning, we planned that we would sell some of the small ducklings, as we had too many of them here 22 ducklings in total, 11 who were 5 weeks old from Krystal, and 10 from Thistle who where 3 weeks old. We were going to sell 6 of the three week old ducklings to Brookfield Produce, this too was a slightly sad event, as we would never be seeing these ducklings again.

It was a stress full time for all concerned, the mother duck, was not happy, the ducklings were scared, as I was chasing them around and trying to capture them, and I was feeling bad, scaring the ducks. I also managed to get a few small scratches on my hands from grabbing the ducklings.

We then transported the ducklings in two boxes and transferred them to a cage, at the shop. This would be the first time that they were not on grass and only had duck mash to eat. It was a sad feeling standing there watching them get used to their new home, as all six of them clustered in the corner I was going to take a photo of them for this post, but decided against it.

Thistle now has four ducklings left, we did this deliberately as we thought it would be cruel to take away all of her ducklings, especially since we are planning on keeping all of the older ones for the next few months.

Growth Rate

We have noticed that one of the older ducklings is noticeably smaller than all the other ducklings,  of the same age. The ducklings are started to get quiet large now and we can start to estimate which ones are male and females. A Muscovy Drake (male) duck will end up about twice the size of the Muscovy duck (female).

The top picture - the black and white duckling at the top, we think is a female and you can see that the duckling that we are worried about is much smaller than the female. The white duck in front is the male duck from the first picture

The Bottom picture shows what we think is a male duckling, and the duckling that we are worried about the size of. You can see from the image how much smaller one is than the other.



From this batch of ducklings, there is only one, and the first of any duckling that we have had that is a mixture of very small section of black and white - creating a grey effect, whereas all the other ducklings have been large areas or black and large areas of white.

The younger ducklings of which we have the 4 left, there is only 'grey' duckling in there as well, and he seems to be a bit smaller as well, although it is hard to tell at this stage. We are not sure if this duckling is just the Runt of the litter, or if there is something 'genetic' about ducks with that coloring.

We will be keeping an eye on the ducklings and see what happens over time and hope that he continues to grow. We also keep a closer eye on this one at feeding time to make sure that he is not kept away from the food.

Steadx 2015

I will be presenting at STEADx 2015 this year, in Brisbane. My talk will be about Go2Asset, our Permit to Work SAAS system.

STEADx (Spatial, Technology, Engineering, Architecture and Design xpo) has been organised by QSSA (Queensland Spatial & Surveying Association).

FRIDAY, 6 NOVEMBER 2015 FROM 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
BRISBANE CONVENTION AND EXHIBITION CENTRE, SOUTH BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA

I will be presenting at 11:30 AM, which is 2.5 hours into a 3 hour session, so people will be starting to get tired and thinking about Lunch, so I will be aiming to do an exciting, interesting talk to get people to listen to what I am saying.  


"How you give contractors access to infrastructure anywhere in the world" Peepel everywhere. Is my talk title.

I will be talking about how do  you allow contractors to access data anywhere in the world, and what it is like dealing with Clients, Customers, Contractors and staff all over the world.

Time-zones for remote workers are becoming more critical for remote workers than their location is, due to improving technological advances, such as collaborative software and VOIP phone calls.

I will put up a longer post about how the talk went and a link to the PDF of my presentation. I am looking forward to presenting, but as always get slightly nervous as the event draws closer.


The SteadX program can be found here.

Baby Ducklings - 1 day old

The baby ducklings wandered out side their nest today, for the first time, they oldest of them would be about 24 hours old now.

In the picture below, you can see that there are 12 baby ducklings, the mother (Crystal), and a few eggs, so there still may be more ducklings.

Crystal and 12 of her ducklings

There is another duckling that is not in the picture, that we helped out of the shell, it appeared that it was having problems. They had broken their shell, but did not seem to be able to get out of the shell. So we helped them out of the shell, and put it back in the nest, the mother has been sitting on them since - so we can not tell how they are going.

We do not expect that Crystal will leave the nest again today, so we will have to wait until tomorrow to see if this one survived or if there will be more ducklings. We do not expect that there will be any more, although about 5 of the eggs remaining are showing signs of having ducklings inside them - you can see the darkened shape of the duckling through the egg.

It is interesting that when the ducklings are outside the nest, the mother keeps making small noises, as if to say "I am here still" or "this way home".

We have just spent about 20 minutes watching the ducklings, as they have started eating and drinking and it is a warm feeling watching them see the world for the first time. The ducklings also seem to be curious about Thistle (another mother duck sitting on eggs) - which is in the pen with them and the ducklings will go and look at Thistle and sit outside her nest and watch her.

I picked up one of the baby ones, and it is amazing how soft and warm they are, the mother was getting a little upset, so I returned the baby to her.

Baby Ducklings have arrived

We have been eagerly waiting for our new ducklings to arrive, we noticed the first one about midday today, then when we check at about 1:00 pm there was six of them, with one of them being only about 15 minutes old.

I was having a meeting with Stephen from Geolocarta and we both went down and looked at the ducklings, there is something special about seeing something so newly born. One of the ducklings was still visibly wet so must have just appeared from within the egg so was probably only 15 minutes old.

There was a total of 26 eggs, so we are hoping that we will get about 15 ducklings from this batch.

Crystal and one of her first ducklings, with an egg.

Duckling

Ducklings - new life. 

As I sit here and write this, we have two ducks (Crystal and Thistle) who are brooding, with Crystal's eggs due to hatch today or tomorrow and Thistle's eggs due two weeks later. This will be our 3rd and 4th batch of baby ducklings, and each time we still learn something new and are getting better and better at the process.

I read a phrase recently that has stuck in my mind and I keep thinking about it

"If you have livestock you will have dead stock" 

Which we realise if we are going to move to a farm and raise animals, this is something that we will have to get used to. I always get very attached to my animals and we spend a lot of time and money looking after them and making sure that they are as happy and well fed as they can be, so it is sad when you see that something goes wrong.

This morning when we went to check the ducklings, we found a dead duckling that was not perfectly formed and was dead. It is always disturbing and sad to find something like that.

We only have a small number of livestock at the moment, namely 5 ducks, and 1 hive of Australian Native bees. We also have several pets (2 dogs, 1 cat).

Delta and Ducklings, one of them would be Thistle.

When we have a batch of ducklings, we consider them as livestock, rather than as pets, as the original 5 ducks are, and do not name the ducklings, unless we decide that one of them will be kept, and then we will name them.

We are thinking that we will keep and then slaughter a small number of male ducks from one of these batches, as we will need to start eating the ducks soon, if we want to start moving towards a semi self sufficient life style. This is something that I am not looking forward to, having to take the life of an animal that I would have seen born, but realise that is the natural cycle, and will give the animal the best life and death that is possible. I will have a friend that is a butcher come and help me with this the first time that I do this, and will research how to do it so that there is least stress for the animal.

Since we can not yet determine the gender of the ducklings until they are older, we will not be able to determine which will be males and females, as we will also keep some of Crystal's ducklings to increase the size of the flock of females. We think that about 8 females is the right number for our one male (Donald) for the space of the yard we have here. We also think that 8 females should give us a sufficient number of eggs for us and our neighbours.

Every hour or two, I continue to check in on the mother ducks and make sure that they are happy and healthy and have water and food, and to check for baby ducklings. The last few times we were able to tell that the ducklings had arrived by just walking near the duck house from the chirping of the baby ducklings, which is a very distinctive sound, and surprisingly loud for an animal that is so small.

Once the ducklings have hatched I will put some photos up here.

My connected world