Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 20 February 2024…
Hey Y’all!
Good morning and happy Tuesday from Air2Ground Farms! The beautiful weather continues here in southwest Missouri with sunny skies and mid-50s to low-70s for the highs in the forecast. The animals continue to do very well this winter. If you remember, we struggled with the decision to supplement the ewes with grain this past fall. We very much wanted to have a grass-only sheep operation but we continued to experience unsustainable losses so we decided to supplement the ewes with about 1/2 pound of feed per day for each ewe. Since that decision, we haven’t lost any sheep. That may not sound like something to celebrate, but in our quest for a grass-only system, we lost over $10,000 worth of sheep. Stopping that level of loss is absolutely something to celebrate! I suppose you can look at like we are thick-skulled to continue to try to do something while experiencing that level of loss, or we are quick to change in that we had only had sheep for 2 years at the time we decided to make a change. I waiver back and forth between the two…. The pics today are of the flerd actively regenerating our pastures. The combination of the carbon from the hay remnants, the impact of their hooves, and the nutrients contained in their excrement work magic on a pasture. The hogs are getting BIG! Four of them will go to the processor in a month, and four will go in two months. These are going to make some amazing pork! The 50 pullets have started laying and we are getting a half dozen or so small eggs a day along with a dozen or so from the hens. By the time the market starts in April, we will be getting 5-6 dozen eggs a day. Beef chicks show up in four weeks, Happy should have her calf around that same time, and lambs will start showing up in about 6 weeks. The winter “lull” is soon to end!
I found a couple of interesting articles on the use or potential use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for nefarious purposes that I wanted to bring to your attention. The first is regarding hackers from North Korea using Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, to overcome some of the barriers that have restricted their success in the past. They use ChatGPT to help them create online personas that are targeting white-collar workers through social media platforms, especially Linked-In. They are able to overcome the lack of English skills by using the LLMs to perfect their communication. This makes it much more difficult to judge whether or not a communication is nefarious. They spend a lot of time building a relationship to build trust, with the ultimate goal of gaining information or enticing a click on a phishing site. The other interesting article described how, using AI, researchers are able to correctly recreate your fingerprint from the noise it makes as it swipes the screen of your phone. YES, you read that correctly. Apps that both encourage users to swipe and have access to users’ microphones can be used to collect the data that allows AI to correctly recreate a partial fingerprint in over 25% of the time and a FULL fingerprint in almost 10% of cases. I’ll let you mull that over to consider the potential negative ramifications…. Please share your thoughts! While not the AI-led end-of-the-world that folks have discussed, these are a couple of examples of how our world is changing, for the worse, with the continued advancements of AI.
Check out Monday’s Dust’er Mud where we discuss the overall results from Hannah’s experiment with a Continuous Glucose Monitor as a fitness device, to include what a hangover looks like!
Cheers!
Psycho & Shelley
Glad the warmer weather has come back around for you guys and the egg production! I know the government and industry folks grade on uniformity for the eggs but my kids and some customers appreciate the uniqueness of the different size eggs that we get. They call them baby and dinosaur eggs!
This AI discussion is really good in helping discuss and brainstorm over the potential ways we can be targeted to help make better choices about what to look for but also what maybe to avoid all together. I have a buddy who is good at thinking like a criminal and it has helped with discussions for better protecting ourselves when the situations arise.
Cheers,
Robert
I had scrambled eggs with bacon for my first meal of the day (noon).
These were store-bought eggs...and let me tell you...I cannot wait to get my hands on A2G eggs again!! I don't usually cheer for the end of winter, but I might just start!!
AI is MADness!!! 😆
So what you saying is not only AI can kill us but it can now do a positive ID on the corpse using fingerprints ? Nice… Ish :)
Good to see the animals are doing well, can’t wait for lambs.