There’s more good press for sunflower oil in the May/June issue of consumer reports. What’s not mentioned is that high oleic sunflower oil, like we use, has the some of the lowest levels of omega 6 of any cooking fat. (Although this distinction is made moot by the fact that studies don’t support the concern)
On top of that sunflower oil does not contribute to deforestation or rely on animals, other than humans, for any part of the process. Thank the Sun!
BjornQorn got a little Christmas present this year. Our very own tractor!
Isn’t it pretty? Tractors can do a lot of things. They can scoop, dump, dig, bury, flatten, scrape, lift, lower, and all the while listening to the newest country chart toppers!
Now I’ve been around a lot of tractors in my day but my parents mostly had me stay on the ground. And even from that vantage point this one looks pretty small comparatively. It has 55-65 horse power though which apparently means that it would take roughly 70 horses to kick its ass. I’d run away from 1 horse so that sounds pretty good to me.
In reality, which is a place I don’t visit too often, this will mostly move snow around and fork pallets into trucks and serve as a way to get our various vehicles unstuck. It’s a problem solving machine and my father has proven that no task is too small for one. And he once said that you don’t have big problems just small tractors. That doesn’t make total sense though so I may have made that up.
A little further down the row we hope to get this thing planting some popcorn trials to help us find the next great kernel to turn into BjornQorn! Qheers!
It’s that time of the year folks. Time to scour every website you can think of for discount codes and pour the entire contents of your bank account onto the internet. BjornQorn.com is no exception to this phenomenon, but I’d also like to offer you an opportunity for some factory zen. Is it ok to call it Qorn Porn? Probably not. Regardless, maybe these little clips will calm your nerves and help you realize that you probably don’t need the pet hair version of that vacuum. It sucks either way. So do your thing! Oh and of course, save a little credit room for us with QORNFORTHEHOLIDAYS for 15% off for Black Friday and Small Business Saturday.
I’m aware its been far too long since my last post here. I will try to keep this more current. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on.
Last week we welcomed the arrival of our 2023 Hudson valley harvest. It was much bigger than expected. The Schoonmakers of Saunderskill Farms grew it on their land behind the firehouse in Accord, NY. It was fun to watch its progress all year long on my way to work. The Schoonmakers are a historic American farm, dating back 12 generations to the 1600s. I believe that makes them the 2nd longest continuously run family farm in America. So we are honored to be a part of that long history.
The crop covered 15 acres on a 30 acre plot along the Rondout river. It was continuously threatened by torrential rains from June through August. July alone saw over 15 inches of rain after 10 inches in June. August calmed down a bit but still saw 6 inches of rain.
By comparison, our land in Minnesota received 1.5 inches in June, 1 inch in July, and a whopping 3 inches in August. That’s just a little below average actually. Popcorn is pretty accommodating to a wide variety of outcomes. And it is much more mold resistant than field corn, which Dan Schoonmaker said was a problem for them this year. Corn, whether popcorn, field corn or sweet corn, adjusts how many cobs it produces, and also adjusts the size and fullness of each cob depending on how much moisture it receives, and critically, when it receives it.
In the end we probably got 60 bushels per acre, or about 3360 pounds per acre, totaling a little over 50,000 lbs. At the rate we are producing, that might only last us 20 weeks. Luckily we still have about 50,000 lbs laying in wait in Minnesota from our 2022 harvest. Field corn would have netted over 200 bushels per acre. That shows just how much more science and development has been allocated to maximizing the yield of conventional corn.
We can’t pop the new Hudson valley harvest just yet. It has to be dried down to popping conditions first. I’ll explain more about that later, but here’s to hoping for some warmer, drier weather soon.
A long time project of ours has been building the infrastructure to be able to receive bulk loads of popcorn from my family farm in Minnesota. This past week saw that project come to fruition.
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This is a rear dump tractor trailer that my father filled from our bin in Minnesota. It held in total 53,660 pound of popcorn, or 958 bushels. We dumped it into a 50 ft grain auger that lifted it up and poured into our new grain bin.
This bin can hold over 3 bulk loads, maxing out at 3000 bushels. It can dry a new crop down with forced air from below the false floor. Then we auger out of the bin into our new grain cleaning facility to prepare the popcorn for production. I’ll post more images of that full process soon once we get all the machines in place
June 2022
Look what we have here. Its the kernel of the month!
This bad boy just didn’t know what to do when its time came, so it did everything! An exotic flower, a bird of paradise.
Interesting title for a less so topic. Recycling.
Since starting a business that generates plastic waste I can’t help but feel a little cynical about my previous self’s rigid adherence to home recycling. To be clear i still make great efforts to recycle anything I can in my home – all cans and bottles, metal, paper, cardboard, #1 plastic, and even occasionally plastic film which a which I never fail to forget to bring to my local Lowes recycling bin – resulting in overflowing receptacles in my home and garage. I understand the nagging feeling you get when you see a bottle or can carelessly placed in your home trash bin by a guest or at work by a coworker. You don’t want to preach, but you do want to preach. Ultimately you just pit it out of the trash yourself and sort as needed and move on.
But lately I’ve been doing this less due to a change in perspective. By having a business that generates plastic waste, inside our own facilty and indirectly to every happy customer we make, my potential impact is so much greater by improving recycling methods inside our company that the decisions I face at home when I mull over how perfect I can be at the task. You think to yourself and explain to others, if everybody in the country picked one bottle out of the recycling that would be 400 million bottles recycled that wouldn’t have been otherwise. You can be the change!
We ask what we can do to help the environment, and the experts tell us all the things we can do. But its hard not to see this as merely a process of atonement rather than useful progress. The people asking these questions already recycle and are already concerned about the environment. There’s only so much we can squeeze out of this population. An analogy would be covid vaccinations. Giving the vaccinated more shots is helpful for them, but its not the progress we need as a world. We need people who aren’t doing it to do it. We need to change minds. This process is unfortunately long and slow.
The top down approach has much more immediate potential effect.
Being an vocal advocate is more useful than personal choices.
Governments are the ultimate tool
Plastic bag ban, climates accords etc
Mcdonalds recycled napkins
It’s been 4 years since we commissioned our solar electric kitchen, and shut down the giant ground-based mirrors that launched BjornQorn. For the past ten years, solar electric has absolutely plummeted in price. This is great news for the world! Solar electricity is now broadly competitive in the marketplace with electricity from other sources. Just about every business should be investing in solar power. With almost zero maintenance, we have been able to generate significantly more power than our kitchen uses each year. Our ground-based mirror experiments have continued on the side, but have been mostly frustrating for the past few years. We’d been trying a modification of the original design but hadn’t been able to get it to work. We were almost ready to hang up our inventor’s spurs, and lay the solar basin project to rest. After all, why continue to pursue it with solar electric so cheap?
Solar electric may be the right answer for our American business, but it is still not nearly affordable for everyone everywhere. The solar basin will still come in 5x-10x cheaper per watt, which makes it accessible to a much broader swath of the world. A solar basin can also be operated completely off-grid without expensive and perishable batteries. The materials that need to be imported are minimal and can ship rolled up. Our end game has always been to create something that could be used by small food businesses in the developing world, but the basins we began BjornQorn with weren’t easy enough to build and operate, and didn’t last long enough.
This summer, we’ve had a bit of a breakthrough, and gotten the new trough-style solar basin to work. The crux of the new idea is still the same: the dish geometry can be built directly into the ground. This allows the use of dirt cheap materials, since it is literally made of dirt. But the trough solves a lot of problems with the original design. Here’s a list of some of the original basin problems, and the way the trough solves the problem:
Large holes required heavy equipment to dig
With the trough the excavation scales linearly, instead of the square of power output, so the holes are much more manageable to dig at a commercial scale.
Cooking surface was difficult to access
The cooking receiver is a long level tube with the trough design, which can always be easily accessed.
Deep Basins were hard to drain
The trough design is much shallower than the original basin for a given power, making it much easier to create a passive drain in most locations.
Surface deteriorated rapidly
The 2 dimensional curvature of the trough allows the use of a much more robust professional reflective film on a thin metal substrate, making it much more durable, with a quoted lifespan of 25 years.
Low winter sun angles and snow cover
Don’t build basins in the northeast! This is a design for equatorial regions.
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solar roasted coffee
solar biscuits
boiling water to test power
These pictures and video are from the first successful small scale test. The next step is to go back to a commercial scale prototype. We’re targeting 10 Kilowatts, about 15 times the size of this test. We’ll be blogging about it as we get underway.
infrared image of oven interior
ambient oven temperatures in the 400s F, surface temperatures in the 500s
some test popcorn popping
So that does it for 2019! It was a great growing year in both MN and NY. We harvested about 800-900 bushels total so far. That’s about 50,000 pounds of popping goodness.
We have one more field in NY that is still drying, and hopefully the most recent snowstorm doesn’t take a big toll. But sometimes waiting is the best option. At Kelder’s we opted to take it a day before the storm, and we’re drying it down in house now. In Minnesota we took it over a month ago and were able to bin dry it somewhat…But not completely. We’ll have to wait for spring to finish the job.
Have a great holiday, pick out one of our Holiday Tins if you’re still thinking of a gift!
Bjorn
Snapped this nice picture of a Monarch butterfly with the BQ barn in the background. This guy should be one of the “super-generation” that will make the incredible flight from here to Mexico to overwinter. Most generations of Monarchs only live for one month, but this one will live up to 8 months! He’ll flutter 50 miles a day to reach Mexico, and no one knows exactly how he performs the navigational feat. Monarchs are on the decline, possibly because of the decline of the one plant they can lay their eggs on- milkweed. Milkweed produces a bitter sap that the Monarch caterpillar eats, which makes them taste bitter and discourages predators.
The BjornQorn barn has a one acre field that we only mow once a year, so that it can become a field of wildflowers and support pollinators like the monarch, instead of a sorta-pointless grass lawn.