Things are changing in the urban and sub-urban environments that I never thought I'd really live to see. As corn's prices skyrocket, a great deal of urban land that is maintained as farm land has started a new life as a serious and legitimate income source. For once in my life, and many, many others reading this, this is the first time I have seen farming begin to encroach on populated society. And as the grandson and son of a cattle farmer... that's a fine, fine change to witness. Viva la farmer!

It's good to be the Corn King...
The last I checked, corn prices were hovering around $3.57-$3.61 per bushel with soybeans between $7.71-$7.79 per bushel in Missouri, however corn prices alone, nationwide, fluctuate to over $4.20 per bushel. That's good news for a guy that's sowed his land year after year and made just enough to get he and his family by. Now, I do understand that farming is a chosen career and that one can choose not to farm just as easily as weather through it. However... to be a farmer is bigger than a job, its a family legacy, its an art and often its the pure definition of a family and a community. Not an easy task to be the first generation to determine that farming wasn't going to work anymore, and, I assumed that was my generation. I grew up with many, many families, good friends of mine that had hundreds, sometimes thousands of acres and farmed, now, they live on .33 acre lots in a subdivision and work at the factory in town or frame houses, run bulldozers, etc. Farming, at least I thought, was a dying art for the independent family. A trade slowly slipping to the enterprise farm. The massive, 20,000 acre operations that employed amazing technology and a corporate backing to protect them when yields were low, but possibly not so much anymore...

E85, the long shot...
Let me introduce you to Ethanol. Fabulously marketed and bottled up as E85. E85 is an alcohol fuel mixture that typically contains a mixture of up to 85% denatured fuel ethanol and gasoline or other hydrocarbon by volume. On an undenatured basis, the ethanol component ranges from 70% to 83%. E85 as a fuel is widely used in Sweden and is becoming increasingly common in the United States, mainly in the Midwest where corn is a major crop and is the primary source material for ethanol fuel production.

Our own government, in all of its oil-bathed glory, is investing nearly $3,000,000,000 in the next two years on plants, refineries and labor to make E85 a reality. The downfall of E85 (which detail I'll leave for another day), is that E85 can be much less efficient to burn than gasoline and cost nearly as much. I'm no math major, but if I'm paying the same amount for fuel and getting 10% poorer fuel economy, even if I'm saving the environment, I'm still consuming a great deal more resources... so, the picture's painted beautiful, but we've still got a ways to go, maybe that's where congress' 3 bills come into play. Guess we'll just have to see.

The inherent risks in economic rearrangement...
Now, I hope I've painted a fairly intrinsic picture of the current state of farming and its excellent growth and opportunity to finally start putting up a fight in Urban Sprawl and reclaim and future for our country's oldest trade and the footing industry for what built our very economy to begin with. ...But now I'm going to throw a wrench into the whole thing. Well, for a few of you, at least. I hope that when you're done reading this, you realize that there are always two halves to the whole.

I'm a hunter, I love to hunt birds for some decidedly powerful reason. My dad, an avid, multi-disciplined hunter, loves his deer and trained us as such, but somehow, I got bitten by the bird addiction. As an aside, the greatest part of hunting is the respect for the game (which is where this entire article actually started for me). I respect greatly the animals I am lucky enough to hunt and help manage for the State of Missouri. Pheasants, quail, goose, duck, turkey, all of them are amazing birds and a true joy to hunt for me.

Now you ask, "Has he completely gone of the E85/corn deep end here??" No. I haven't (honestly, I'll swing this ship around and make both ends meet here in a second...). The Missouri Department of Conservation is a great organization, especially for me and my sons. Living in St. Louis, we use their land extensively to fish, hunt and target shoot on. I happily pay those few pennies of my tax (the others I have issue with... ; ) To ensure habitat for animals, particularly waterfowl and upland birds, the Dept. of Conservation and the United States Department of Agriculture provide programs like CRP or Conservation Reserve Programs, that allow a farmer to be financially rewarded or tax abated for reserving land for wildlife use, thus we now have along many bridges, flatlands and flood plains, thousands of acres dedicated to providing habitat for birds.

Herein lies the bigger problem, because of the rising value of corn and beans, the land that was once reserved in order to protect the wildlife population will now be reclaimed to grow decidedly profitable crops on, thus eliminating suitable habitat and resources for many game birds in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and a host of other states. Missouri is the convergence of the Mississippi and the Missouri and is smack-dab in the center of the International Migratory Bird Flyway. Some of the best duck and goose hunting in the country. Because of that, millions of dollars a year are funneled into the state in the form of licenses, hotel rooms, food, services, etc. We lose the land and habitat, we lose those dollars.

To sum it all up...
Now, I know it may appear that I'm being pessimistic about this entire arrangement, but I'm not, I'm all for helping people that were my greatest of friends reclaim a legacy that's rightfully theirs. I'd love to see a bunch of redneck boys with grain elevator hats on cruising around in Bentleys, poetic justice. The truth of the matter is that whether you're talking about building Green with LEED or low impact environmental materials or E85 fossil-fuel replacement, there's always a cost, somewhere. Always an anchor prohibiting change. Often times that anchor is an even bigger deal than my hunting and a place for those birds to refuel and recharge.

On a regular basis I hear people ask questions like, "Why can't the government just use Hydrogen?" or "Why don't they ever invest in the environment, they just want to destroy it..." when in reality, to change something that big (think just about the Missouri scenario) will create all kinds of ripples in the water.

Work for change and keep fighting the good fight, but also understand that the unravelling of decades of damage can't occur overnight, no matter how obvious the solution. Always be wary of the 'clear option' because chances are, there are strings attached. Be educated, be smart and make the decision that focuses on the greater cause, not the one that's hip at the moment.

I think E85 is a step in the right direction and may serve as a stepping stone, a momentum builder for change and I'm willing to take the consequences of that change, but I don't have to be happy about losing my pheasants and ducks...


All the best,
Tanner

Contractor - A gambler who never gets to shuffle, cut or deal.

Bid Opening - A poker game in which the losing hand wins.

Low Bidder - A contractor who is wondering what he/she left out.

Engineer's Estimate - The cost of construction in Heaven.

Project Manager - The conductor of an orchestra in which every musician is in a different union.

Critical Path Method - A management technique for losing your shirt under perfect control.

OSHA - A protective coating made by half-baking a mixture of fine print, split hairs, red tape and baloney - usually applied at random with a shot gun.

Strike - An effort to increase egg production by strangling the chicken.

Delayed Payment - A tourniquet applied at the pockets.

Completion Date - The point at which liquidated damages begin.

Liquidated Damages - A penalty for failing to achieve the impossible.

Yesterday I had the great privelige of doing something that I truly think is a fruit, a true social fruit of all the work IT professionals, Network guys and visionaries in the technology industry have attempted to accomplish for years. This last weekend, I was at an Uncle's house for our annual Father's Day gathering. The wives, daughters and sisters all prepare a fine meal for all the fathers in the family and the men hang out, play washers, horseshoes, bocce and typically find the nearest patch of shade while sipping a mint julip. A typical picture of my childhood and I absolutely love it.

This scene is not, however, the scene you have in your mind when you think of the social impact of communications technology. This is, at least always has been, for me professionally, the place that I feel the modern push for communications somewhat overlooks, but I was corrected in that idea...

A cousin, similarly sipping mint julip and waiting her turn in the washers tournament asked me a simple question, "Hey, Tanner, why haven't you built us a family web site?" Seriously? For whom, I think. I tell her I will and proceed to add it to my mental to-do list (which by the way is entirely too full, I'm fairly certain items are falling off at random without notifying anyone...). When I got back to St. Louis and my office, I wrote it down. Well, yesterday during lunch, I decide I'll set up something simple and see what happens. I utilized publically available tools, Google Calendar and Blogger.com. Built a site, added a family calendar and linked a couple of picture websites I knew of, one being my own... then I sent an email to the few family contacts I had emails for... Little did I realize the technological prowess of my Boonville family.

Little more than than an hour had passed and I began to get a deluge of emails with links to family picture websites, personal blogs, email addresses and websites. In less than 12 hours I've received nearly 30 emails from people I didn't know had a computer much less an email address!

As you may have seen in yesterday's post, Don't ever assume... ever. This, to me, makes my work in technology real. When you take a conceptual market and industry like technology and can eventually swing that rig around enough to hook into the life you truly love, you have found your place in the world. I spent a great deal of the last 10 years trying to explain to people what I do and have been met by many a blank stare... but now I know, I connect people through technology. And that my friend, is a cool role to have...

I wrote a little about the NIST report on the Capital Facilities industry a few days ago and the numbers are great. They're substantial enough that they don't really affect you. I'm sure you probably read it and thought... "Hm. That's a lot of money, didn't realize it was that much." and then managed to go on with your day and finish your triple, half-caf, soy, overpriced coffee without feeling sick in the pit of your stomach. I'd like to change that... for good reasons, I promise. My intent is only for the good. ;)

So, class, to refresh our minds: the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) produced a report on the capital facilities industry (read: commercial and public building structures/infrastructure, etc.) and the money that's lost due to poor management of project data, otherwise referred lovingly as 'Interoperability'.

Definition: Interoperability [in·ter·op·er·a·bil·i·ty]
(find a word with more syllables than that... I challenge you)
"The ability to manage and communicate electronic product and project data between collaborating firms' and within individual companies' design, construction, maintenance, and business process systems."

Basically, this is an idea that has had a very difficult time getting up and moving, but what it has done is given the construction industry a 'bucket' of sorts that allows us to start quantifying otherwise incalculable loss and inefficiency into one tidy and now justifiable definition, ergo: the NIST Report.

This report did great things for my industry (reprographics & construction project document management). It allowed us the ability to take an outside information source into our customers and essentially tell them what we already knew. Here's how we break it down for our customers:

16 billion dollars is what's reported as loss by the NIST. God love the NIST, but they are a federal institution and studied, albeit a big portion of the industry, not all of it. So, saying that, we realize that 16 billion could mean anywhere from 75% of the total to merely a portion of it. So... very legitimate number. Now, who's losing it? Architects, Owners, GCs, Subs, suppliers??? Answer: all of them, with the owners getting punished in a bad way.


What does the lack of correct information in construction really cost?

• Architects/Engineers - $1,170,000,000
• General Contractors - $1,802,000,000
• Specialty Trades - $2,204,000,000
• Owner/Operators - $10,658,000,000

• $5.93 /sf initial cost burden through planning, engineering, design, and construction phases
• $0.23 /sf annual cost burden on maintenance and operations throughout life of facility

In other words, for a hypothetical 200,000 sf facility, inadequate interoperability adds:

• $1.2 million to the initial cost, and
• $1.3 million dollars to the maintenance and operations cost of the facility over a 30 year lifecycle

LEED Architects, Engineers and developers may soon be living in self-made trees near you! http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2007/06/02/fab_tree_hab_lo.html

The next time an architect, in a sales call, tells you that the firm's technology is plenty to handle the security of their jobs and the management & distribution of their drawings, politely hand them a printed copy of this article (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18979621/) and indicate to them that Document Mangement, especially in a volatile and litigation-prone industry like construction is not to be taken lightly... then send him to ReproMAX.

The image to the left is one that was included in those leaked. Stock image from MSNBC.com.

I'm sure you know this, but just in some case you weren't aware, the construction world of technology, it's-a-changin'. Right now, the construction industry spends around 1/5 of what manufacturing spends on technology (or roughly 2% of annual revenue). In terms of the modernized world, construction is very, very underserved.

For tech companies, this has always created a barrier into the industry. The good ole boys like my family, working with their hands and gang boxes has no real need to infuse any 'process management tools' or 'cost & risk management' software. It was a waste of time and ended up costing more than it was worth...

Well, that mindset, from Subs & Suppliers to Owners and GCs has got to go. And that's not just me telling you that. The NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology - Read: Propeller-head Feds/the Fed's IT department) did a study in 2004 on the state of waste in the capital facilities industry in the US. Basically, they wanted to know what kind of money was being lost due to bad information alone. The numbers are startling...

The Capital Facilities Industry (now, understand this is an, albeit large portion of the US Construction market, its certainly not all of it) is losing 16 Billion dollars annually because of bad information. Whoa. 16 Billion is roughly 3x the entire industry cap for reprographics/construction printing. (I'll post more on this data in a bit, the breakdowns of cost/sq ft is equally astounding...)

So, here's the breakdown. Reprographers are standing, looking into a chasm that contains one of two things; 1) the future of their industry and a three-fold market opportunity or 2) the end of reprographics as we know it. We are the construction information managers, unequivocally responsible for providing up-to-date information, plans and specs. We either step up to the plate and provide the tools, practices, support and leadership to help these organizations reclaim this small fortune (and keep a few bucks for doing it, mind you), or we stand by, doing what we've always done and watch our industry commoditize itself through price cutting and free or near free 'value add' services meanwhile, outside players, without feet on the ground or relationships with real GCs/Owners/Subs/Architects start to rape and pillage our market.

I don't know about you, but I vote for #1.