Klarinet Archive - Posting 000391.txt from 1996/10

From: "Mark A. Williams" <markw@-----.COM>
Subj: Re: California Cane
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 14:48:19 -0400

California's Central Valley is a vast agricultural area.
Many types of cane are already growing wild along rivers and canals here.

The problem is infrastructure. You need someone familiar with growing
good cane to select seed stock, choose a good region, find and train a
labor force and generally set up a farming operation. There are plenty
of farmers who would be willing to subcontract to grow it, if you
"manage" planting, irrigation, fertilizing, weeding and harvesting.
I grew up on a farm here, and we could grow pretty much everything,
but we concentrated on high profit items like cotton and specialty crops.
In general farming is beastly hard work for low return, most of the
profit is in marketing and distributing the wholesale product.

Assuming you can arrange the farming operation successfully,
that gets you raw cane, which needs to be stored a few years to dry.
Then you need a factory to process the cane into reeds and package it.
Finally a marketing group must promote the new product and distribute it.

Setting up those myriad operations is like starting any business, with
all the risks and potential rewards. Since the whole world is used
to French cane, you have a potential problem inducing people to switch.
What are the benefits of the new cane and reed? Why change to it,
unless it is dramatically improved in some way? Unless you have some
compelling answers to those questions, this would be a pretty long shot.

   
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