Using everything but the squawk...

 When they start breeding chickens for feathers, I want to see what the birds look like. And I'd like to know if you can rig them up like a kite to take them to market. If they could float in a 5 mph wind, think of all the trucking costs you could save just by tethering a thousand or so birds to the pickup and flying them to the  processing plant. Which would have to be upwind from the farm, of course.
    Why am I talking about breeding for feathers? It's the hydrogen economy, which may or may not ever be upon us. If it is to be, then carbonized chicken feather fibers could be in demand as a storage medium for hydrogen gas. Keratin, a natural protein found abundantly in chicken feathers, forms strong, hollow tubes when it's heated. This increases the surface area, making an efficient and economical storage medium for hydrogen.
    A 20-gallon carbonized chicken feather tank would add $200 to the cost of a new vehicle. Which is significant, but less so then metalhydrides , which would add about $30,000 to a car's cost, and nothing like the mind-boggling $5.5 million it would take for a tank filled with carbon nanotubes.  A chicken feather report from the American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute will run in the Ag Science section of Saturday's edition of Lancaster Farming.

    Newton Bair was a man way ahead of his time. He was a soft-spoken low-key dynamo who sold his dairy farm and enrolled as a freshman at Penn State when he was 50 years old. After graduation, he became a Lebanon County extension agent. Nowadays we call that "mid-life career transitioning." The thing that really put him into company of futurists was an anaerobic manure digester that turned cow manure into enough methane gas to power a garden tractor. I saw him actually operate the tractor at the 1973 Ag Progress days in Hershey, and it was a bit of a marvel. Like the man himself. Newton's son, Alan, wrote a Father's Day tribute to his dad and his forward thinking ways in our current edition. It's a good read.
  
    Unbelievable. Five minutes of hilarious comedy that even your kids can watch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuMMfgWhm3g