All About Agriculture, the Dummy Version

Offspring of hybrid plants

Every once in a while, one of the staff stumbles upon a post written by a freelancer who was clearly just throwing words at the page. The prose may appear to make sense, but anything beyond a cursory glance will reveal that the author had abso-friggin'-lutley no idea what he or she was pretending to talk about. That's why we picked today's nominee on the basis of the post he barfed up on EzineArticles.com, "Increase Your Harvests Multi-Fold With Non-Hybrid Seeds." Let's welcome James K. Blake back to the podium.

Making Hay for Dummies

harvesting hay

A few of the staffers are country kids, having grown up in small towns and even on farms or ranches. Some of them have even worked at such jobs as detasseling corn and baling hay, neither of which is likely to appear on the resume of most j-school grads turned freelancer. An even more unlikely ag expert, however, is a "social science" student from Lahore, one like Nida Rasheed. Her unfamiliarity with farming is pretty obvious, at least based on the post "Types of Hay Cutting Machinery," which Leaf Group niched at CareerTrend.com.

Bush Hogs for Dummies

Perhaps the greatest weakness of Demand Media's eHow.com model was that the founders fervently believed that any writer could address any topic with a little research. Well, they probably realize that was utter bull, but didn't care because their way could make them boatloads of bucks. Whatever the reason, however, the website was infamous for the failure of its writers to connect to reality. That's what happened when Glenda Taylor (also known as Glyn Sheridan) tried to explain "How Does a Tractor Work With a Bush Hog?"; now available at CareerTrend.com.¹

Tractors for Dummy City Dwellers

Ford 8n tractor

If you aren't old enough to remember the show yourself, ask Mom and Dad (or Grandpa) about  the '60s sitcom "Green Acres": a city slicker decides he'd like to be a farmer, complete with a cast of tobacco-spittin' rustics and a Gabor sister. Apparently the Netflix version reached the home of WritEdge author Ellina James (real name Shreya Vishonoi; she also "wrote" at Seekyt), who shared with her readers something she claimed was "A Brief Introduction to Tractor Accessories for Better Farming."¹ Yeah, sure...

Acreage for Utter Dummies

one acre compared to a football field

We were checking past award ceremonies the other day and found that the people at Leaf Group (whom we suspect of monitoring this site for useless posts in the eHow.com canon) had deleted a singularly stupid post by one Mallory Malesky, about measuring an acre. The old link redirects now to a post by someone named Paul Lin at GardenGuides.com, a post entitled "How to Calculate the Outside Perimeter of an Acre." Unfortunately, the replacement is no better than the original...

Tractor Tire Inflation for Dummies

Tractor tire with ballast fluid

If you've never heard of the television show "Green Acres," you can probably be forgiven: it ran even before the "golden age of television" sometime in the mid-sixties. A city boy decided he wanted to move to a farm but his wife was less than enthusiastic. In the introduction, you saw star Eddie Albert driving an old red Farmall tractor while wearing a business suit... 'nuff said. We suspect that Eddie knew as much or more than eHowian Kurt Schanaman when it came to the tries on those tractors. Apparently Kurt had never seen one leak before he penned an article called "How to Fill a Tractor Tire" for the mother lode of misinformation, eHow.com (since moved, for unknown reasons, to Sciencing.com).

Measuring Tree Height for Dummies

Using trigonometry to measure height

If you look through the 517 other entries in our Antisocial Network tally of daily dumbasses, you may notice that we often mention eHow.com's minimum word count as one of the reason we catch their contributors being stupid. Most of the time it's because they've padded short answers to meet the MWC; sometimes it's because they just can't seem to shut up. Today's the latter: we found Amelia Allonsy (already a two-time winner) padding her answer to the VERY simple question "How to Judge the Height of a Tree"¹ for the Demand Media site SFGate.com. Note that there are several ways to do this, two or three of which could easily have been discussed in a space of 300 words – Allonsy took 450 words to discuss one – and in all honesty, she did a rather poor job.

Grain for Citified Dummies

Harvesting corn

Television sitcoms like to make fun of rural people, probably because most comedy writers are city boys and girls whose raging inferiority complexes mean they desperately need someone to mock, which may be why there are so many sitcom references to cow-tipping. Of course, those who grew up on farms have knowledge that city and suburban kids lack, which is why it makes no sense for someone who's never touched a tractor or thinks a "combine" is some kind of business organization to teach people about agriculture. That, however, is precisely what eHow's Marie Mulrooney tried to do the day she penned "How to Convert Bushels of Corn to Tons."¹

Milk for Dummies

Yup, cows give milk... like all mammals

We think that there's almost nothing more irritating online that the bait and switch. Heck, it's irritating everywhere! But when you click on the link that promises you information, whether it's "Nude Natalie Portman Pics!" or "Secrets of Anti-Aging Serums," we think you should get what you're looking for. Not according to some money-hungry freelancers, though they're perfectly happy to slap on a title that's only tangentially-related to their content. You know, people like gardens14 over at InfoBarrel.com, who claimed he was going to tell us "What Is Milk" – but then he didn't...

Soybeans for Dummies (eHow Week)

soybeans

Day three of eHow week, and there's still no shortage of candidates for Dumbass of the Day among the freelancers over at Demand Media. Random selection, however, works just fine; so let's learn what Keren (Carrie) Perles, yet another English major with delusions of competence, has to share. Carrie's topic? "How Are Soybeans Harvested?"¹ over at Sciencing.com.

Soybeans, in case you weren't aware, are big agriculture: American farmers harvest about 80 million tons of the little guys every year. The beans are used widely as animal feed, to make oil and milk, and as a vegetable-based protein source for those who choose not to eat anything with a face. In Japan, farmers harvest immature soybean pods for the dish known as edamame. That, it appears, is the only use of the beans familiar to Ms Perles, who informed her readers that: