By Walt Hickey

Agave

The price of agave has slipped calamitously in Mexico as the effects of the tequila boom cause a major surplus of the agave used to make it. As recently as 18 months ago, a kilogram of agave hit the record price of 32 Mexican pesos ($2). As of this February, that had fallen to just 5 pesos, or $0.30, per kilogram, and analysts expect the price will continue to drop as the agave that growers planted continues to mature, which in the case of agave means that decisions made several years ago are finally manifesting in the market. The number of registered agave growers has quadrupled since 2018. Given the number of plants that went into the ground in 2021 and 2022, prices may not even hit bottom until 2026.

Hannah Staab, Vine Pair

Fish

Parasite ecologists who study the nematodes that live in fish were greeted with incredible news when the Seafood Products Association got in touch to alert them that they had found boxes and boxes of long-since expired canned salmon during the cleaning of their basement. To the delight of the researchers, they handed over 502 cans of chum, coho, pink and sockeye salmon, whereupon they dissected the contents of 178 cans that had been processed from 1979 through 2019. All told, they collected 372 worms from half the cans, worms that had been killed as part of the cooking process and are normal in seafood. This then allowed them to track how the infection burden on salmon evolved over the past 42 years across the four species, finding that there’s been an uptick in the worms in two species thanks to a resurgence in the populations of the mammal species that host them, and thus a successful recovery in those mammals’ hangers-on.

Rachel Nuwer, Scientific American

Restaurant

Pollo Campero is a Guatemalan chicken chain with hundreds of locations. After mapping how much workers had to move around the kitchen and store, the chain has overhauled its restaurant design, in doing so slashing the number of steps taken by the staff members from 18,000 steps per shift to just 9,500 steps per shift, ensuring prompt order delivery. That increase in efficiency is good for the restaurant, because it helps save on labor costs and cuts down on unnecessary effort for the workers.

Daniela Sirtori and Charlotte Hampton, Bloomberg

Departures

There’s been a fascinating shift in the number of young adults who leave religion, as the trend has now become that women are disproportionately leaving faith. In the U.S., religious disaffiliation has traditionally skewed male; among baby boomers, according to the Survey Center on American Life, 57 percent of people who left the religion they were raised on were men, with Gen X (55 percent male) and millennials (53 percent male) also skewing toward men. Among Gen Z, though, it’s women leaving the faith: 54 percent of people who disaffiliated from religion among Gen Z adults are women, and just 46 percent are men. One reason? The survey found that 65 percent of Gen Z women said they don’t think churches treat men and women equally, considerably higher than in earlier generations.

Daniel Cox and Kelsey Eyre Hammond, American Storylines

Gas Up

A 2021 infrastructure law put up $7.5 billion for charging infrastructure, and an unexpected taker has emerged: the gas station business. Gasoline stations, long a natural adversary of electric vehicles, has come around on charging infrastructure and now constitutes a main recipient of the federally-funded highway EV chargers. Gas stations and convenience stores accounted for 29 percent of charging stalls through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, followed by travel centers and truck stops with 25 percent of the stalls. To date, $265 million has been awarded by the program, and $92.1 million of that has gone to truck stops and gas station chains.

David Ferris, E&E News

Herbal

Tradition Chinese medicine remains a massive business, as seen by the recent acquisition of the Singapore-based Eu Yan Sang store, which has 170 stores and 30 herbal medicine clinics and is the largest such chain in Southeast Asia. The retailer was just bought up by two Japanese companies for 800 million Singapore dollars ($594 million). Efficacy aside, this stuff is very profitable, and is growing: The global market for traditional Chinese medicine is projected to grow 50 percent from 2020 to 2027, hitting $121.9 billion around that time.

Yuki Misumi, Nikkei Asia

Recycling

Ship recycling has dropped to the lowest point in decades, with just 2 million deadweight tonnes of ship capacity scrapped in the first quarter of this year. Things have been low for quite some time, this being the ninth consecutive quarter with recycling under 3 million deadweight tonnes scrapped, and it’s largely thanks to an increased demand for ships and lower than typical orders for tankers and bulkers. The lull — only 0.1 percent of the global shipping fleet has been recycled over the past two years, compared to the 0.45 percent average over the past two decades — is thought to be temporary, as new deliveries and an eventual cooling of the ongoing crisis in the Red Sea should increase incentives to take old vessels out of service.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Alexander C. Kaufman about the last-minute deal made by the obscure organization the International Code Council that will set back the energy transition when it comes to homebuilding by years. You can read more here: Gas Industry Blocks Building Codes Meant To Make Going Electric Cheaper. We spoke about a recent win for the fossil fuel industry, federal oversight on American building codes, and what’s new in the climate change narrative. Kaufman can be found at Field Notes and at HuffPost. You should read his coverage of the dzud, which is not being covered well enough elsewhere.

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