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Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

It's weird that they don't talk about what they're doing that supposedly makes the soil so special. They mention that once they installed the soil at the Pirates stadium (about 2 hours away from where it's manufactured) the number of rain delays dropped. If it were a property of the local soil you'd assume the existing soil in the pirates stadium would already have it. I can't believe the clay composition differs that much on a two hour drive.

Instead I'm guessing it has something to do with how they process it?

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Pennsylvania is a geologically diverse state. The soil can definitely vary across short distances.

Yes, and Western PA has the Poconos mountain chain, so various geologic strata are exposed in close proximity.

Poconos are actually eastern PA. There are also mountains in western PA, but I don't know their names without looking it up.

The Allegheny Mountains are in western Pennsylvania.

The Poconos are in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Soil map https://free-printablemap.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/gen...

Super helpful, thank you!

This video may be of interest to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6AUq3BSoLY

> It's weird that they don't talk about what they're doing that supposedly makes the soil so special.

That would be like a bakery asking McDonald's how much sugar they put in their buns. If everyone could do it, they'd be out of business.

the sugar content of a McDonald's bun is public knowledge

Their competitive advantage has nothing to do (or at least extremely little) with recipe trade secrets. Any professional test kitchen could reproduce any McDonald's item within weeks

Exactly. McDonald's not-so-secret secret recipe is immense scale.

Soil conditions can definitely vary wildly within 100 miles, and Pennsylvania goes from coast to river valley to mountains in much less distance.

New Zealand is a major milk exporter, some countries pay a premium for our milk.

And yet the milk we locals buy in the supermarket (which I am sure is the same as our exports) is milk that has been divided into its core elements (fat sugar protein) and the recombined in a certain ratio.

New Zealand milk does not come from a cow, and I would think PA dirt baseball fields do not come from the ground, but rather PA has the right raw ingredients at hand.

On a side now people here pay a premium for “raw milk” (unpasteurised straight from a cow).

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