Showing posts with label Friday Farming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Friday Farming. Show all posts
The Real Threat to Food Security
The Real Threat to Food Security: Our lawmakers need to take farmland access seriously. The next farm bill should work more for the health of our farm system, and less for Wall Street.
Lex Anteinternet: Friday Farming. The vehicles that changed the West.
Lex Anteinternet: Friday Farming. The vehicles that changed the West.:
Friday Farming. The vehicles that changed the West.
Oh, sure, there were snowplows that went out on the narrow two lane highways, but off the highways? Well, you better be pretty sure you could get back.
Now, my father only ever owned one 4x4 vehicle, and it was one he bought from me. But we didn't go up in the high country or into the foothills once winter started. That was out. You stuck to areas that were relatively near a county road or that were blown off, and probably down around 5,500 feet or less. Beyond that? Forget it.
And this was true for ranchers too. Some men stayed up in the high country, but they stayed there. . . all winter long. People often fed by horse drawn wagon (and in a few places, still do).
The Dodge Power Wagon changed that. And it was a creature of the Second World War.
Lex Anteinternet: World War Two U.S. Vehicle Livery: National Museum...:The father of the Dodge Power Wagon, the 1/2 ton truck, a fair number of examples of which can be found in the Rocky Mountain West in spite of the small number produced, was in addition to being too light, too top heavy.
With the Power Wagon, you could now get there in winter. Maybe not everywhere, but darned near everywhere, even up in the high country.
And that meant you didn't need to keep hired men up in the high country in line shacks all winter. For that matter, with a trailer, you could easily feed in a fraction of the time it had taken with a wagon. You probably didn't need hired men for that either, if you had them.
And while it would take awhile, really when NAPCO started converting Fords and Chevys into heavy duty 4x4s, it would also mean that sportsmen could get back there in the winter too.
Revolutionary.
Related threads:
Lex Anteinternet: Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Cutting Hay
Lex Anteinternet: Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Cutting Hay: Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Cutting Hay : The Big Horn Basin usually gets three cuttings of alfalfa a summer. Mid July, right b...
Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Cutting Hay
Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Cutting Hay: The Big Horn Basin usually gets three cuttings of alfalfa a summer. Mid July, right before the fair and barley harvest, is a good time to kn...
Lex Anteinternet: Elemental activities.
Lex Anteinternet: Elemental activities.:
Elemental activities.
Indeed, if I had power for some thirty years I would see to it that people should be allowed to follow their inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, sing, dance, sail, and dig, and those that would not should be compelled by force.
Hilaire Belloc
Lex Anteinternet: Friday Farming: Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Lettuce Get Down to Business
Lex Anteinternet: Friday Farming: Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Let...:
Friday Farming: Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Lettuce Get Down to Business
Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Lettuce Get Down to Business: Photo from 1918 of the Mahon Ranch, west of Buena Vista. Pictured are Martha Mahon, her daughter Cassie and Cassie’s husband George Fields...
Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: War on Weeds
Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: War on Weeds: Weeds are my nemesis. Left unattended, they'll overrun a guy's place. With last year being such a wet summer around Worland, the wee...
Published here both for its content, and my comment.
Lex Anteinternet: The worst immigration argument
Lex Anteinternet: The worst immigration argument:
The worst immigration argument
Victory Farm Volunteers registering in Lane County. Oregon. Lovina Wilson, farm labor assistant, routes the first three children, and that is what they are, to register during the Mobilization Day program at the Frances Willard School in Eugene. The enrollees in the photo are, left to right, facing table front row: Glenn Cash,13; Howard Cash, 11; and Don Mickelwait, 13. This photo was taken in 1946, right after World War Two, demonstrating that wartime manpower shortages were ongoing. This would be, quite frankly, more than a bit much today, as these individuals are way to young to seriously work on a farm, unless they are working on their family farm, and they were frankly way too young then. Note the boys are wearing white t-shirts, with nothing emblazoned on them, and that girls are in the crowd as well.
There are a lot of varieties of this argument I keep seeing:
If you’re out here talking sht about immigrants but still going to the grocery store to feed yourself, that’s clown sht of the highest order.
Stop being lazy & get your hands in the dirt or shut the fck up.
From, of course, Twitter.
This is baloney.
To distill the argument, it is that the US must dare not get control of its border with Mexico, or at least not a fair degree of control, as the US is dependent upon those illegally crossiong for food production.
That argument is first and foremost baloney, as it somehow makes the assumption that the huge number of immigrants arriving from Central and South America are in fact arriving in order to work on farms. That isn't happening. They want to work, no doubt, but the migrant farm system is well established, and they aren't seeking to get jobs in cabbage fields this summer and then go back home.
In reality, most are economic migrants or migrants from Central and South American failed states. The US is racing towards becoming a failed state itself right now. Our government isn't working, and we're about to elect an imagined Caudillo who will have to turn on migrants like a health inspector turns on expired milk.
But economically, the farm sector isn't employing them.
Lots of other things are, such as the construction industry, local small businesses, and back door employment, which explains who we got in this mess. Democrats imagined, wrongly, that all future migrants are Democratic voters.* Republicans imagined them all as somebody who was going to mow their lawn for cheap. Turns out that they are none of those things.**
In reality, they take entry level manual labor jobs which, frankly, would go to Americans who need them, but for the price depression impact this has.
Which gets to the next thing.
The "agriculture depends on migrants" argument is, really, that American agriculture is habituated to cheap farm labor because the Federal Government, with apocalyptic visions of the future after World War Two, created a cheap food policy.
Frightened that Depression Era conditions would return after World War Two, and then frightened that conditions were going to go into the waste bin due to the Cold War, from 1945 on the government has done everything it can to keep foods as cheap as possible. Americans bitch about food prices, but they spend about 9% of their budget on food, and it generally keeps going down. The U.S. Government has tracked food prices since 1929, and it's the lowest ever, generally. From 1929 to 1952 Americans spending on food consumed generally above 20% of a family's income. In 1932, it was 22%. In 2008, in contrast, it was 5.6%.
That's great, for family budgets, and it has ancillary impacts on a lot of industries. Cheap food means that people can go to good restaurants (where you are actually a lot more likely to run into an illegal alien than in a cabbage patch) and have a really good dinner for pretty cheap, and then sit there over dinner and bitch about food prices. This hasn't always been the case. When Americans "ate out" well into the 1970s, they probably meant that they went to a diner for lunch. Growing up, trips to restaurants for dinner were so rare that they only occured, normally, when it was some sort of special occasion, like a birthday or anniversary. To take a date to a restaurant was a big deal, even when I was a college student. You were trying to really impress a girl if you took her out for a meal, and later you assessed the damage to your finances that had ensued.
Even fast food joints to some extent expressed this. We would often hit the burger joints on the weekends, but not daily. By the time my son was in high school, however, high schoolers hit the nearby fast food joints every day. Indeed, when I was in high school I ate in the cafeteria, the first time I'd eaten routinely at school. I didn't particularly like it, but that's what there was. When our high school cafeteria was condemned during my first year of high school, and prior to their building a new one, I briefly ate downtown, but it was too expensive, and I took up just brining a bad sandwich I'd made myself at home and sitting in the football stadium to eat it.
Glory Days indeed.
Now, fast food fare is absurdly cheap. Quite a few people I know hit Dirty Ron's Steakhouse every morning for a couple of Egg McMuffins and a cup of Joe on the way in to work, and frankly, they're not bad (and no, that nickname aside, that establishment is not dirty at all). And I've met working adults, including professionals, who go to Subway, or whatever, every day for lunch. "Value Meals" and the like are incredibly cheap. All of this because of a "cheap food" policy. Part of that policy is related to legal farm migrants, but they are not flooding across the Rio Grande or the desert and claiming asylum.
Nor, frankly, is an ongoing "cheap food" policy a good thing.
The cheap food policy has helped make Americans increasingly fat while driving smaller agricultural entities out of business. It's contributed to the concentration of everything, and not in a good way. It's made food prices unrealistically low, while divorcing Americans from the reality of the actual cost of things. It should end.
Part of that would be, quite frankly, to end the modern version of the Bracero program that has depressed the value of farm labor. When it came in, in 1943, it made a little bit of sense, maybe, perhaps. But eighty years later, it doesn't. Americans will work any job, contrary to what is claimed about them, but at wages that are realistic. Immigrant farm labor wages won't attract them, as the wages are too low.
In an era in which thousands of Americans are out on the streets without jobs, and in which there are rural areas that are basically depopulated save for the injured and left behind in smaller towns, lying between the consolidated farms, and in which we have urban areas and reservations that are hardcore reservoirs of poverty, if people were paid real wages, there's a ready-made source of labor. Sure, they aren't the best jobs in the world in some ways, but they are jobs. And they're also jobs for middle class younger people, who have a demonstrated interest in topics of the soil.
The numbers involved are not small. The US takes in 3,000,000 migrant farmworkers per year. Ending a program such as this would result in a big impact to farm production, and it'd jump food prices for sure as the positions were, and they ultimately would be, filled with American residents. It'd frankly also spur mechanization, which I'm not particularly keen on, as right now there are very expensive agricultural implements that are not employed as migrant farm labor is cheaper.
But ultimately, the principal of subsidiarity should come into play here for lots of reasons.
None of the reasons involve the thousands crossing the US Southern border, who are people facing an existential crisis that must be addressed. They aren't the migrant farmworkers however. That's a completely different topic.
Footnotes:
*Democrats have long assumed that Hispanic immigrants are natural Democratic voters, without learning the lessons of demographics or history.
Immigrants tend to be Democratic voters early in their demographic's migration history. Irish immigrants were. Italian immigrants were. This frankly had a lot to do with patronage. But as they became established, this became much less the case. To declare yourself "Irish" today doesn't mean that somebody should automatically assume you are a Democrat.
And that's true even if you have 100% Hibernian heritage, or to take the Italian example, if you can trace your lineage back to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus' third cousin, once removed. Truth be known, in a species in which Joe Cro Magnon pretty quickly asked Lucy Neanderthal out on a date, those straight lines of lineage don't last very long. To declare yourself "Irish" today, in the US, might merely mean that you think the Irish drink green Budweiser with corned beef sandwiches on St. Patrick's Day.
Moreover, Hispanics in the US have and retain (although they are rapidly losing it) a very distinct culture which is existentially Catholic and conservative. This is so much the case that the radicals of the Mexican Revolution, in the form of the Constitutionalist, sought to stamp it out, much like their semi fellow travelers the Bolsheviks went after Orthodoxy in Russia after 1917. And they had a similar success rate, which means lots of Mexican Hispanics, which is what most Hispanics in the US are often only semi observant, but culturally Catholic still. Given that, the darling issues of the Democratic Greenwich Village set, which forms the central corps of Democratic thought, are deeply at odds with what most Hispanics believe. And this only becomes more the case when Hispanics from outside of Northern Mexican ancestry are considered. So, not too surprisingly, they're turning Republican.
They are also due to the border crisis itself. Hispanics along the border whose ancestors settled there two hundred years ago, or in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, or even in earlier recent migrant waves, are not really of the same culture, no matter how dimwitted Americans are about it, as those now crossing and the flood is wrecking their communities. Americans may see Hondurans and Guatemalans, as well as Venezuelans, as being the same as people from Chihuahua, but people from Chihuahua who live in Eagle Pass do not.
**And they are people, which oddly seems forgotten, except as an argument over the crisis. Democrats thinking they were mindless sheep who could be herded into the voting booths and Republicans thinking they were something akin to slaves is inexcusible.
Lex Anteinternet: European Farm Protests
Lex Anteinternet: European Farm Protests:
European Farm Protests
French and German farmers have been protesting.
But why?
Some of it is related to costs. Energy, fertilizer and transport costs have risen in Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while at the same time, governments and retailers, have moved to reduce rising food prices in what basically amounts to a joint wartime effort to keep "cheap food" rolling.
It's partially a "cheap food" policy, then, which the US has had since the Second World War.
And ironically, in that wartime category the cost of Ukrainian agricultural imports are down as the EU waived quotas and duties following Russia’s invasion in order to try to make up for the impact on the huge Ukrainian agricultural sector which was stressed due to Russian control of the Black Sea.
And extreme weather, which is been very notable in Wyoming this year, and if things don't turn around will lead to a major drought this summer (although we're not supposed to talk about that here), is impacting production in Southern Europe.
And then just as with Franklin Roosevelt's Depression Era agricultural programs, and the post World War Two cheap food policy in the US, Europe's six decade old common agricultural policy (CAP), a huge subsidy system designed for food security. . . for the consumer, massively favors economies of scale.
That has resulted in farm consolidation, just as it has here, with the number of farms in the EU dropping off by 1/3d since 2005.
Somewhat ironically, however, a EU program designed to combat global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, based on a "farm to fork" or "farm to table" model, has been unpopular, as such things usually are with farmers, even when, if they stop to think about it, it'd help them. Anyhow, the EU has the ability to impose rules, and its imposing rules to force this.
Among the rules being imposed are ones to cut the use of pesticides by 50% by 2030, cutting fertilizer use by 20%, and allowing land to be idled up to the rate of 25% of all European farmland.
That latter, which sort of resembles some policies in the US, no doubt is seen as a shocker, but as agricultural production has become more efficient, and the European population is rocketing into decline, it makes sense.
And environmental programs in individual countries, such as ending tax breaks on agricultural diesel to balance the budget in Germany, or reducing nitrogen emissions in the Netherlands, have been unpopular.
Well, what of this?
Interesting, at the same time, in Southern Europe there's been a trend of people returning to small agricultural holdings and making a go of it. This has been occurring in France and Greece. And maybe there's a thought there.
Farmers are among the most resistant people in the world to change. So much so, that it must be an inherent part of the nature of farming. At the same time, they're also among the people who are most wedded to doing things in an expensive way, once they adapt to it. The disaster that fence to fence farming would bring to individual farmers was something that Willard W. Cochrane warned about in the early 1960s, and he also worried about the evolving scale and expense of farm equipment. He actually proposed to regulate it in favor of small farmers, but of course that's something that Americans, who are addicted to economies of scale to their own detriment, would never do.
European farmers, who were still principally equine powered until the end of World War Two, have become addicted to the petroleum fueled agriculture that the US brought in starting in the 1920s. Sadly, we're likely to go to more and more automated farming, and by extension make large number of Americans more and more miserable. Europeans are likely to follow suit.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
Lex Anteinternet: Friday Farming. All agriculture is local, the danger of taking agricultural advice from Reddit, and Meeting Marcus Aurelius on the prairie.
Lex Anteinternet: Friday Farming. All agriculture is local, the dan...:
Friday Farming. All agriculture is local, the danger of taking agricultural advice from Reddit, and Meeting Marcus Aurelius on the prairie.
Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Longhorn in mixed herd, central Wyoming. This is from this year. . . a high water year.
From the r/ranching Subreddit on, of course, Reddit:I just inherited 1200 acres of ranch land. WTF do I do?
My father in law wants to pass on his ranch to me before he passes. He’s in bad health and for some reason decided that I would be the best of everyone to take on his property. I don’t know a god damn thing about cows or hay, having lived in a big city my whole life; but I’m a pretty good mechanic and would fix all of his equipment whenever I visited him, so I guess he likes me and he thinks I’m the best to take things over. The ranch, located in southern Wyoming, hasn’t done anything productive in the past 5 years due to FIL declining health and I have no idea what to do with it. Like the title says, it’s 1200 acres of mostly hilly sagebrush with grassy bottom land surrounded by forest land. I promised him I wouldn’t break up the land or develop it; but how does a city slicker move out to the middle of Wyoming and generate a living income off of the land without knowing a thing about ranching? Can I lease the grazing property out; lease the grass land out? Just looking for any advice or recommendations. Any advice is appreciated.
Let's answer the question first, that being, "how does a city slicker move out to the middle of Wyoming and generate a living income off of the land without knowing a thing about ranching?"
The answer is simple. You don't.
Here's the reason why:
level 1With only two sections, in Wyoming, I’m assuming that he wasn't a full time rancher, or that he leased a lot of land to get by. Most working Wyoming ranches are large for a reason.
So, as a starting point, what did he do with it? 1,200 acres sounds like a lot unless you've actually ranched in Wyoming, in which case, it really isn't.
19level 2And to be fair, two sections in Carbon or Sweetwater Counties is different than the same area in Laramie or Albany Counties. Your mention of sagebrush suggests that you are somewhere west of Laramie. That also suggests that there are some state or federal leases that are connected to the privately owned land. How many adult cattle does (or did) he run on his place?
The truth of the matter is that, in today's operations, your mechanical abilities are among the most important skills to make a farm or ranch work.
15level 3True. If you are east of Cheyenne, which is really more farm country, it's one thing. Once you start heading west of Cheyenne and into Albany County, it's another. The sagebrush country of Carbon County, something else entirely. Wyoming has quite a bit of varied terrain and conditions.
None of it will support really dense stocking, however, like some other regions of the country will allow. I'd have to assume, like you, that if he was really ranching, he must have had Federal and perhaps state leases, or maybe some private leases.
As a total aside, the line "Somewhere west of Laramie" is part of one of the greatest advertising campaigns of all time, which some credit with starting modern advertising. The 1923 ad for the Jordan Playboy car, which starts off with “Somewhere west of Laramie there's a broncho busting, steer roping girl who knows what I'm talking about".
Replies, from me, and some other guy.
Now, the same thread is full of advice on how this person can just move out and, yee haw, be a rancher.
Bull.
All agriculture is local. All of it. A grain farmer in Kansas can't walk right into a bandanna plantation in Africa and expect to make a go of it instantly. Gardeners all over the country, if they suddenly inherited a wheat farm, would go broke.
And with animal agriculture, this is particularly true. Ranching in Wyoming may be like ranching in Montana, but it's not like cattle farming in Arkansas. Frankly, a Northern Plains rancher used to low grass and cold winters would have a lot better chance of being successful in Arkansas, than an Arkansas cattle farmer would of being a rancher here.
And somebody from a city, stepping into land on advice from people who don't realize that 1,200 acres doesn't cut it here as a ranch, and who have never endured our winters.
Forget it.
This property will be leased to a neighbor, or sold.
And let us discuss the injustice of things.
From when I was small, I've always wanted to ranch. It's hard to explain these things, but I always wanted to. It's probably one of the two "I want to be when I grow up" things in my personality. The other one was being a soldier, which I've done. Regarding that, by the time I was approaching graduating from high school (I graduated when I was 17 years old, not all that uncommon at the time) that was waning, but that desire was expressed by six years I spent in the National Guard.
And I have been a stockman as an adult, but I was never able to make it my full time occupation.
I came pretty close twice, once before being married, and once after, but events transpired and. . . off to the office I go.
There's a difference between being in the Regular Army (which I was for training) and being in the reserves. And there's a difference between being a part-time stockman and a full time one. Moreover, as I'm in one of the professions, I've entered that weird part of my life, which seems to be the case for at least people in my profession, when the kids have grown up and have their own lives, and your spouse has her own job, and most of the people you meet on a daily basis are in your profession, where your private aspirations just die as other people murder them.
You don't need a stock working horse. . . you can borrow one. Wouldn't you like to sell that old one ton stick shift and buy a nice 1/2 ton sport auto, or maybe a Jeep pickup? You don't need to work cattle this weekend, you can get that big project done at work.
Which is why, I think, that I see so many old members of my profession carrying on into their 70s and 80s. Their actual personality died thirty years ago. Just the shell is left.
And in the weird way of the world, here we are. Some urban dude who has little interest in ranching inherits a small (and it is) parcel, but one that has entertaining possibilities, and isn't really that interested, whereas some rural dude spends his whole life, more or less, in suit and tie.
M'eh.
My wife always says things work the way they do for a reason. We're placed in one place, under one set of circumstances, because God wants us there for some reason. We should accordingly accept it, and be happy with it and that we can do what we do, even if we don't realize whatever the good is that we're supposed to be doing by our placement. I try to accept that, but I'll confess, stuff like this frustrates me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
The irony.
Same day, same paper. One ad celebrating agriculture, and one celebrating its destruction.
-
Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Lettuce Get Down to Business : Photo from 1918 of the Mahon Ranch, west of Buena Vista. Pictured are Martha M...
-
So, having published this screed over a period of days, and then dropping the topic, we resume with the question. Why, exactly, do you think...
-
And what's this thing about Agrarianism? I believe that this contest between industrialism and agrarianism now defines the most fundamen...
