prairieadventure

A christmas to...remember?

2011-12-27T14:45:00.000-08:00

I gave myself a concussion last Friday, the 23rd. It’s kindof a funny story.

I’d been experimenting with chair placement at my desk,trying to find just the right combination for my new bifocals. It’s been hardto put everything together – posture, arm angle, head angle, easy keyboardmanipulation, and especially a crisp and clear view of the words forming on thescreen as well as a sharp view of the keyboard.

I just about had it dialed in to perfection last Fridaymorning. I’d moved closer to the screen and keyboard, feet farther under thedesk. Everything felt good and looked right.

Then the phone rang. My cell phone. The one I’d just pluggedinto a charger in another room.

I jumped up from my chair, intending to rush down the hallto answer my phone.

BANG!

As I leapt out of my chair I drove the top of my head intoan over-desk bookshelf. A bookshelf loaded with about 400 lbs. of college mathand science texts. Didn’t bother the shelf at all.

But it bothered the heck out of the top of my head. Tryingdesperately not to curse, yell or give in to the tears now stinging my eyes, Iturned away from the desk and toward the still-ringing phone. As I stumbleddown the hall, I felt warm blood flowing down both sides of my head. I pickedup the phone, said hello, then impolitely hung up. Telemarketer.

Hanging up on the telemarketer is the last thing I rememberfrom Friday, and that only dimly. I must have done something about my bleedinghead, some bare minimum of treatment to stop the flow of blood, but I don’tremember doing so.

I remember not one single detail from Saturday, ChristmasEve.

Calves soak up the sunshine Christmas Eve Morning

I was busy on Saturday, too. In addition to morning andevening chores, I baked bread and dinner rolls and made oxtail soup for ourfamily Christmas Eve repast. If you’ve ever baked bread or rolls or made oxtailsoup, you know that these tasks take some thoughtful coordination. I rememberdoing none of it, nor do I remember the meal that evening.

Ria (near) and Nona, Border collie sisters closing in on six months of age, share a drink from a freshly chopped stock tank Christmas Eve morning. I have no memory of taking these pictures.

My memories of Sunday, Christmas Day, consist of a fuzzyimage of a hay bale and an even fuzzier image of my brother trying to tell mehow much he’d enjoyed the soup and bread. I had no idea what he was talkingabout.

Monday is a blank as well, up until about 5 p.m. when thingsstarted to clear up a bit. I sat down at my desk to start on some stories forthis week’s newspaper and noticed a few strange things.

First of all, there was dried blood on my computer screenand keyboard. It was smeared around a bit, as if a child had tried to clean upthe mess with a piece of paper. In the wastebasket next to my desk were severalblood-smeared sheets of paper. The corner of the aforementioned over-desk shelfwas also smeared with dried blood.

Strangest of all were the stories I found when I opened upthe files for this week’s assignments. Let’s just say they didn’t make a lot ofsense. Now, I know I’m not the world’s greatest newspaperman. There’s noPulitzer Prize in my future. But the stories I’d started were, well, they wereworse than awful.

I must have worked on them on Friday (smeared blood) andSaturday and maybe even on Sunday. I don’t remember working on them, and aftertrying to find some sense in what I’d written, I’m glad I don’t remember.

The brain is a funny place. Although our greatest brainsurgeons and neurologists know a great deal about what happens in the brain,they know very little of the why or of the how. Neurotransmitters andelectrical impulses flow across synapses, and the brain does it’s thing.

What is memory, exactly? How is it that I obviously knew todo chores and bake and cook and travel and fill my fuel tank, and that just asobviously I was able to competently complete these tasks, yet my memory iscertain that none of the above took place?

My doctor says that brain trauma manifests in differentways. I had two concussions in my early 20’s, both resulting in headaches and astrange sense of disconnectedness, but no amnesia (at least that I can recall(ha!)).

According to the doctor, my brain seems to be working fine.I’ll have a few more tests tomorrow, and I imagine they’ll be normal. Simpleconcussion and post-concussion syndrome.

Or is anything simple when it comes to the human brain?

Hope the ol’ brain keeps coming back. I’d hate to be stuckas the guy who wrote the undecipherable junk I found in those work files.

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas and best wishes inthe coming year.

One final thought. Friday was an anniversary of sorts, 24 years to the day since my best friend ended his run in a smoking hole at the Navy-Dare bombing range in North Carolina. A painful memory to be sure, but one that I'm thankful I retain.

Alright, we both knew I was going to do it...

2011-12-20T15:47:00.000-08:00

At some level, I can't help myself. I'm in love with the English language, with lyrical prose, with attempting to employ those things to share the experiences I love. Perhaps that indicates only that I'm in love with myself; with my thoughts and my deeds and my words and my world view.

Stephen King (and about a zillion other successful writers) says that one should write for (to?) the ideal reader; an imaginary construct representing not only those you are writing to, but those you are trying to give the experience of joyful reading.

My ideal reader is a fuzzy, ill-defined construct at best. It might even secretly and subconsciously be me. Ah, nothing like pondering the unknowable. But I digress.

I’ve written about this subject before.

Five years and some months ago, as weather autumn ended onan especially lovely October Saturday and winter arrived in the night with coldand snow, I shared the experience in a column in a different newspaper. Theopening line of that column was, “Every season has a last, best day.”

Light and shadow cast by High Plains December sunlight

This year autumn seemed to linger here in my part of the world, the southwest corner of the Nebraska Panhandle. Oh, we’ve had a taste ofwinter – the sub-zero temps and snow of early December – but in the main our2011 fall has been extended, dry and balmy.

Winter weather usually arrives here before calendar fallexpires. In itself, that's little different than anywhere else in our hemisphere, at least north of the tropics. The farther north you go, theearlier winter arrives and the longer it lingers into calendar spring. Ourplanet’s weather doesn’t seem to care much about our calendars, though in a a lovely andironic twist, we rely utterly on nature – the celestial mechanics of Earth’saxial tilt and it’s orbit around the sun; the moon’s orbit aroundour planet – to write our calendars.

On Sunday, with the shortest day of the year rapidlyapproaching (winter solstice will occur at 10:30 p.m. MST tomorrow, Dec. 21), one wouldnormally expect the weather conditions to be cold and windy, with perhaps evena lot of snow on the ground.

But Sunday was absolutely gorgeous. It was warm, the sky wasdeeply blue with only scant, fleecy cloud cover, the ground was mostly clear ofsnow, and a light southerly breeze was wafting gently across the prairie. Itwas definitely time for a hike. Having been laid low with a month-longcold and an injury to my yet-to-be repaired starboard calcaneal Achillesinsertion, I’d been gimping and wheezing around for far too long.

I prepared carefully. Hiking the prairie in December ispotentially dangerous, particularly in and around the rock-strewn gullies Ilove to explore. Snow and ice lurk in the permanent winter shadows, and where the season’s slantingsunshine does fall, thin mud layers form atop frozen soil. A wrong step ontreacherous ground can lead to a slip, fall and tumble – and potentially – amobility reducing injury. An injured, immobile hiker will be in big troublewhen the early sunset allows the true, cold character of the December prairieto reassert it’s iron grip.

For a prairie hiker, one who relies on his feet to get himin and get him out, boots and socks are of penultimate importance. I wear Ingenious socks and Danner boots. They’re top of the line andpriced accordingly but, oh my, are they ever worth the cost.

I double-checked my rucksack to ensure the appropriatesurvival gear was there; first aid kit, fire starter, hard candy, spare water, a hand-cranked emergency cell phone charger. I added a sealed bag of dryclothing, a trio of insulating poncho liners, and extra gloves. The additionsboosted the weight of my ruck to 51 lbs, a not inconsiderable load for a 50year-old hiker.

I grabbed my rifle, pistol, GPS hand held and camera and headedout.

Why carry the shootin’ irons? There are a number of reasons.First and foremost, while the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the UnitedStates guarantees me the right to keep and bear arms, it does not spell outthe ethical responsibility of owning and operating a lethal device. That's on me. I take it seriously. The skill set required to carry and use firearms,including the rigor of a maintaining a responsible mindset, requires practice.Every thing I do on a hike is predicated on weapon safety and discipline. Another reason is that therifle and pistol and their ammunition, like the bulging rucksack, increase theload I carry, and that increases the exercise quality of my hike. I could carryrocks and a crowbar for exercise enhancement, but I’d have to give up thediscipline of responsibility. Bad trade. Finally, I might have to employ my weapons intheir lethal capacity. The chance of such a thing happening is tiny, but aweapon locked up miles away is useless should such a situation arise.

Shouldering my rucksack and taking up my rifle, I set out.Muscles and joints complained at the unaccustomed load and my foot-eyecoordination was terrible. I kept stepping on small rocks and otherfoot-twisting features of the prairie landscape. My heart began to hammer andmy ragged breath was that of a fat old man struggling up a short flight of stairs. I was anything but agile, nor were my efforts worthy of the beauty of the day or the joy of the task.

But slowly, oh so slowly, my mind and body responded to thechallenge. After the first mile my tread became sure and steady, as my feet coordinated with my peripheral vision. My heart rate stayed up but my breathing became even and smooth. The cool air flowing in and out was, as always, a wonderfulsensation. The slanting rays of December sunshine were warm and comforting andthe sweat of exercise flowed freely. I began to revel in every moment. In my world, this was living.

High Plains December sunlight has a nearly Mediterranean quality

There was precious little green in the landscape, and what there was came mainly from fading yucca. But on closer inspection, there was stillactive chlorophyll at the base of many grasses and forbs. Above ground levelthough, the prairie wore her autumn coat; dull and whitish-brown, yetgloriously beautiful as it glowed with feathery brightness in the slanting sunlight. Theair was clean and clear and devoid of any smell, the fading season having drivenaway the fragrances of fall – sumac and stink grass and sage. Insects were absentfrom the scene, as were birds of prey, though sparrows and larks abounded.

As I hiked and breathed and poured with sweat, the peaceful beauty I’dbeen unconsciously craving began to steal gently into my heart. The frown of human concerns vanishedfrom my face, replaced by a giddy, happy grin. An intense joy bubbled up fromdeep inside. I knew with certainty how indescribably blessed I was to be there, to bear witness to thenatural beauty surrounding me.

I thought about the lines I wrote five years ago. Was it indeed thelast best day of the season? Who knows? Who cares? It was or it wasn't. Namingthe day isn’t important, and neither is predicting the future. I was there towitness the moment, to sop up every bit of the wonder I could hold. Being part of thehere and now is far more significant, far more fulfilling than self-absorbedspeculation. Being in the moment, unbound by yesterday or tomorrow, is potentmedicine.

And it’s amazing medicine. I walked an uneven prairie at age50, gimpy with a painful injury but alive and kicking nonetheless. The pain wasdistracting but vital, a component of experience and a tool to remind me thatI’m mortal and limited. I won’t always be here, but I was still there on Sunday. I breatheddeeply and easily, my heart sent blood coursing through my veins, I bore thepain. I was far, far from my mortal limits, the pain a gift, and very smallcompared to the pain endured by others.

I stopped and slowly turned around, drinking in a complete prairiehorizon and soaking up the soft autumn light. Peace. It may have been December, with the discomfort of cold winds on the near-future weather menu,but those things were not there in that moment. Re-centered, I could go in beauty. It was enough.Perhaps it was everything.

I climbed to the top of a steep hill and took in the view. Tothe north and south, wind turbine blades slowly rotated far away, on the edge ofthe world. I dropped my load and sat, leaning back against my rucksack, rifleacross my knees. The breeze was cooling, evaporating moisture from mysweat-sodden clothing, causing the beginnings of a shiver. A muted growling of high bypass turbofans tumbled down fromthe sky. The contrails were far overhead, stark white lines across deep, towering blue.

As evening came on and the air quickly cooled, I watchedclouds begin to creep in from the west. The bright, white sun went firstorange, then red as it neared the horizon, painting the southwest land and skywith glowing sunset colors.

As the cold crept in it became time to go. I donned a sweatshirtand light gloves and took up my ruck and rifle. I’d come four miles and thesame distance would return me to my parked pickup. As I set off, I realized thepain and swelling had increased in my right foot. Perhaps I’d overdone it abit, but I doubt I’d caused any additional injury. As I moved and stretchedmuscles and joints and regained my hiking rhythm the pain receded to a dull ache.After a time I returned to my starting place and the GPS confirmed the distancetraveled at just over eight miles, with a cumulative elevation change of nearly6,000 feet over that distance. Who says Nebraska is flat?

As I drove away I murmured a prayer of thanks for the day andthe experience. Without a doubt, I am profoundly blessed.

Monday morning the world had changed. It was cold and dampwith fog and freezing rain in the air and ice on the ground. The horizon wasclose and tight and gone were the long vistas of yesterday. I shivered in thefreezing damp as I fed calves and chopped ice. A light snow began to fall, andsnowflakes gently dotted my face with gossamer kisses. In the still, bovine-tingedair, the crunch of chewing corn came clearly across the feedlot. Light snowbegan to coat the backs of the calves as they stood lined up at theirbreakfast table.

The prairie I hiked Sunday was hidden from view now, hushedand hunkered down, waiting. Winter is coming, bringing ice and snow and bittercold. But right there, right then, the day was sweet.

Every season has a first best day.

Words aren't enough

2011-12-18T17:17:00.000-08:00

The temperature hit 60 this afternoon (Dec. 18), less than 80 hours before calendar winter begins with the solstice. I hiked six miles across the shortgrass prairie in this balmy weather, and I'd love to describe the beauty of the experience to you. But I can't. The right words haven't yet been invented, nor am I a good enough writer. These pictures will have to do, but they only nibble at the edge of actually being there. My life is incredibly better than I deserve. Click the images for a larger view. May each of you have a surfeit of days of joyful wonder.

Me an' my shadow

Spent Tenpetal Evening Star, Mentzelia decapetala

Someone forgot to police up his brass

Light, shadow, sky, water

Stuff of life

Sun, water, ice, carbon

Where are the polar bears?

Sweeter than champagne, and even (temporarily) bubbly

Warning, treacherous footing here

Backlit grass seedpods

No sun all winter = deep freeze

Lichens thrive

Grass, yucca, snow, sky, clouds, sunshine

Spent Stemless Hymenoxys, Hymenoxys acaulis

Sun-kissed late-autumn prairie

Old bower in leafless sumac -- baby birds raised here in the spring

The reason I can hike here

cow thinking

2011-12-15T05:52:00.000-08:00

If you’ve ever owned or worked around cattle, you’veprobably had occasion to wonder what they’re thinking.

What is this heifer thinking as I capture herimage?

For instance, we’re backgrounding two pens of calves on theranch this year. Each morning – and most evenings – when I feed them theirgrain ration, there are three calves outside the west pen. It’s always the samethree calves.

Is this calf thinking of escape? Wondering iffeed is going to appear like it did yesterday morning? There’s plenty of roomfor her to squeeze out of the pen, but is escaping even a consideration forher?

“Hey, look! The corn’s back!” Human thinking. Not bovinethinking. Loose cables on the feed rack, too.

I know how they get out. There are a couple of loose cablesalong the feed rack, and they simply inch their way through the loose spots asthey try to find one more morsel of corn or bite of hay. Little by little theypush their way through. First the head, then a foreleg, then another foreleg,and hey-presto, they’re through the feed rack, on the outside looking in. So tospeak.

They’re not trying to escape. They never stray from theirpen-mates, nor from the feed rack, where they continue to placidly feed, noseto nose with their fellows. They’re comfortable in the feeding pen. They’rewith their peers in a mini-herd, there’s plenty of food and fresh water closeat hand, they have shelter from the cold December wind and plenty of warmingsunshine, and there are no predators to be found.

Returning the three amigos (amigos y amiga, two steers and aheifer) to the pen is a breeze. I simply open the gate and get out of the wayand they file back in, usually kicking up their heels and seemingly pleased tobe back where they belong.

I can’t help but wonder why, if they want to return to thepen and their pen-mates, they don’t crawl back in the way they crawled out.

Calves tucking into their morning ration.

But that’s human thinking, and when I apply it to the threeamigos, I’m anthropomorphizing their behavior, thinking of them as creatureswho possess the same thinking and reasoning set that I have. I’m humanizingthem, to use a less scientific word.

It’s something we all do, to a greater or lesser extent. Foran over-the-top example of anthropomorphizing non-human creatures, check outthe web-sites of PETA or the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) and see whatthey have to say about farm animals. Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of PETA,famously said “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”

In the sense that rats, pigs, dogs and boys are livingorganisms, she’s right. And I agree completely with both PETA and HSUS thatanimals should always be treated humanely. Of course, plants are livingorganisms, as are bacteria, biting flies, disease-laden mosquitoes,rattlesnakes, dust mites, cold and flu viruses, city pigeons, zebra mussels, flyingcarp, cane toads, etc. By Newkirk’s reasoning, surely these organisms deservehuman rights as well. The phrase “hoist on her own petard” comes to mind.

We differ completely, however, on the definition ofhumanely.

By humanely, PETA means human; that all animals are endowedwith the same fundamental rights as people. HSUS is no different, though theycome across as less radical. Both PETA and HSUS profess to believe that humanetreatment means giving all animals basic human rights and allowing them to livecompletely wild, natural lives. But why not plants, pathogens, and bugs? Whynot dangerous or “icky” animals? One can argue that rather than providing foranimal rights, PETA and HSUS are far more interested in exercising control overpeople.

Agricultural producers, and most reasonable people ingeneral, do not believe that animals are human and are somehow deserving ofbasic human rights. They do believe that livestock and wildlife should behusbanded, though. That is, mankind should respect animals and ensure that theyare cared for or managed in the ways that suit their different natures.

When it comes to food animals, this means seeing to thehealth needs of livestock through preventative health programs and veterinarymedical intervention when animals become ill. It also means keeping livestockwell fed and watered, sheltered as necessary, and humanely slaughtered when thetime comes.

When it comes to wildlife, this means population controlthrough hunting, to stave off overpopulation and starvation, as well as habitatmanagement.

The difference in the two approaches lies in the basicassumptions we make about the nature of animals. PETA and HSUS, as well asmillions of non-activist people, anthropomorphize animals. A few do this in theextreme, but most humanize animals to a lesser extent.

Pet owners are a good example. Most think of their pets asmembers of the family, and most tend to treat their pets as nearly human –talking to them, ensuring that they have adequate (sometimes elaborate) nutritionand shelter, and seeing to their health needs. Some pet owners spend thousandsor even tens of thousands of dollars on very high level veterinary care such asadvanced diagnostic tests and surgeries. But nearly all pet owners, even thoughthey genuinely love their animals and tend to think of them in human terms,understand that they are animals and not people. They feel a big responsibilityto care for their pets, and struggle mightily with emotion-laden end of lifeissues. But when their pets are suffering, be it from the infirmities of age orfrom disease or accident, and recovery is unlikely, most choose to have theirpets put down. It’s the humane thing to do.

They, like you and I, would never have Granny euthanizedbecause of old age, nor a sick or injured family member, no matter how dire thecircumstance or how poor the prognosis.

We recognize the fundamental difference between humans andanimals.

But many others struggle when it comes to understanding thebasic differences between people and pets – and by extension – other animals.As the world-famous “Dog Whisperer” Cesar Millan famously said, “The mostcommon mistake in America is that we humanize dogs. There's nothing wrong withloving a dog like a human, but it's important for them to become dogs first andbecome fulfilled as a dog. I rehabilitate dogs, and I train people. That's whatI do.”

Here is where a problem lies for livestock producers.Because there are so few of us, we find it difficult to get our animalhusbandry message out to the population at large. We are at most two percent ofmore than 300 million people. The animal rights activists are organized andwell funded, and they flood the media and airwaves with anti-livestockproduction propaganda. The 98 percent of Americans who’ve rarely, if ever, setfoot on a farm or ranch feel a tug on their heartstrings in response.

But most, as I’ve noted, understand the fundamentaldifference between animals and humans. Most understand the utility of foodproduction, which they depend upon for survival, and most enjoy and embrace theavailability of safe, abundant, and nutritious meat.

What they don’t understand is the level of respect shown to livestock by producers,feeders, and processors. For the producer, this respect is quite similar to thefeelings pet owners have for their dogs, cats, and other pets. The vastmajority of producers care deeply about the well being of their livestock andtake seriously their responsibility to husband their herds. Though there arestill some in the food animal industry who do not care about or who mistreatlivestock, and a few examples get wide play in the media, these people are atiny minority and do not represent the industry as a whole. Just as the murdersand child molesters covered extensively by the media do not represent humanityas a whole.

The livestock industry is slowly getting better at gettingtheir positive message out, but it will be an ongoing struggle. We are so few,and the people we feed – who are mostly two or more generations removed fromthe farm and ranch – are so many.

Producers should try to keep this in mind as they interactwith their non-ag friends, neighbors, and visitors. And they should considershowing off their operation when the opportunity presents itself. As is oftensaid, seeing is believing, and visitors will go away with a new appreciationfor the livestock producer and the way he cares for his animals.

And yes, I’ll be tightening the cables at the feedrack. Probably tomorrow.

Broken noses, heroes, Pearl Harbor

2011-12-07T12:53:00.001-08:00

John Shaw was just another Irisher who set out for Americaand found a far better life than he could have imagined.

Born in 1773 at Mountmellick (Móinteach Mílic), CountyLaois, in east-central Ireland, Shaw came to America in 1790 as a lad of 17. Hesettled in Philadelphia and joined the merchant marine.

He was appointed Lieutenant in the US Navy in 1798, and hisfirst assignment was to the USS Montezuma, a converted cargo ship in CommodoreThomas Truxtun’s squadron in the West Indies during the early part of theQuasi-War with France. The 350 ton trans-Atlantic merchant ship mounted 20nine-pounder cannon and had a crew of 180. Shaw saw considerable action, anddid well enough to gain his own command, the USS Enterprise, a 14-gunbrig-rigged schooner.

Shaw fought the Enterprise against French privateers in theCaribbean for more than a year, protecting United States merchantmen. Duringthat period, Enterprise captured eight privateers and liberated 11 Americanvessels from captivity. The ship's fame was such that she was one of only 14ships retained in the Navy after 1900.

The name Enterprise has been continuously on the rolls ofthe Navy, having served eight ships since 1775. Today's Enterprise is a nuclearaircraft carrier (CVN-65) home ported at Norfolk, Virginia.

To honor the plucky Irishman, two destroyers were laternamed for him, USS Shaw (DD-68) and USS Shaw (DD-373). In an odd coincidence,both destroyers lost their bows in action but were repaired and continued toserve, each fighting actively in a World War.

The first USS Shaw (DD-68) was a Sampson class destroyerwhich fought in a pair of convoy actions in World War I. In early October,1918, while escorting a convoy southwest of England, she suffered a jammedrudder and was struck by the huge liner Aquitania (at 46,000 tons, she was asbig as the Titanic). The collision ripped off 90 feet of the Shaw’s bow,mangled the bridge, and set her afire. Though 12 sailors were killed in theaccident, Shaw’s heroic crew managed to save their little four-piper. She madePortsmouth under her own power, received temporary repairs, then returned tothe US for permanent repairs at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. She was decommissionedin 1922, but transferred to the US Coast Guard in 1926, where she served on therum patrol until the repeal of the 18th Amendment in 1933. She was returned tothe Navy but stricken in 1934 and scrapped.

The second USS Shaw (DD-373) was a Mahan-class destroyer.Commissioned on Sept. 18, 1936, she was a fairly new ship when she entered afloating dry dock at Pearl Harbor for hull work in late Nov., 1941.

Struck by three bombs when the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7,her forward magazines exploded, producing perhaps the most spectacular seriesof photographs made during the raid.

The USS Shaw (DD-373) explodes in dry dockduring the Dec. 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor attack. Photo credit U.S. Naval HistoricalCenter, in the public domain.

When the smoke began to clear, the carnage in the dry dockwas terrible. The formerly sleek and beautiful ship was now an awful mess, herbow seemingly gone from the bridge forward, and much of her interior burnedout. But a spark of life remained in the ship; her keel, protected by theflooded dry dock, was sound and true, and her boilers, turbines and runninggear were all intact.

With all US battleships out of action, every ship became avital asset, and Shaw was no exception. She received temporary repairs inHawaii, then sailed to Mare Island at San Francisco for a new bow andcompletion of repairs. By August, 1942, she was better than new. She returnedto Pearl Harbor and rejoined the war. She escorted convoys and fought in theGuadalcanal, New Guinea, Marshall Islands, Marianas and Philippine campaigns,earning 11 Battle Stars. She was decommissioned in 1945 and scrapped in 1946.

There were more than enough heroes to go around on that “Dayof Infamy” in Dec., 1941. Peter Tomich was a Chief Watertender stationed on thebattleship USS Utah (BB-31).

Born in 1893 in the tiny village of Prolog in Austria-Hungary (present dayBosnia-Herzegovina), he came to America in about 1910. He was drafted andserved in the US Army during WWI, then joined the Navy in 1919.

When the Utah was bombed and torpedoed on Dec. 7, she beganto capsize. Tomich remained at his station in the boiler room to secure theboilers and help his shipmates escape. His actions cost him his life and wonhim a posthumous Medal of Honor. The medal was never presented because none ofTomich’s family could be located. It remained in storage over the years.

To close the circle on this story of broken noses, devastatingattacks, and heroic immigrant Americans, Tomich’s family was finally presentedwith the medal aboard the modern-day USS Enterprise (CVN-65) in 2006, 64 yearsafter his heroic deed.

It's easy to forget that America has always represented awonderful dream to people around the globe. John Shaw and Peter Tomich are onlytwo examples of “foreigners” who came to the states with air in their pocketsand made not only themselves, but their new country, a far better place.

During this first week of December, 2011, when weremember the attack of 70 years ago, it’s a good time to remember what theopening phrase of the US Constitution, “We the People,” really means.

Pressure dancing

2011-12-06T13:10:00.001-08:00

If you’re a regular reader of my columns, you’re probablysurprised to see the word ‘dancing’ in the title of this piece.

And I am such an unskilled,inexperienced dancer that I’m probably violating federal regulation in writingabout it.

But have you ever heard of pressure dancing?

Pressure dancing is the phrase that comes to mind when Ithink about low-stress cattle handling.

Low-stress cattle handling is like a dance. The handlerleads, the cattle follow. The handler guides, the cattle respond. They danceacross square miles of prairie rather than square feet of ballrooms,communicating and coordinating their movements in a choreography unlikeanything most people have ever seen.

Cattle are herding prey animals. They congregate in herds,and with eyes located toward the sides of their heads, they have a wide fieldof view and very acute, dichromatic distance vision. This makes them very goodat spotting potential predators.

To the human eye, it’s easy to tell thedifference between the substance of this cattle chute and the shadows cast byits various components. To a cow, however, equipped only with dichromaticvision, the difference isn’t so clear.

The way they respond to potential predators is the key tocattle handling in general and to low-stress handling in particular.

Cattle don’t automatically flee potential predators. If theydid, they’d be constantly galloping across the landscape. To a cow; afluttering plastic bag, a man, a pickup truck, a bear, a wolf – all arepotentially predators at first sight.

Rather than flee at first sight, cattle assess the threatlevel and behavior of potential predators before taking the action they deemappropriate to remain relatively secure.

If a potential predator is spotted at long distance, cattlewill simply keep an eye on it and wait to see how things develop. They’ll alsoalert the rest of the herd to the presence of the potential predator throughvisual, rather than audible, communication.

This communication system is nothing more than bodylanguage, but it’s intricate and complex. In fact, for those who’ve studied it,it’s in many ways quite beautiful. A change in posture. A slight raising orlowering of the head. A particular switch of the tail. A quiver of musculaturealong the back or flank. The flicker of an ear. It looks meaningless, evensuperficial. Yet those cues can alert in moments every cow scatteredacross a square mile, turning their attention to a single object faster thanyou can scan the horizon.

Familiarization with such ‘cow talk,’ with those visualcues, is a big part of low-stress handling. It’s part of what’s called“reading” cattle. It takes time, study and experience to even begin to be able to read cattle.

Another important part of reading cattle is understandingthat while they’re instinctive herding animals, the herd isn’t a homogenousunit made up of identical parts. Cattle group together for many reasons,including for the level of individual safety that comes with numbers. But eventhough they group together as a collective herd, each animal is an autonomousindividual. This is a critical thing to understand.

The low-stress cattle handler understands most of the howand the why of cattle behavior, and is familiar with (though not fluent in)their body language form of communication. The low-stress handler uses thisknowledge to guide, rather than drive, cattle.

Guiding cattle works through the application of mild, indirectpressure -- by moving inside the animals’ comfort zone. When the herderviolates the comfort zone, the cattle respond by moving away from the herderuntil they’ve reestablished their comfort zone. If the pressure was mild, the cattle move slowly and calmly. If the pressure was too vigorous, the cattle flee.

Cattle, both as groups and as individuals, have differentsized comfort zones, depending on the situation, just as people have differentcomfort zones under different circumstances. For instance, you might feelperfectly comfortable sitting next to a complete stranger in a movie theater,yet be very uncomfortable if the same stranger stood as close to you in anempty parking lot. In the theater, you would stay in your seat. In the parkinglot, you would move away from the stranger.

When moving cattle in an open field, say from pasture to aset of corrals, the low-stress handler places himself so that the cattle aregenerally between himself and the ultimate destination. He then moves back andforth in a line perpendicular to the direction he wants the cattle to move in.While moving back and forth, he crosses through the comfort zones of individualcattle, who respond by moving away from the handler and toward the destination.

Initiating herd movement in this fashion can be done onfoot, from horseback, from a pickup truck, or from an ATV. “Reading” thecattle’s body language tells the handler how close to come and how quickly totravel. A well-trained handler can corral all but the wildest herd of cattle byhimself and on foot, even if those cattle are spread out over a square mile ormore. He has only to read the cows and apply appropriate pressure. Of course,he has to be willing to spend the time and walk the not-inconsiderable distancerequired.

“Pushing” the cattle by moving too quickly or by pushing toofar inside the comfort zone will cause the animals to “raise the threat level”and become excited or stressed. It takes time and experience to learn where theline is drawn between guiding and applying stress. One useful tool is calledthe “rule of stop.” To put it simply, if an animal stops, turns sideways towardor looks directly at the handler, it’s time for the handler to stop and waitwhile the animal(s) adjust their positions relative to the handler back to acomfortable one.

The same rules generally apply when working cattle in acorral or pen, with a few minor differences. Comfort zones are smaller in aconfined area, but the cattle are more sensitive to comfort zone violations.This is where reading body language, having the patience to take yourtime, and heeding the rule of stop canmake the difference between quietly sorting cattle or having a full-fledgedrodeo. Again, it takes time and repetition to develop reading skills.

Another couple of things to keep in mind. In general, cattleonly vocalize when under some form of stress, whether it’s a cow searching fora lost calf or an animal actually being predated. They don’t often communicatevocally, nor do they like loud noises, which they usually take as evidence of adangerous threat. Therefore, yelling or whistling to move them isn’t a verygood tactic. They may indeed move away from the sound, but they’ll be morestressed.

Occasionally it’s appropriate for the handler to vocalize,and this is generally when working a group of cattle in the confined area of apen or corral.

As we noted before, cattle have a wide field of view, about340 or more degrees, and possess excellent dichromatic distance vision. This isin part due to the wide spacing of their eyes, and it’s a fantastic tool for aherding prey animal to have. But it comes at the cost of poor near vision anddepth perception. In a crowded pen or corral, individual cows can lose track ofthe handler, even when the handler thinks he’s in the plain sight of theanimal. With enough experience, a skilled handler can read by a cow’s bodylanguage whether or not they can see him. The important thing to remember hereis that if the animal has lost sight of the handler, she can easily be startledwhen she suddenly “spots” the handler, particularly if he’s well inside hercomfort zone. This will not only increase stress, but is likely to induce aflight reaction. The cow may try to crowd in with others, jump a fence orcharge a gate, or if she feels trapped, she may try to run right over thehandler to escape the immediate threat and reestablish a comfort zone.

Therefore, in a close environment where one or more cattlemay have lost sight of the handler, it’s appropriate for the handler toadvertise his presence vocally by keeping a patter of talk going. It doesn’tmatter want the handler says, but it’s important how he says it. His cow-talkshould be in a low key monotone. Something like, “Okay girls, you’re all fine,just me back here, nothing to worry about, I’m just going to move over here abit…” You get the picture. This kind of low key vocalization allows the animalsto be aware of where you are, and how close, even if they’ve lost sight of you.Therefore you can nip a potential stressor in the bud by just talking quietly.

Finally, and back to vision again, I’ve noted above thatcattle have dichromatic vision, poor near vision, and poor depthperception at close distances.

Dichromatic vision simply means that instead of seeing inthree main colors like we do (red, green, and blue), cattle see in two maincolors (yellowish-green and blue-purple). Combined with poor depth perceptionand near vision, confined cattle have trouble telling light, shadow and realitywhen it comes to corral fences and gates. Where there is strong sunlight andshadow present, they often miss open gates and try to cross through solidpanels or closed gates. When they see a dark blob on the ground, they can’ttell weather it’s a dangerous hole or a shadow. The key to low-stress handlingin these situations is patience, provision for good lighting and shadowelimination to the extent possible, and backing out of the animal’s comfortzone until they’ve found a path that feels safe to them.

Is that a shadow on the ground or hole you mightstep into, causing you to break your leg? You and I can easily tell it’s ashadow, but a cow, with her poor near-depth-color vision can’t really tell thedifference.

One final thought – cattle can definitely sense youremotions. You are in charge, and if your can’t be calm and professional whenworking your cattle, you might as well give it up for the day until you cancontrol your emotions, or hire cattle handlers who can control their emotionsand be professional.

By the way – I may have coined the term “pressuredancing.” I can’t seem to find any citations on the internet.

Close, but no disaster

2011-12-01T12:17:00.001-08:00

I can reel off dozens of reasons I love being a fourthgeneration rancher.

I grew up in the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb., and fromthe earliest age I can remember, I got to explore the entirety of the ranch,both alone and with brothers and friends. Over the last 50 years I’ve becomeintimately familiar with the landscape in all seasons, in good years and badyears, on the most beautiful days imaginable and under the harshest conditionsthe High Plains can dish out.

That long-term relationship (which included twice-yearlyworking visits while I served in the navy) is among the top reasons I love whatI do.

There are many others, but I don’t have time or space thisweek to do them justice, and I don’t want to produce some ridiculously inanetop-ten list.

But at the top of the list – by a wide margin – is the factthat ranching drives humility deep into the core of my being. With a very bighammer. That’s simply the way it is.

I feel pretty good about the quality and quantity of myranching knowledge. Not very many people can ask me a ranching question – nomatter how detailed or arcane – which I cannot answer with relative ease.

Nevertheless, very few days go by when I don’t learn anunexpected lesson. A good, solid, valuable lesson.

I hauled bred heifers to winter pasture last Thursday. Therewere only 24, so three trips with the stock trailer did it.

And I did it the right way. I checked the pickup and trailerwhen I hooked up. Engine, fine, pickup and trailer brakes fine, lights workingcorrectly. The tires on both pickup and trailer were inflated properly and hadno obvious nicks, cuts, or wear. Good to go. Though my dogged attention todetail has been known to drive people to distraction, there’s a real upside tothe navy training that taught me to take care of my equipment and pay attentionto detail. After all, I’d be transporting $12,000 worth of cattle on each trip.

As those of you who’ve read my columns on low-stresshandling can attest, it’s a method I believe in and use. So loading therarely-stressed, calm cattle, eight at a time, was an easy one man job.

And all went well on the first trip.

When I came home to pick up the second load, I backed thetrailer too quickly and bumped the rear door frame against the loading chute,bending it enough to make sliding the door closed a problem. Not aninsurmountable problem though, and I managed to close the door.

The remainder of the second trip went well. After unloadingthe heifers, I decided to fix the bent door frame using the time-honoredsledgehammer technique. I left the rear door closed, climbed inside through theside door, and soon had the frame straightened and the door sliding like new.

I flew back home, loaded the last eight heifers, recheckedthe tires and connections, and headed back to the winter pasture. As I arrivedand drove through the gate, a flash of movement in the right-side mirror caughtmy eye.

It was the trailer side door swinging open. The one I hadforgotten to latch after fixing the bent door frame.

I was initially terrified. I could picture eight crumpledheifers in my mind, spread out along the road, battered, broken, and surelydying.

I quickly jumped out of the pickup and latched the door,relieved to find that there were still eight heifers aboard.

After dropping them off I could only scratch my head inwonder. How could it be that they hadn’t simply walked off the trailer as Iloaded them? Why didn’t they jump or fall out during the jostling of the trip?How could I (and the heifers) have been so lucky? And perhaps most importantly,how could I have been so dumb?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. Coincidence,lucky break, smart cattle, divine intervention? Maybe all of the above.

Everything worked out in the end, which is important.

But pulling a boneheaded stunt like that was a very humblingexperience.

Those experiences seem to happen when my hat starts to gettoo small. I know a lot, but there’s a big difference between what I know andwhat I think I know.

And that’s a darned fine lesson.

The AND and two-stage weaning

2011-11-30T06:40:00.001-08:00

This year marked the second consecutive year in which alow-stress approach to weaning has been used on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball.

Traditionally, cows and calves have been physicallyseparated at weaning time, often with the cows returning to pasture and thecalves leaving for market on a truck.

Numerous studies have shown that abrupt separation andrelocation is a high-stress evolution for both cow and calf, leading to reducedfeed intake in both and a sharply higher rate of illness in the calves,particularly Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD), routinely called pneumonia or“shipping fever.”

The impact of these stressors hit the producer square in thepocketbook. Cows which are abruptly separated from their calves andsubsequently “go off feed” for a few days are shortened on nutrition at acritical stage in the gestation of the new calf growing inside them. This canresult in smaller, less vigorous calves at birth or even loss of the calfthrough spontaneous abortion or stillbirth. Troubled pregnancies can also meanreduced conception rates in subsequent years. Also, a cow going into winterrequires a solid body condition, and missing a few days of grazing can meltflesh away quickly.

Calves which sicken after weaning don’t do as well at themarket, costing the cow-calf producer the premium he’s worked so hard for.Calves which succumb to BRD either make the producer no money or gain him areputation for producing “iffy” calves – those which require doctoring at thefeed lot and seldom catch up with their peers in adding flesh or grading well.

Reducing the stress of weaning – for both cow and calf –makes a lot of sense. Many studies conducted over the years have shown thatreducing weaning stress correlates very well with healthier, faster gainingcalves, and healthier, better conditioned cows that tolerate winter better,produce more vigorous calves, and have higher breed-back rates.

The cattle industry has been somewhat slow in adoptinglow-stress weaning, and probably for a number of reasons. Firstly, the “old” or“usual” way has always worked. Secondly, the expenses and physical work areborne solely by the cow-calf operator. And thirdly, while many cow-calfoperators like the idea of low-stress weaning, the additional supplies,attention to fencing, and the time spent planning and executing the plan oftenseem like a few too many extra tasks to producers who are already tasksaturated.

There is more than one way to reduce weaning stress. Two ofthe most popular are fenceline weaning and two-stage weaning.

In fenceline weaning, the cows and calves are separated by afence. They can still see, hear and smell each other and spend time in closeproximity. Depending on the design of the fence, cows and calves can even makephysical contact through the fence. The fence has to be exceptionally strongand tight to prevent nursing, though, and both cows and calves can work theirway through surprisingly tight fences. Most often, fenceline weaning merelyreduces nursing, rather than eliminating it. In many ways, reducing nursing isalmost as useful as eliminating it, and given time, complete weaning willeventually happen. So for a producer who can spend 30-60 days weaning calves,and who is willing to spend the time and effort to re-separate pairs who getthrough the fence, this is a great option.

Few cow-calf producers can spend that much time on weaning,however. The calves have to go to market, to a feedlot, into a backgroundingprogram, or out on autumn/winter grass. Cows need to stop lactating, whichtakes significant energy, and devote that energy to maintaining condition andgrowing next year’s calf.

A big heifer waits in the chute Saturday justprior to receiving her anti-nursing device during annual weaning on the EJERanch south of Kimball, Neb.

Another heifer with her newly-appliedanti-nursing device anti-nursing device. The anti-nursing device preventsnursing by pushing the teat away when the calf tries to suckle. The devices areleft in for 4-7 days, then removed when the cows and calves are separated.

This is where two-stage weaning has an advantage.

A steer calf with a newly attached anti-nursingdevice just after being turned back in with the cow herd.

In the first stage, a plastic anti-nursing device (AND) isplaced in the nose of each calf. The devices are small plastic tags which fitinto the calves nostrils and hang down over their upper lip like a moustache.This can be done while the calves are in the chute to be weighed, vaccinated,and otherwise “worked.” The calves are then turned back with the cows. As thecalf tries to nurse, the AND pushes the teat away from the mouth, makingsuckling nearly impossible. The device does allow the calf to graze and waternormally, however. The cows and calves still have close contact and can nuzzle,reducing stress for both. As the first stage progresses, the cows and calvesspend less and less time in close proximity, drifting farther and farther apartas they graze and water, until they are separated for good.

After a number of frustrating attempts to nurse,this calf finally gave up on milk and turned to grazing.

During the second stage, after the AND’s have been in placefor four to seven days, they are removed and the calves separated from thecows. Depending on the situation, the calves can remain near the cows for a fewdays along a tight fence or can be moved immediately to market, feedlot,pasture, or backgrounding pen.

A steer calf happily grazes late-season grassone day after his anti-nursing device was affixed.

Two-stage weaning is nothing new, and cattlemen wereaffixing metallic AND’s to calves more than a century ago. The plastic tags arenothing more than a modern iteration of a good idea.

In practice, the process seems to work quite well. On theEJE Ranch last year, the backgrounding calves gained as well or better thanthey had in the past, adjusted to the feed bunk in record time, and had noillness. Likewise, the replacement heifers did quite well on fall/winter forageand hay.

The cows also did exceptionally well, carrying goodcondition through the winter and producing, healthy, vigorous calves in thespring. Those calves summered exceptionally well in 2011 and represented atop-ten calf crop for the ranch.

Removing the AND’s does represent an additional sorting stepand an additional trip through the chute for the calves. Placement of thedevices, which cost about fifty cents each, is quick and easy.

All in all, two-stage weaning seems to be a good option forthe EJE.

Perfect

2011-11-29T09:47:00.001-08:00

Weaning calves on the EJE Ranch has become a family affairover the years, with brothers and sister and their kids making the trek acrossthe state to participate.

This year all five sons and the single daughter wereavailable, and they brought a total of six of a possible 13 of their kids. It’sa reflection of the way time marches on that the other seven are busy withcollege and careers, which seems nearly impossible to me, as none of thoseolder ones, in my mind should be older than five or six. Maybe eight or nine atthe most. Time moves ahead regardless of whether you approve.

The pushing crew waits for the working crew tofinish a calf in the chute during calfweaning this fall on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

They also brought an enormous quantity of dogs. I’m notentirely sure, but I believe the final count was eight. Several of those werepuppies of the recently departed River, so it was good to see them and havethem around though they got up to no end of mischief.

A fall-born calf gets worked the old-fashionedway during calf weaning Saturday on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

The weaning process itself is pretty straightforward. Bringthe cows and calves in, sort the cows off, then run the calves through thechute for their brand and shots and de-worming and any other items a particularcalf might need addressed.

For the second year in a row we added Anti-Nursing Devices(AND’s) to the mix. The AND is a plastic tag that fits in the nostrils of thecalf. It is designed to prevent nursing but to allow the calf to graze andwater normally. Adding the nose tags is part of a low-stress, two-stage weaningprocess. We tried it last year and liked the results, so we gave it a whirlagain this year.

The pushing crew tries to get a balky calfturned around during calf weaning Saturday on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball,Neb.

Once the cows were sorted off and the calves pushed into thefeeder corral, the real work began. My siblings jumped right in and did theirusual outstanding job. It’s a pleasure to work with them and it’s amazing howadept they are at working cattle. Not every-day adept, of course, butsurprisingly good when you consider that they all work for the government intheir real jobs, which include firefighting, teaching and social work.

Of course there were the occasional problems. “Pushing” toohard led a pair of calves to escape, and a couple of the city dogs caused aruckus once or twice. Two of my brothers even accidentally set a calf on firewhen one applied the branding iron just as the other was pouring the calf. Theyput the flames out quickly, the calf wasn’t even singed, and though it was asurprise, it was quickly and correctly handled and we moved on to the nextcalf.

Once all the big calves went through the chute and werereunited with their mothers, it was time to brand and vaccinate the baby calvesfrom our nascent fall-calving herd. This process went reasonably well andbrought back a lot of memories from “the good ol’ days” when we hand-threwevery calf. It didn’t tale long but it did result in an astonishing collectionof bumps and bruises and the application of copious quantities on liniment.

When the work is done it’s time to play, and theautumn game of choice on the EJE Ranch is football. Here about half the workingcrew and too many dogs to count enjoy a pick-up game.

Once the work was done and after we checked the score to seewhether the Huskers had managed to hang on at Beaver Stadium, we got togetherfor our annual ranch football contest, featuring teams of “grownups” sprinkledwith youngsters and made doubly exciting by the sheer quantity of dogs whochose to participate. I’m not sure if there was a winner and a loser, and I’meven less sure there were any rules, but we had a lot of fun and sent only oneplayer on injured reserve with a bloody nose.

The evening meal was good, EJE grass-fed brisket, ovensmoked all day, and all the usual trimmings of potatoes, salads, relish trays,baked beans, and even a taste of high school cooking class potato soup. Anddesserts. Lots of desserts. The whole meal was fabulous, and the 10 lbs. ofbrisket disappeared in only about 15 minutes. That’s got to be a record.

Afterward there was time for talk, for the recounting of thedays exploits, and for watching a bit of college ball on the television.

The whole weekend was a delight. It included hardwork, minor injuries and aches and pains, competency and comedy, a day spent inthe great outdoors with calves which will ultimately provide sustenance to thousands,and time well spent together as a family. It’s hard to put a price on somethinglike that.

The one percent and the 99 percent

2011-11-28T06:19:00.000-08:00

VA Medical Center, Cheyenne, Wyo.

What is freedom?

The well-publicized “occupiers” around the country seem to know the answer, though it usually takes a bit of deciphering.

The message of the self-professed “99 percent” comes down to this:

Freedom is a government provided sinecure (not a “job” job; heaven forbid!).

Freedom is the government forgiving whatever debt the 99-percenters have amassed.

Freedom is the government taking wealth from those who’ve earned it (especially the “rich”) and giving to those who want it but don't want to earn it.

Freedom is free food, free medical care, and “…no hassles about rules, man.”

Freedom, to paraphrase Nancy Pelosi, is not having to take a job so that one can follow one’s muse.

Oh, and freedom pretty much means ridding the world of Jews. I never really thought I would see that kind of naked hate return. It’s human nature, I suppose. Some control it, some refuse to control it or find excuses not to.

As you may have guessed, I don’t agree with the “occupy” crowd. Perhaps you don’t agree with me, that’s fair. But I’ve spent a lot of time studying this self-professed movement, and if you’re honest, you have to agree that I’ve pretty much suitcased their demands and their idea of freedom.

Initially the occupiers were reasonably peaceful and law abiding, in the goofy tradition of “everybody gets high, and everybody gets a chance at the mic” fashion so beloved by young protesters since the 1960’s.

Unfortunately, while the message hasn’t changed, the occupy protests have grown considerably more violent of late.

While the 99-percenters rail against the greed of the one-percent, the vast (?!?) Zionist/Capitalist conspiracy that controls the world government, they seem oblivious to the fact that a different “one-percent” exists. A one percent that ensures the liberty and rights of the real 99 percent, the 300-plus million Americans who, for the most part, continue to live their lives of liberty one day at a time, in good times and in bad times. The same one percent ensures the rights and liberty of the childish occupiers as well, because they swore a solemn oath to protect and defend the constitution of the United States, and not just the people they agree with.

As I write this on Tuesday morning, it’s closing in on 10 p.m. in Kabul, 9 p.m. in Baghdad, and Mombasa, 2 a.m. on Wednesday in Quezon and at Naha. In these places, and in nearly every one of the 24 time zones on this planet, American fighting men and women are prepared to go into harms way on your behalf. In many places they are, as you read these words, in direct peril. On this day, Nov. 11, 2011, some of them may give their lives, others will surely bleed.

I visited the Cheyenne VA Medical Center on Monday. As I walked through the halls of the big, clean, high-tech hospital, I carefully looked at all of the veterans. There were a lot of older fellows who had seen service in WWII and Korea, and a younger generation of graybeards who had fought in Vietnam. There were a scattering of folks my age who fought in places like Beirut and Grenada and Panama and what we now call “Gulf War One.” And there are younger ones, too. Men and women who look far too young to have fought for our nation, yet bear the healing external scars and unfathomable internal hurts of combat.

On Monday I thought about the experiences shared across time by those few hundred vets. Experiences so very similar within the community of those who have served, so utterly foreign to those who have not.

I wondered what those men and women thought about the occupiers. But I didn’t have to ask. They know, as do I, that a “…government of the people, by the people, and for the people” can sometimes be pretty messy. Disgusting, even. It’s the nature of self government, and so far as anyone has been able to determine, the only way to ensure individual liberty.

So long as enough Americans believe to their core the ideas our country was founded on, the country, the people, the Constitution, will be worth defending. The one-percent will continue to raise their right arms, will continue to take the oath, will continue to fight and bleed and die.

For us.

I wrote this on Veterans Day. When I write about Veterans Day I often urge you readers to thank a vet or someone on active duty.

This time I’ll ask you to think about the difference between one percent and 99 percent.

To my brothers and sisters: I know and understand your sacrifice. Bravo Zulu.

Chores and a puppy

2011-11-26T14:28:00.000-08:00

November 5 was a pretty day, a day filled with chores and delight.

Not that there’s anything particularly delightful about hand-scooping five tons of corn or tinkering with tiny engine parts deep in the bowels of a skid-steer or deploying four miles of electric fence.

But these are some of the things that must be done if one wants to continue to raise cattle and continue a legacy.

The work can be miserable. The physical toil exhausting. Most of the work is done outside, in hammering heat or freezing cold or something in between. Early in the morning and late at night and at all hours in between.

But not every hour of every day. There are compensations.

After scooping corn and bringing life back to the skid-steer, my Border collie puppy Nona and I went off to check the cows.

As we got out of the pickup I felt like I was stepping into a magical place, a secret place, a place only Nona and I could experience. The overnight coolness was flowing away across the prairie with the gentle northerly breeze, and a bright sun slanted down through a nearly cloudless, deeply blue sky. The touch of the sun was just right – warm and embracing and neither too hot nor too cold. As the ground warmed the smell of autumn filled the air, damp grass and sod and junipers melting out of the first snow of the year.

Nona dashed about hither and yon, following her nose and seeing some things for the first time in her life – she was only about 15 weeks old, after all. As we approached the cow herd on foot she seemed to take on an extra dose of excitement. She’s been around cows every day for more than a month – nothing new there. But there’s always an extra spark when she sees them, as if she knows they’re somehow special, but she can’t quite put her paw on what it is.

Border Collie puppy Nona investigates some cows and calves on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

On our previous walks among the cows Nona has been clearly curious but timid, preferring to stick close to me. On Monday she lost some of her timidity and trotted off ahead of me toward the cattle. I flopped down on the grass to watch her.

She moved straight toward the cows until she was fifty or sixty feet away, then paused. She looked back over her shoulder at me a couple of times, then slowly started circling to the right in a classic gathering move. As she moved to the right, several of the cows began to drift away from her to the left, reacting to the pressure of her proximity. Nona paused and watched, then as the cows stopped, she began to loop back to the left, gently pushing the cows back to the right and ahead. Her herding instincts were clearly starting to show up.

As a curious cow approaches, Border collie puppy Nona stands her ground momentarily – before scooting back to the security of her master.

All was well until a curious calf decided to take a closer look at her. Nona stood her ground for a moment, but as the 600 lb. calf drew closer, she turned and dashed away, back to her master and protection. She fairly leapt into my lap, wiggling and wagging with excitement. She’d taken a big step, and seemed to know it.

After she settled down a bit she moved off toward the cows again and went through a nearly identical process, only this time, a calf sneaked up on her from behind and gave her quite a surprise. Some of her timidity returned and she stayed close to me for several minutes.

She finally found a happy medium at about 75 feet from the cows, a place where she was close enough to watch, yet far enough away that she couldn’t be outflanked.

As I lay on the cool, spongy grass and soaked up the warming autumn sun, I thought about how fortunate I am to be able to enjoy the simple pleasures of the real world.

Opportunity: costs and benefits

2011-11-25T10:58:00.000-08:00

I've been neglecting this blog of late, and for that I am truly sorry. Between ranching, newspapering, and now writing and maintaining two blogs, I've struggled to keep my plates spinning, if you'll pardon the trite metaphor. That's just an excuse however. And fortunately, I think I'm starting to find a way to get it all done (the secret is to waste less time. I am a champion time waster).

On to opportunity costs and benefits.

Most ag producers reading this post will be well acquainted with the concept of opportunity cost. Those readers who aren’t familiar with the term will almost certainly recognize the concept of judging opportunity cost, because it is something we all do, to a greater or lesser extent, when we consider selling or purchasing something.

By definition, opportunity cost is the value of the best but foregone alternative. In a bit plainer language, it’s the value of the best thing you could have bought, but now can’t buy because you’ve already spent that money. Alternatively, when it comes to selling, opportunity cost is the best money you could have pocketed if you had taken a different marketing approach.

On the EJE Ranch we look hard at opportunity costs. By weaning time, we have essentially harvested our annual calf crop, and like the corn or wheat farmer, we have to decide how to sell our crop in a way that maximizes our profit.

If we sell all the calves at the sale barn, we have to be aware of the opportunity cost (which we cannot now realize) potential in backgrounding or stockering the calves until spring. The potential profit in selling larger calves in a higher market always looks good, but is balanced by increased risk. Losing a few calves over the winter can wipe out profit, as can a change in market prices.

The utility of understanding opportunity costs is in fact the utility of rating the costs and benefits of all options. There’s never been, nor will there ever be, a single, fool-proof, highest profit option. But the ability to honestly assess risks and rewards allows the thoughtful producer to eke out enough profit to continue.

Time has an opportunity cost component as well. Few if any of us ever get caught up with all the tasks on our various lists. We have to manage our time so that the “must do's” get done. Only when the must dos are done can we afford to expend time on the like-to-do's.

Over the weekend I had a number of like-to-do's tentatively scheduled, including cleaning corrals, fixing a barn door, assembling a dog kennel, and nailing up a few sagging wires here and there.

I had an unexpected call for a ranch tour, though. The few dollars I would collect for driving someone around the ranch and explaining what we do wouldn’t even come close to the value of catching up on tasks that have been waiting too long already. But as is the case for many of us in ag production, money isn’t the only consideration. In the case of giving ranch tours, I enjoy meeting new people, and I enjoy showing them what we do. I also get to expose non-ag folks to a real, working ranch, and in doing so, give them a tiny slice of reality to compare against what they read, hear and see on television regarding agriculture when they return home. In theory, this kind of interaction can pay off by slowly increasing the agricultural literacy – one or a few people at a time – of our largely urban-suburban population.

There’s another incentive to give the tour, another non-monetary benefit. Just as I give my guest a glimpse of life on a ranch, my guest usually gives me a glimpse of their world. It’s important for me as a food producer to understand what consumers think about their food, to listen to their questions and concerns about food, where it comes from, and whether it’s really safe or not. Each of us also get to compare and contrast lifestyles, and the differences provide for some interesting and memorable conversations.

I’ll call my Saturday tour guest Marvin, because he asked me not to use his name or picture.

Marvin was born and raised behind the Iron Curtain of eastern Europe and came to the U.S. in the mid-80’s. He’s retired now and was returning home to an eastern city on the final leg of a vacation when he stopped for gas in Kimball and heard about the ranch tours I offer.

Marvin was astonished at the sheer size of the ranch. He had assumed, he told me, that most non-cultivated land was public land, owned by the government. He wondered how it was possible to earn a living from what looked to him (and frankly, looks to everyone in mid-October) like utterly unproductive land.

As I explained the cow/calf operation and how we are designed to be in tune with nature, how the cows and calves “harvest” the grass for us and convert it into beef and new calves, how we depend on each season to naturally grow and maintain the shortgrass prairie ecosystem, Marvin became more animated. “Ah,” he said in his thick Slavic accent, “this is real green! “Not electric car. Not windmill. This keep healthy planet, this real green!”

Marvin’s excitement and enthusiasm were delightful. We talked for hours, and he told me a bit about growing up behind the iron curtain. I told him about growing up here, my career in the navy, returning home to ranch. We talked about many things, including some of the problems facing the world today. We didn’t solve anything, but each of us had a good time and enjoyed meeting the other.

As Marvin drove off toward the interstate late in the day, I thought about the chores I hadn’t accomplished, and I thought about opportunity costs. The opportunity cost of doing those chores was the cost of not meeting Marvin, not sharing with him the ranching lifestyle, and not showing off the real, boots on the ground reality of modern agriculture.

Our story is worth telling, our farms and ranches worth showing off. I can’t calculate a dollar figure for the value of sharing the ranch with Marvin, but I think it was time well spent for both of us.

A second Blog

2011-11-15T06:22:00.000-08:00

Agriculture Under Attack is a second blog I put together last week. It's still in the building stage but has a few posts up.

Agriculture Under Attack will be more specific, responding to misinformation about the coexistence of nature and modern agriculture on our planet.

I’ll be moving some of the content from Prairie Adventure over to the new blog, updating it as appropriate, and I’ll leave this blog for the more general, descriptive writing I enjoy.

Over on AAU, I plan to counter misinformation with logic, common sense, facts and data. Feel free to call me out on any errors you find, and please comment if your opinion differs from mine.

While this will not be a “scholarly” blog, I’ll do my best to make it clear which is fact and data, and which is opinion.

NPR: Agriculture is planetary enemy number one

2011-10-18T13:25:00.000-07:00

National Public Radio (NPR) crowned agriculture as "Planetary Enemy Number One" last week when it reported on the planned cover story of the Oct. 20 edition of the journal Nature.

The Nature story is a paper written by a team of environmental scientists from the University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin, UC Santa Barbara, and Arizona State University in the U.S., McGill University in Canada, Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University and the Stockholm Environment Institute in Sweden, and the University of Bonn in Germany.

According to NPR and a University of Minnesota (UM) press release, the researchers have concluded that agriculture is destroying the environment in trying to feed a growing population, and the solution they propose – world-wide governmental control of agriculture and food – can ensure both enough food for a growing world and environmental protection.

Without pre-publication access to the actual paper (I'm writing this on is Oct. 18), it’s not possible to review the methodology used by the researchers nor the data derived from their efforts (though I’ll do so more formally in the weeks to come), but it is possible to glean a bit of information from NPR and the UM press release.

According to those sources, the researchers argue that humanity and the environment are facing a “daunting triple threat” of insufficient access to food by one-sixth of the human population, environmental destruction wrought by agricultural expansion (increased farmland acres and a concurrent increase in water, pesticide and fertilizer use), and increasing demand for food by a population that will grow to nine billion by 2050. NPR and UM hint that the researchers relied heavily on satellite imagery and computer modeling to reach their conclusions. Unsurprisingly, the threat of human-caused global climate change appears to figure large in the analysis of the “threat,” despite the massive flaws in previously published climate research and steadily increasing evidence of the near-insignificance of the human impact on climate.

The solution proposed by the researchers is a five-point plan, predicated on the centralized control of agricultural production and food distribution around the globe. This is a chilling proposal. In every instance where governments have exercised tight control of agriculture, starvation and environmental degradation have immediately followed. One need only look at the “Great Leap Forward” in China and multiple famines in the Soviet Union to understand the potential for disaster. Though admittedly incomplete, Soviet and Chinese records reveal that at least 6 million and 1.5 million people respectively starved to death under centralized control of agriculture in the 1930’s USSR and in 1950’s China.

Nevertheless, this is the five-point solution proposed by the researchers, at least according to NPR and UM:

1. Halt farmland expansion through centralized control and certification of all land use.

2. Close yield gaps through centralized control of agricultural productivity.

3. Strategic reallocation of inputs through centralized control of all water, fertilizer, and pesticide use.

4. Shift diets through centralized control of food production, shifting away from animal protein (meat) and toward “healthy” (though thus far undefined) food production.

5. Eliminate waste through centralized control of all food from production to consumption.

Interestingly, NPR admits that the researchers do “not really explain” how centralized control will increase food production and halt environmental destruction. They do, however, maintain that centralized control is the solution, and lament the fact that there is at present no “global dictator” to “abolish feedlots” or actively set “…prices for land, corn, meat and everything else.”

According to the UM press release, lead researcher Jonathan Foley, head of UM’s Institute on the Environment said, “For the first time, we have shown it is possible to both feed a hungry world and protect a threatened planet. It will take serious work. But we can do it.”

Farmers and ranchers will likely be quite skeptical of Foley’s assertion. They have, after all, been feeding a hungry world and protecting the environment for generations, if not centuries.

Most of those reading this blog will be farmers and ranchers, and they will likely wonder, as do I, whether the proposals of these researchers have any chance of being adopted here and abroad. My own common sense and experience tell me that the proposed solution is folly, yet in talking with a number of well-educated and well-meaning people, all of whom are at least peripherally involved in agriculture or agricultural research, I’m surprised at how much they are willing to take on faith, and without appraising the “evidence” presented by information resources such as NPR and UM.

This is where I see some real danger in the combination of “the few feeding the many” and of badly flawed and unethical reporting by much of the major media. More than 98 percent of the U.S. population is two or more generations removed from any practical experience or understanding of food production, and are much more likely to be influenced by flawed but widespread and well-presented information. Those same 98 percent are therefore vulnerable to voting for, or acquiescing with, policies which actually threaten, rather than safeguard, their food supply.

We’ll have to wait until publication to assess the real merits of the argument posed by the researchers, however, as reported by NPR and UM, there appear to be some potentially major flaws, including:

1. Computer modeling based on flawed input data (including UN-IPCC climate data).

2. Faulty population growth predictions (in the 1960’s, population experts confidently predicted a world population of 10-12 billion by 2000).

3. Flawed information on both the quantity of water and chemical inputs projected and on their environmental impact.

4. Lack of details regarding the centralized control of agricultural production and food distribution and the safeguards which would prevent repetition of past centralized control disasters.

There are a number of other potential problems with the research as it has thus far been reported. We’ll look more closely at these when the paper is published.

In the meantime, farmers and ranchers should continue to monitor major media ag reporting and do what they can to counter flawed reporting, which can be considerably more effective than one might at first think. Thanks to increased access to valid news via the Internet and a growing agricultural social networking community, ag producers seem to have steered the EPA away from implementing plans to regulate agricultural dust, and have been able to effectively pressure companies supporting anti-agricultural causes, such as Yellow Tail.

Bearing the burden

2011-09-20T16:47:00.000-07:00

I got the news via e-mail. The son of a close friend and former navy colleague had been killed in action near Kandahar in Afghanistan. The stark message shattered my emotional defenses utterly. Gravity suddenly seemed overwhelmingly powerful. I put my head down on the desk as grief and memories washed through my mind and heart.

I remembered a little tow-headed boy running around at squadron picnics and softball games. A happy little boy, somehow in love with stock car racing at seven and filled to bursting with NASCAR facts, figures, names and places.

The little boy was 28 when he died. Twenty-eight? The juxtaposition of memory and reality rocked me with perspective. Twenty-eight with a wife and two young daughters. The sudden, savage grief I felt for a little boy of memory and a family I had never met was wrenching, to say the least.

I thought about the boy’s mother, who I served with on and off over a dozen or so years in the 1980’s and 1990’s. We were, and remain, great friends. I could scarcely imagine the shock and grief she and her family were experiencing. Years of closely held memories played across the big screen of my mind as a bittersweet admixture of joy and pain flowed through my heart.

Gradually I began to wonder about the power of my own shock and grief. I had fooled myself, I realized, into thinking I could shield myself emotionally from the consequences of our now decade-long war. During my time of active service I lost far too many friends and suffered more than my share of grief. I’d done my bit and had the medals and scars to prove it. I told myself that it was someone else’s turn. Intellectually I supported our fighting men and women and their mission absolutely. But emotionally – emotionally I would sit this one out. I’d done my part.

I raised my head from the desk. Hours had passed, night had come, my house was dark. I realized then the terrible truth. In attempting to shield myself from emotional pain, I had turned my heart away from my fellow warriors just when they needed me the most. It was an act of utter cowardice. The realization burned like fire.

Jumbled words from John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Inaugural Address tumbled through my mind. I quickly pulled up the text of the speech on my computer.

“…We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights…to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship…to assure the survival and success of liberty.

“In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.

“Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need--not as a call to battle, though embattled we are-- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.”

in your hands...

summoned to give testimony...

to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle…

I thought back to the sacred oath of service to country I took so many years ago, when I swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, and that I would bear true faith and allegiance to the same. That oath, it occurred to me, had no expiration date. That I am not presently called on to fight is irrelevant. My sworn duty remains. I swore to bear true faith and allegiance to the constitution, to that founding document which explains in simple and majestic terms the idea of America. The idea I believe in with all my mind and heart, not because someone told me I must, but because I realized even as a young man the truth and the power of those words and in that idea.

Just as I had shamefully turned my heart from my fellow warriors, so too had I turned my heart from true faith and allegiance to America, turned my heart against my own sacred oath.

I had gone far off course, I realized, and I knew that the path of brutal self-honesty was the only way forward. Seeing and understanding the stark reality of my failure allowed me clearly see the path I must take to regain the road of true faith and allegiance and service to America. More Kennedy:

“In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger…The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it--and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.

“My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

“Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.”

One of the things I can do for my country – one of the many but perhaps one of the most important – is to turn my heart back to my fellow warriors and to this nation. To bear the burden of grief, to pay the price I swore to pay so many years ago. This I have done, and strangely, while my heart is heavy with grief, the fear which prompted me to hide in cowardice is gone. I have been summoned once again, as Kennedy put it, to give testimony to my national loyalty. I nearly failed the test, but in the end I did not fail.

There’s an old saying that when a man or woman joins the military, they are signing a blank check to the government for the amount of up to and including their life. This saying is essentially true, but in reality, they are signing those checks not to some nebulous “government,” but to me and you and every citizen of this nation. We’ve each of us been cashing those checks for the last decade. We are each of us faced with a choice, a choice no one can make for us. We can either bear the burden of cashing those checks or we can turn away from paying such a heavy price. But turning away comes with a cost, too. Freedom isn’t free. Not for any of us.

Chokecherry time

2011-09-13T12:40:00.000-07:00

The chokecherries were ready. As I stood there on a shelf of rock above the bottom of the canyon and looked around, I saw hundreds – maybe thousands – of twisted, almost ratty-looking branches hanging heavy under the weight of fruit.

These wild, canyonland chokecherries are always a surprise to me. Their shrubby forms grow in the most improbable places – some are anchored in bare inches of soil layered over solid rock, and some, many of the best it seems, have sprouted directly from fissures in the bare rock.

In the dry years, the bushes produce only a few berries each, and these are quickly consumed by birds and deer and other wildlife. In the good years, however, years like 2011, their prolifity is astonishing.

At first glance, the bushes look anything but promising. They live in a tough neighborhood where the yearly arctic winds constantly try to scour them from the canyon. Few grow to more than five feet in height, and their stubby branches are sparse but substantial. In the spring their foliage is a deep, radiant green, but by chokecherry time the leaves have lost much of their color and are quickly fading to brown.

Western chokecherries (Prunus virginiana demissa) shine in the late summer sun on the EJE ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

In a year like this one, the wonder of the tangled, unattractive mass of bushes is the sheer volume of fruit clustered on those spare, twisted branches. Each cluster contains a dozen or so fat little berries, each about the size of a pea, and so darkly purple as to be black. At first you spy one or two clusters, but then, in that lovely bit of prairie magic, you look just a bit more closely, and dozens, hundreds, thousands of fruit clusters snap sharply into view.

The chokecherries on the EJE Ranch are likely a western variety of the chokecherry native to North America, possibly Prunus virginiana demissa. Western chokecherries are adapted to a more arid climate than their eastern counterpart, the bushes generally smaller in stature, and tolerate colder winter conditions. Their fruit is distinctively darker, and according to many, more sweet.

The name chokecherry is derived from the tannic, highly astringent taste of the ripe fruit. As I stood there on my rock shelf and contemplated the chore of picking and preserving, I reached out and plucked a fat, ripe berry from the nearest cluster and popped it in my mouth. My taste buds erupted with delight. Astringent – yes – but so very sweet. Probably the sweetest chokecherry I’d ever tasted.

To work, then. The sun was well up in the afternoon sky and the day was pleasantly warm with a slight northwest breeze. The breeze was welcome, because chokecherry picking can be sweaty work. It can be a bit hazardous, too, as wild canyonland chokecherries grow where the footing is often treacherous and where rattlesnakes prefer to live, among the sharply fractured siltstone of an actively eroding prairie canyon. An hour’s worth of picking yielded two gallons of chokecherries, and during that hour I moved less than 10 feet from my starting place. Buckets filled, I called it a day. Besides, I’d have helpers in a couple of days, two young ladies from the big city of Omaha who were excited about visiting the ranch and looking forward to some “country” experiences.

When the weekend arrived my helpers were primed and ready for some chokecherry picking. Grace, my niece, had visited the ranch many times but had never picked chokecherries. Myah, Grace’s friend from Omaha, had never picked “…any berries or cherries or anything.” She hastened to add that while she lives in Omaha, she’s not “city.” She’s visited a farm in Iowa many times.

Myah smiles in the midst of a chokecherry thicket last weekend on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

Being a bit more experienced, and with a bit less talking to do, I quickly filled my pail with dark, fat chokecherries. I climbed to the top of the canyon wall and found a good rock to perch on, then just watched the girls as they picked and gabbed away. They were clearly having fun and occasionally remembered to pick some fruit. As they moved back and forth among the uneven bushes I could hear their non-stop conversation, though I couldn’t make out any of the words. What do 11 year-old girls talk about, I wondered? None of my business, of course.

Grace (l) and Myah pick chokecherries last weekend on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

As I sat there in the warm sunshine and watched the girls and enjoyed the hint of breeze, my mind turned back to chokecherry picking when I was 11. I’d like to say it’s a great memory for me, but it’s not. I thought it was a crashing bore. Why not go to the store for jelly? But the memory is precious in another way – I was picking with my grandfather Wilbur, and neither of us knew how quickly the clock was ticking for him.

Tired, sweaty, covered in dust and leaves and cobwebs, the girls finally emerged from the canyon, pails brimming with chokecherries, faces glowing with big grins. Almost immediately Myah caught a small horned lizard and decided to take him home and make him a pet.

Together we harvested enough chokecherries to put up 32 pints of jelly, a not-inconsiderable accomplishment. The jelly is made and stored away now, and it’ll taste especially good on cold winter mornings – a taste of sweet, late-summer sunshine when the arctic winds are howling just outside the door.

But best of all, at least for me, will be the memory of precious time spent with two lovely young ladies as they enjoyed a chore that few youngsters get to experience these days.

River

2011-09-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

Last year I was gathering a few cows that needed moving back north with the rest of the herd. I was working by myself on the four-wheeler. River was with me, though, so I wasn’t really by myself. Which could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending…

The cows were bunched loosely in the northwest quarter of the pasture section, and I wanted to pen them in the corral down on the south side, so River and I got ‘em headed that way and enjoyed the day as we trailed along behind ‘em.

Soon enough we came to the drift fence and the cows ambled along toward the corral and started in through the west gate. They still had calves at their sides and were acting a little skittish. A half-dozen broke off at the gate and headed south and I quickly looked around for River. Nowhere to be found. Blast that dog! Probably off rolling in something dead, I thought. What’s the use of having a working dog if she’s never around when you need her?

I zipped around and steered the balky cows and calves back into the corral and got off the four-wheeler to shut the gate, satisfied with a job (the first part of it anyway) well done. It was then that I noticed River sitting there on the east side of the corral, guarding the open gate. The gate I remembered closing a few days before, and had (as usual) assumed to be still closed.

I smiled and shook my head. So much for the superiority of the highly developed brain. But hell, who needs to check the gates when you’ve got a fine working dog who knows more about what you’re doing than you do?

River helps move a bull on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

Once river caught on to her job, when her grown-up herding instincts overcame her puppy-like chasing instincts and she started figuring out what moving cattle was all about, she became a valuable asset to the operation. She wasn’t perfect by any means, and sometimes she’d get too excited or put herself out of position or let a bull buffalo her.

She was also prone to sticking her face into a porcupine from time to time, and never seemed to learn the lesson, which always seemed a remarkably human trait to me.

But mostly she was a good solid working dog, filled with enthusiasm and energy, and if you took the time to watch her work you could learn a few things about moving cows.

River plays with a new puppy last autumn on the EJE ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

River whelped nine pups earlier this year, her first litter, and handled her new job with ease. The fat little puppies grew like weeds and were soon up and about, learning how to use their new bodies and new senses and busy exploring their new world.

River died last Friday. She was only five years old, and as full of life and energy as on the first day she came home. Then she was gone in an instant, leaving a surprisingly painful hole in our lives.

Being ranching folks, we’re able to put her loss in a reasonable perspective. We miss her and our grief is profound and real, yet we live close enough to the cycle of life to know that her life and our shared experiences were far more important than her passing. We’ll all make a similar journey one day, a fact which gives life its incredible beauty and sweetness.

River is gone but her very existence added a special richness to my life. She’ll live on in my mind, and in my mind’s eye, she’ll always be sitting in that open gate, holding a pen full of cattle, seemingly saying, “Don’t worry, I’ve got your back.”

Livin'

2011-09-06T10:37:00.000-07:00

The heat lay across the prairie like a smothering blanket. My thermometer read 97 degrees, but my body thought it was warmer than that. The air was still and dry and dusty and it shimmered all around me, not close up but in the distance, out near the horizon. Overhead the sky was an inverted bowl of washed-out blue. I looked and looked, but couldn’t find a cloud. The sun had passed the midpoint of it’s daily sky crossing and hung there white and hot, bearing down with palpable force.

The landscape looked hot and tired. Nearly all the green was gone; the grass was brown and sere, the soil gray and powdery, the limestone rocks blindingly white and oven-hot.

Prairie ground is twisted and uneven compared to parks and fairways and walking paths, and it’s treacherous to the uninitiated or the unwary. Yucca and prickly pear can poke and tear with their sharp spines, scourging feet and legs. Even the seed heads of mature grasses contain barbed spikes that penetrate clothing. Hiking the shortgrass prairie requires an eye for terrain and a lightness of foot. The pavement plodder or lawn stroller will either quickly learn or be down and injured within a few hundred feet.

Lightness of foot was hard to achieve as I strode along, weighed down by rucksack and rifle. In addition to my usual 25 lbs. of gear, my rucksack held eight steel pencil-posts, a hammer, a package of “Dirty Bird” targets, and about 20 clothespins. In addition to getting in a workout hike, I planned to build a temporary shooting range.

I pushed myself hard and chose a route with lots of verticality. A pleasant stroll is one thing, a hard hike another. Both have their place, but hot, dry August days are made for hard hiking; for burning calories and working muscle and, to borrow a famous line, to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

As my heart rate climbed and stabilized at about 160, the sweat began to flow from my pores and the oven-like air roared in and out of my lungs. Muscles loosened and joints relaxed and I soon found the driving, mile-eating rhythm I was seeking.

I topped a rise and started down a steep slope, heading generally for the windmill at the bottom of a deep draw. The windmill’s vanes stood motionless in the still air, and the towering contraption glinted, galvanized facets scattering bright sunlight in dazzling patterns. The tank at the base of the windmill was nearly filled with cool water, and half-a-hundred heifers lay ruminating nearby. They watched me as I scrambled down the slope, curious as young cattle always are, but content to lie in digestive repose during the heat of the day.

Leaving the cattle behind, I bent my course southwest along a wide, shallow valley ringed by high ground. The valley was a quarter-mile wide and nearly a mile long, bisected in two places by gullies. Other than the gullies, the valley bottom was wide and grassy and remarkably flat.

I hiked to my pre-surveyed target sites; 100, 200, 300 and 600 yards from my shooting site. At each target site I quickly hammered a pair of pencil posts into the ground, then affixed targets with clothespins. At the 600 yard spot I affixed two targets, one above the other. Six-hundred yards is long range for a 16-inch barreled rifle, and despite the assurances of my shooting charts, I thought I might have a hard time suitcasing bullet drop. As I finished with the last target I felt a north breeze coming up and estimated it at about 6 mph, gusting to 12 mph.

I hiked back to my shooting spot, pushing as hard as I could and running the last 100 yards. This range session was to be a test of my shooting skills, and I wanted to work around the sweat in my eyes, the labored breathing, the hammering heart.

At the shooting site I threw down my rucksack for an improvised rest and flopped down behind it, anchoring the rifle in a solid crease. I quickly chambered a round and peered through the scope as I splayed my legs, turned our my feet, and found good bone-on-bone connections. I would fire five rounds at each target; rapid fire at 100 and 200 yards, then timed fire at 300 and 600 yards.

With a solid rest and great sight picture, I hammered out 10 quick shots at the 100 and 200 yard targets. I felt good about their placement and could see tight clusters on the targets through the scope. I could see that I’d doped the wind correctly.

On the 300 and 600 targets I took my time and made sure my shooting mechanics were right. I knew I had one flyer at the 300 yard target when I pulled rather than squeezed the trigger. I couldn’t see the hits through the scope but felt good about my mechanics.

At 600 yards I trusted the scope and held dead on vertically at the 600 yard setting and two dots to the right to compensate for the wind. The first shot went just left, shattering a clothespin on the left pencil post. I shifted my windage to 2.5 dots right and let fly the final four rounds.

Then it was up, reload a fresh magazine, shoulder the rucksack, and retrace my steps to the targets. At 100 and 200 yards my groups were smaller than minute of angle, slightly less than one and two inches respectively. At 600 yards I had a vertical string of 13 inches, right down the center of the target, and of course one shot nearly off the paper to the left. Far from perfect but surprisingly good, considering the short barrel.

My joy was in the 300 yard target. I’d doped the wind correctly and with the exception of the called flyer put my string into just over two inches.

After policing up my brass and trash I struck out west, making a big loop as I headed back to my pickup. At the end of the hike my GPS told me I’d covered 8.1 miles in three hours and twenty-four minutes. I was a little tired and sore and thirsty, but it wasn’t too bad an outing for an old man.

As I close this it occurs to me that some might not understand this post. I can only refer them to the title.

Fences and Neighbors

2011-08-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

You may recall that Robert Frost (1874-1963), one-time Poet Laureate of the United States and recipient of four Pulitzer Prizes for his work, penned in 1914 a poem called “Mending Wall.”

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,…

Frost was describing the stone walls of New England, walls which marked property boundaries and kept livestock within the bounds of the owner’s land.

In this part of the country, we have fences, but, walls or fences, the purpose is the same.

So to is the heavy hand nature lays upon a fence or a wall. Frost spoke of ground heave disrupting a wall and necessitating annual repair. Here on the High Plains our fences suffer from ground heave too, as well as from wind pressure, wood rot, rust, and gravity. In Frost’s poem he also describes the ravages of hunters, who tear holes in walls to more easily pass (as well as to “…have the rabbit out of hiding.”

Modern “hunters” have torn down miles of my fences. Such people most assuredly do not deserve the noble title of hunter. Frost seems to have held such hunters in small regard as well.

The wall Frost’s poetic character shared with a neighbor was not a livestock barrier. Perhaps this is why he didn’t comment on damage wrought by livestock. Or perhaps livestock can do little if any damage to a stone wall. In my mind’s eye, stone is much sturdier than stranded barbed wire stretched between wooden and steel posts.

Livestock can certainly damage a fence, though.

Last week a neighbor’s bull pushed his way through an aging (but to the eye, still sturdy) six-wire fence to join the yearling heifers in our adjacent pasture. In the wake of his fence-passage, he left snarls of wire and broken posts. He made, in fact, not one passage through the fence, but three.

We didn’t want the neighbor’s bull in with our heifers. We have our own bulls, our own breeding program, our own carefully selected genetics. The same is true for the neighbor. He has no desire for his bull to mix with out cattle, nor for our bulls to mix with his cattle. This is why we share a sturdy fence.

But if a fence has a week spot (or two, or three) a bull in pursuit of heifers in estrus will find it (or them). It’s what they do. We clever humans try to prevent cross-herd genetic flow with our fences. But, to paraphrase Frost, something there is that does not love a fence. Wire rusts, posts rot, staples heave themselves from posts over years of freeze-thaw cycles.

In “Mending Wall,” Frost puzzled over the motivation of his neighbor, who insisted on maintaining the shared wall even though Frost’s poetic narrator saw no need, and would have preferred ready access to his neighbor’s land – to wander unimpeded where his poetic muse led him. He saw his neighbor as an ancient, fading farmer, unable to break the time worn habits of the past:

He will not go behind his father’s saying,
…Good fences make good neighbors.

Still, Frost not only shared the annual backbreaking labor of wall repair with his neighbor, he initiated and coordinated the chore:

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line,
And set the wall between us once again.

Here on the High Plains, where fence repair is somewhat less taxing than rebuilding a stone wall, there’s seldom need for neighbors to meet and share the labor. A few hours suffice, and the neighbor who discovers the problem generally fixes it.

The wayward bull was eased back into his pasture where he could attend to his own responsibilities, and the fence was quickly repaired. As I repaired the fence I marveled at the ravages time had wrought upon the fence. In places the oldest wire had corroded to almost nothing, and in other places, sturdy wire was the only thing holding base-rotted fence posts aloft. Indeed, …something there is that does not like a fence.

Though Frost used the line “Good fences make good neighbors” twice in his poem, and though countless college professors have made much of this, carefully explaining to their students that fences clearly serve to keep people apart, I read in the poem a far deeper understanding of nature and of people than most professors will ever be able to achieve.

In my mind, Frost was describing the very real beauty of the relationships between men and nature, men and their tough agricultural pursuits, and between men and men – neighbors if you will.

Though the lettered demand that Frost was railing against divisions between men, it’s clear to me that he was observing and reporting the simple beauty of human existence on the land, and on the remarkably special intersections where men and toil and nature meet.

Though Frost’s character repeated the phrase “Good fences make good neighbors,” it’s clear to me that his penultimate message is that good neighbors make good neighbors. And that together, good neighbors do remarkable things. Remarkable things that most people rely on, but never understand.

Food programs and out-of-control federal spending

2011-08-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

With so much news regarding the national debt featured prominently in the major media of late, I thought it might be worth while to look at the debt – and it’s attendant federal spending – from a uniquely agricultural perspective.
Many – perhaps most of you – reading this blog are engaged in the production of food. This being the case, two aspects of federal spending are perhaps more immediate to you than to others.

The first is federal spending on direct or indirect aid to farmers and ranchers.

The second is federal spending on food programs – that is to say, the amount of federal money given to people to purchase food.

These things are immediate and important to us (I too am engaged in food production) because they bear on the huge problem of the burgeoning national debt and how it relates to each of us directly. The problem of the debt is self-evident and important (or should be) to all Americans. More on this in a moment.

As food producers, we make up somewhere between one and two percent of the population, so the immediacy with which we view federal spending on farm/ranch support is not shared with the other 98-99 percent of the population.

Since nearly all federal spending on food programs is channeled through the USDA, and is therefore nearly always described as “ag spending” and equated with money paid directly to farmers and ranchers, food programs are of immediate concern to us as well.

While we represent at most two percent of the population, food programs give federal cash directly to more than 50 million Americans, fully one-sixth or about 17 percent of the population. Federal spending on food programs is therefore understandably immediate and important to those folks, too.

Now let’s look at the numbers associated with the federal debt, and since they are so large, let’s put them in a context we should all be able to understand. First the huge numbers:

Annual income for the United States: $2.17 trillion ($2,170,000,000,000)
Annual spending for the United States: $$3.82 trillion ($3,820,000,000,000)
Annual NEW DEBT for the United States: $1.65 trillion ($1,650,000,000,000)
Existing debt for the United States: $14.271 trillion ($14,271,000,000,000)
U.S. budget cuts from debt ceiling legislation: $38.5 billion ($38,500,000,000)

To get a good feel for these numbers, simply cut off the last eight zeroes and think about them as the annual budget for your family.

Your annual income: $21,700
The amount of money you actually spent: $38,200
Debt you added to your credit card: $16,500
Previous unpaid balance on your credit card: $142,710
Spending you decided to cut to “fix” your indebtedness: $385

Just imagine the conversation with your credit card company. “I know I’ll owe you more than $150,000 at the end of the year – my total earnings for seven years – but good news! I’m not going to charge any movie rentals from now on, so instead of charging $16,500 this year, I’ll only charge $16,115! Of course I’ll never be able to make any actual payments on what I owe you, but, I’m sure my kids will make it good someday…”

In keeping with this theme, let’s say we tell our credit card company that we’re actually prepared to exercise even more spending restraint. In addition to no longer charging movie rentals, we will also no longer make our annual donation of $328 to the local school’s lunch program. Therefore, we’ll argue, instead of borrowing $16,500, we’ll only borrow $15,787. We’ll still not make any payments to the credit card company, nor will we plan to ever make such payments. Someone will take care of that in the future. In the mean time, we’ll have reduced (albeit by a tiny fraction) our rate of borrowing. That’s fair, isn’t it? We're doing a good thing, right?

Okay, let’s turn away from the imaginary family and back to the federal budget. Using the same “chop off the last eight zeroes” method for the moment, we see that completely eliminating the USDA from the federal budget will have even less impact on the federal budget than the “cuts” derived from the most recent round of debt ceiling legislation. Put the zeroes back, and you see that getting rid of the USDA entirely cuts only $328 billion from federal spending.

Cutting the USDA won’t fix the problem. But cutting the USDA, particularly if it were done suddenly, would almost certainly cause terrible problems for rich and poor alike.

Firstly, more than 66 percent of the USDA budget goes to providing food for the poor. Think about that for a moment. During budget talks, it's always trendy for major media talking heads to regurgitate numbers showing that "rich" farmers are receiving unneeded "welfare" dollars from the federal government. The truth, however, is that for every three dollars of ag spending, two go directly into the electronic accounts of the 17 percent of Americans who qualify for food assistance. Of the remaining dollar, only about 60 cents go to farmers. The remaining 40 cents goes largely to bureaucratic overhead and to research. With the possible exception of military spending, which is done on an entirely different scale, I'd argue that it is in ag spending where the taxpayer gets, by far, the best return on investment. Nowhere on the planet is food less expensive, nowhere on the planet are the "poor" so very, very wealthy.

But out of control spending is destroying the U.S. economy, and with it the future of our country. I can see no good reason not to remove farmers and ranchers from the federal teat. So long as private crop insurance is available and so long as the government does not continue to manipulate commodity markets (in order to keep food prices artificially low), farmers and ranchers can do just fine.

But it took more than half a century to get where we are regarding federal support of farming and ranching. The weaning process will take time.

It'll take time as well to wean the poor from food programs. A sudden end to those programs would be catastrophic. The poor would no longer be able to buy food – at least not with government funds. Some would have to sell off personal possessions to buy food. Some would have to budget and scrimp and save. Some would starve.

Since food is the most inexpensive thing we buy in this country, you might ask yourself why more expensive items can’t be eliminated first? As I see it, every other federal program should be on the table as well. If we all share the burden of giving up some of our treasured federal cash, the pain will be negligible. But the weaning process should be gradual and well planned.

A sudden end to farm payments would cause many farmers to fail. Fewer farmers would produce less food, and prices would soar. In fact, not only would prices soar, real food shortages would occur. Genuine food insecurity would begin, ushering in hoarding, riots, and all manner of disruption.

Agricultural research would come to a stop, and with it the ability to continue increasing yields and fighting pests and weeds.

It’s clear that abruptly “slashing” the USDA would have serious unintended consequences.

My point in this essay is neither to advocate “slashing” government programs nor to imply that government programs, including the USDA, are too important to be cut.

The point is that cuts have to be made to save both the economy and the country, but they have to be made over time and with a full understanding of the disruptions many of the cuts will make.

In truth, there are very few segments of society who cannot live without federal entitlement dollars. However, a great many segments have become dependent over time on these entitlement programs.

In my mind, the best thing for all of us – farmers and ranchers and food program recipients – is to become completely independent of, and no longer rely on, government entitlement programs.

This would be a fundamental change for all of us, and change is scary. But try to think about a system where you are completely in charge of your farm or your ranch or (in the case of those mired in the depths of the food programs) your life.

Is there really that much downside to no longer being under the thumb of faceless Washington bureaucrats or beholden to the whims of “transformational” politicians?

Food prices: home and abroad

2011-08-04T10:38:00.000-07:00

Though food prices in the U.S. continue to trend higher, a report by the USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) shows that Americans continue to spend a smaller percentage of their disposable income at the grocery store than ever, and have by far smaller food budgets than citizens of any other nation.

U.S. retail prices for all food rose 1.8 percent in 2009 and 0.8 percent in 2010, numbers which include prices for both “food away from home” (restaurant meals, etc.) and “food at home” (retail-purchased food prepared and consumed at home – traditional home meals).

Food away from home prices rose 3.5 percent in 2009 and 1.3 percent in 2010. Food at home prices rose 0.5 percent in 2009 and 0.3 percent in 2010. These numbers are at least partly influenced by consumer purchasing habits; as away from home costs increased, many consumers reduced their consumption of restaurant meals and increased consumption of home-prepared meals. As demand for restaurant meals fell, restaurateurs lowered prices to draw more customers to their establishments.

Food prices are forecast to continue to rise over the next 24 months however, with all food increasing 3-4 percent in 2011 and 2.5-3.5 percent in 2012. Food away from home prices are forecast to rise 3-4 percent this year and 2-3 percent next year, while food at home prices are forecast to jump 3.5-4.5 percent this year and 3-4 percent in 2012.

A table of food price index changes is available online at http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/CPIFoodAndExpenditures/Data/cpiforecasts.htm

While food price increases are unwelcome, U.S. consumers spent only 9.4 percent of their disposable income on food last year, tying the record low percentage set in 2009. This figure is the lowest since 1929, the first year ERS began compiling annual food spending reports.

To put 9.4 percent of disposable income in historical perspective, Americans spent around a quarter of their income on food between 1929 and 1935 – ranging from 25.1 percent in 1933 to 23 percent in 1931 and 1932. Those numbers began to decline in 1936 and have generally trended down ever since, falling into the teens in 1936 and finally falling below 10 percent in 2000.

A table of food expenditures as a share of disposable income is available online at http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/CPIFoodAndExpenditures/Data/Expenditures_tables/table7.htm

In comparing U.S. food expenditures to those of other nations, a slightly different number is used – “Food Share of all Expenditures.” These numbers are derived from World Bank data and describe the total percentage of per capita gross national income spent on food rather than percentage of per capita disposable income. The latest published figures are for 2008.

U.S. consumers spent by far the lowest percentage of gross income on food at 5.9 percent. Consumers in other “high income” countries spent as follows: 7.7 percent in Singapore, 8.5 percent in the U.K., 9.9 percent in Germany, 12.5 percent in France, 13.6 percent in Japan, 14.3 percent in the Czech Republic, and 14.5 percent in South Korea.

Percentages in “upper middle income” countries ranged from 14.1 percent in Hungary to 31.8 percent in Romania. For consumers in “lower middle” and “low” income countries, food expenditures ranged from 24.1 percent in Brazil to 41.9 percent in Indonesia.

Though consumers in other countries around the globe continue to pay higher food prices and spend a larger proportion of their gross income on food than U.S. consumers, the overall global food bill has been trending down. In 2002, the percentage of gross income spent on food averaged 12 percent in high income countries, 26.1 percent in upper middle income countries, and 36.6 percent in lower middle and low income countries. In 2008 those percentages had fallen to 11.5 percent in upper income countries (down 0.5 percent), 21.5 percent in upper middle income countries (down 4.6 percent), and 33.9 percent in lower middle to low income countries (down 2.7 percent).

A table of worldwide food expenditure patterns is available online at http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/GlobalFoodMarkets/Data/FoodExpPatterns.xls

These numbers are remarkable but don’t, of course, tell the entire story. Global food cost data from 2008 to the present day is sketchy at best. Solid data analyses generally take 1-3 years to complete, so today’s real numbers are in some sense impossible to know. We can guess that the global economic downturn since 2008 has most likely increased food costs around the globe, though to precisely what extent it’s impossible to say just now. We also know that global food production numbers have been trending up in recent years as modern agricultural production techniques continue to trickle down into less industrialized, more agrarian societies.

The joker in the global food cost deck may well prove to be the health of the U.S. economy. If congress can find a way to get runaway spending under control, America’s economy will continue to drive the world economy. A healthy U.S. economy will ensure continued advances in agricultural production as ag sector profits in this country allow continued research, development and implementation of techniques and technologies to boost food production. Increased production will continue to trickle down to the poorest countries, easing hunger and raising the overall lot of humanity to unprecedented levels.

Failure of the U.S. economy may spell more than tough times for Americans. Without the driving force of a healthy U.S. economy, food production may begin to trend down both here and around the globe, perhaps raising the curtain on an unprecedented age of darkness.

Ag spending and the federal debt

2011-08-04T10:35:00.000-07:00

With Congressional Republicans and Democrats locked in partisan battle over raising the country’s $14 Trillion debt ceiling, it’s worth taking a few moments to look at federal ag spending. Is USDA part of the problem? Can ag spending be trimmed? Or are the USDA and ag programs in general so vital to the national interest that they should be inviolable?
The debt ceiling isn’t causing the present economic crisis, it’s merely a symptom. The cause is Federal spending, which far exceeds Federal income, or revenue. Federal spending for 2011 will exceed $6 trillion. Federal revenue for 2011 will be $4.5 trillion. This leaves a $1.5 trillion deficit to be made good.

There are only two ways to make the deficit good – by cutting spending or by borrowing the money. In the past, Congress has almost always chosen to borrow. Though China and a few other countries have previously bought U.S. debt, there are few overseas takers these days for U.S. bonds. Today, in a complicated accounting scheme which would be unlawful for any but the Federal Government, the U.S. is borrowing from – itself.

The argument over raising the debt ceiling is actually an argument whether the government can write more I.O.U.’s to itself. This scheme is hardly sustainable, though most Republicans and Democrats favor it. At the bottom line, the only difference between the “plans” of each side is whether to make entirely cosmetic and temporary spending cuts.

Regardless of the outcome of this round of “crisis negotiations,” at some point the U.S. is going to have to quit spending more than it takes in in revenue. At that point, spending cuts will have to be made. Where the cuts will come from and the details of how the cuts will be managed are impossible to know at this time, however, the deeper the crisis is allowed to go before spending corrections are made, the more likely it becomes that the cuts will be imposed with little real planning. In such a situation, those affected by the cuts will be in for a rough ride.

In thinking about the best way to make spending cuts, let’s look at how the 2011 budget is being spent. These numbers aren’t precise, because no formal budget has been passed or implemented in two-and-a-half years. However, they are the best numbers available and are probably very close.

Of the $6 trillion spent in 2011, 16 percent went to defense, 14 percent to education, 18 percent to health care (primarily Medicare), 16 percent to pensions (primarily Social Security retirement), 11 percent to welfare, 5 percent to protection (Homeland Security, TSA, etc.), 5 percent to interest on the debt, 4 percent to transportation, and 2 percent to general government (which includes USDA).

The obvious question is where to do the cutting. I have my own ideas, but it might be better to begin with general ideas rather than specific examples.

When we look at any part of the budget, we need to keep in mind that it took time to get to the numbers we see today, and ideally, it should take time to roll the spending numbers back. The idea of “slashing” spending is attractive – massive across-the-board cuts would quickly solve the problem on the balance sheet. Immediate and drastic cuts would be hard on the people who have come to depend on government spending, though. And the list of those who would be adversely affected includes most Americans. Though not everyone receives welfare, nearly everyone depends on the government for things like defense, transportation infrastructure, police services, etc. Over the years we’ve all increasingly come to rely on government spending for the local education of our children and for supplemental retirement income and health care.

A good example of the complexity of cutting spending can be found in Federal agriculture spending, a topic of great interest to most who read The Business Farmer, but of little interest to the 99 percent of Americans who aren’t involved in agriculture.

The USDA budget is far less than one percent of the entire federal budget, at about $32.8 billion. Of this, only about 22 percent goes to farmers and ranchers as direct payments or crop insurance payments. A further 9 percent goes to conservation, with direct payments to many farmers and ranchers through various conservation programs. Yet 68 percent of the USDA budget goes to food welfare programs. So farmers and ranchers receive at most 31 cents of every Federal ag dollar, while “poor” people receive 68 cents of that dollar, which is less than 1 percent of Federal spending.

Unfortunately, a great many farmers and ranchers have come to depend on the USDA for survival. Without crop subsidies, insurance, and other Federal income, many farmers and ranchers would be unable to survive. If Federal ag spending were “slashed,” many farmers and ranchers would be out of business in short order. However, almost all farmers and ranchers would be able to adapt to cuts phased in over a number of years.

Farmers and ranchers make up about 1 percent of the U.S. population, yet they essentially provide all of the food consumed by the entire population. Therefore, an unintended consequence of precipitous cuts in Federal ag spending would very likely be food shortages – a crisis for which no one is prepared and which would probably be the biggest crisis ever faced by America.

The problem of reigning in Federal spending is complex, but the stakes are very high.

Perspective

2011-07-19T11:01:00.000-07:00

As the sky lightens in the east, I’m sitting on soft, green buffalograss, leaning in comfort against a timeworn hump of siltstone. I’m nearly in the center of pasture we call the North Googie. The air is cool still and fragrant with the smell of prairie-July and cattle.

Around me I hear the quiet sound of heifer footfalls, the soft grinding of heifer chewing, the dim rumble of heifer rumination. The waning gibbous moon hangs fat and bright over my right shoulder, providing plenty of light to take in the scene. The heifers are grazing north-to-south, moving along the low ground at a steady pace, selectively grazing on tender new warm-season grasses like blue grama and buffalograss. As sunrise nears, morning twilight fills the air and the still somewhat shadowy animals gain substance, dim shapes becoming distinct and shaped like what they are – young cattle.

I’ve come to check cattle, but I’ve come early enough to enjoy the last cool of the night and to soak up the beauty of a summer sunrise. Wrapped in cool beauty and surrounded by natural wonder, my mind dashes down thought-filled brain corridors as each sensation prompts staccato flood of thoughts. The curse, perhaps, of the fifty year-old mind.

The young cattle grazing around me are in the midst of a remarkable transformation. They are nominally under the control and authority of the pair of Lowline Angus bulls grazing alongside. The bulls are doing their job – have done so in most cases – of providing genetic material to quicken heifer ova into fetal calves. At the same time, the heifers are growing wildly, turning sun- and water-fed grass into flesh and bone and sinew.

This mid-summer slice of the cycle of life is remarkable to me, but only because I pause to give it thought. Otherwise it is simply nature at work, and nature does her work whether I think about it or not. Although we spend lots of time and more than a little effort managing our ranching operation, nature is really in charge here, at least in charge of the important stuff.

The management stuff is vitally important to the continuation of our ranch and of our lifestyle. Without proper management, bills go unpaid, and the land title passes to someone else. In many ways, however, land ownership and ranch management are simply ideas, a set of artificial rules to guide us as we navigate civilization – an artificial civilization which exists, perhaps only ephemerally, alongside the real world.

I smile as the young cattle graze on by. Just as it’s important to manage the ranch to the best of our abilities, so also is it important to understand the reality of one’s place in nature.

My thoughts shoot down another passageway, one echoing with voices from the past. How many times, I wonder, have people paused here to enjoy midsummer coolness and the impending beauty of sunrise?

I have no way to know, of course. It seems a perfect pausing place, and I’d be unsurprised to find evidence of previous use. Yet the land is wide, with many possible paths, and people – compared to the vastness of the land – are few, even at their present six-billion-plus number.

I think about a letter I’ve recently discovered, penned by my great-grandmother Oda and addressed in 1970 to my grandparents. The letter describes, in two pages of sparse but detail-packed paragraphs, Oda’s marriage to Sam in Kentucky, their subsequent migration to a homestead in New Mexico, and ultimately, back to a farm in Adams County, Neb.

“(We) were married Apr. 20, 1904 at a lumber camp in Lee Co., Ky. Pastor was an old man who came on a mule across the Mts. from Owsley Co., Ky. Mamma had dinner soon as the ceremony was over. They had a square dance at he house that night. There was no work at the mill that day…

“In summer of 1909, Sam went to New Mexico & took up a homestead. He paid $550…we picked up bag & baggage & got to Estancia, New Mexico. The shack was very small, 10 x 16 ft. It was fun at first, but money ran out & first crop burned up – so dry. Sam went to Albuquerque to look for work. The children & I stayed on the claim, as the family had to stay 7 months of the year. We had 2 horses & a neighbor worked them while Sam was gone. Every week the children and I went 11 miles to Estancia to get groceries and mail. Sam would send me a little money. We proved the claim in Dec. 1909. Sam came back to prove up & we went back to Belen with him. Dale was born 5 days after we got back…

“Dale left us 28 Sept. 1915, and it was a sad time. He was at a cute age, 2 years, 9 months. In August 1917, Sam decided he wanted to visit his brother in Nebraska so he got a pass on the railroad. He rented a farm and went back to New Mexico and disposed of the household goods. We got to Nebraska 2 August 1917…

“The first year, we got hailed out, but Sam had good luck with hogs and with chickens. By this time, both girls had to go to high school. Mae worked for her board and came home on week ends. She taught school at 17, Wilma at 16. They took Normal training at Kennesaw, Neb.”

Oda lived to be 99 years old. Sam died in 1973 at 94. They were never very successful at farming, but farming isn’t the yardstick to gauge a successful life. How many Americans could do today what Sam and Oda did a century ago?

Yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery, live in today. As the sun finally breaks over the southeastern horizon, the day comes alive and the temperature begins to rise, quickly chasing the coolness from the air. I have more cattle to check, not to mention windmills, water and mineral supplies, and fence integrity. I stand up and stretch, then walk back to my pickup to begin managing.

The smile on my face lingers, though. If the words of my forbears and my own experience have taught me anything, it’s to enjoy the good years and endure the hard years. So far, this has been a year to enjoy.

Love and the butterfly-to-be

2011-07-12T16:04:00.000-07:00

As I trudged across the shortgrass prairie Tuesday morning, my heart was doing emotional flippity-flops, and I wondered why. Why was my throat tight? Why were unbidden tears stinging at the corners of my eyes? Why was I on the verge of blubbering like a girl?

The emotion wasn’t sadness, it was joy. I’d just had a remarkable hour of photography, taking pictures of a Monarch butterfly caterpillar feeding on common milkweed and of some of my young cattle grazing on rich native grass.

The caterpillar was beautiful, both in its present intricate and colorfully banded form and in its gorgeous potential adult form. The cattle were beautiful too, but probably only to a stockman. Strong and healthy, with rapidly growing calves at their sides, they were busy turning the prairie’s grassy bounty into milk for this year’s calves and into energy reserves for next year’s calves, even now present as fetal calves in nearly every recently-bred cow.

Still, I wondered, why this upwelling of emotion? The prairie ecosystem, the cattle – these are daily bread to me. I deeply appreciate them. I revel in their paradoxical simple complexity. I am never more at peace with the world than when I’m amongst my cattle out on the native prairie. But I’m seldom near tears at those times.

As I hiked along my mind kept turning back to two things; the beauty of the caterpillar and the rough licking one of my young cows gave the bottom of my hiking boot as I lay in the grass snapping pictures. Those two disparate experiences seemed to be at the heart of the emotion I was feeling.

On the one hand, I’m pleased that my cows are quiet animals, accustomed to low-stress handling and to seeing me afoot on the prairie. As herding prey animals, their instinct is to flee any possible threat. The fact that they don’t dash away in panic when I approach seems to validate my efforts at low-stress handling and of the husbandry I provide them. You can click on the images for a larger view.

Cattle graze within a few feet of the photographer Tuesday morning on a ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

An inquisitive calf approaches the photographer Tuesday morning on a ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

But it was more than that on Tuesday. The cow that licked the sole of my hiking boot, for instance, is a first-calf heifer. Last summer I spent a lot of time afoot amongst her and her heifer group. As curious young cattle, they would always eventually approach and crowd around me, particularly if I stayed very still. One heifer, braver (or perhaps stupider) than the rest, would nearly always sniff at me and then lick me with her rough tongue. On Tuesday, she exhibited the same behavior, despite the passage of a year’s time and despite having a calf to care for and protect.

There’s behavioral continuity there, and that feels good to me. Does the cow “remember” me? Well, perhaps at some level. But she’s still only a cow, and so far as we know, the bovine brain operates very differently than the human model. The emotion I feel is almost certainly not reciprocated by the cow. This I know, yet that knowledge does nothing to dampen my emotional response. It might, in fact, enhance that response.

At this point, you may be wondering if I’m certifiably nuts. If so, you may be right.

Half an hour earlier I’d clambered through a four-wire fence to snap some pictures of common milkweed, a plant that had come up as a topic in, of all places, a facebook conversation last week.

Common milkweed is common in the ditches and in recently reclaimed grasslands, but not in native prairie. I spied this milkweed in a ditch alongside a county road that cuts through the prairie I was hiking, and facebook conversation in mind, decided I’d better grab some images while I had the opportunity.

Considered by many to be a weed, common milkweed is nonetheless showy and attractive. The plants I was photographing were partially obscured by tall, headed, western wheatgrass, so I moved along the ditch to where a single plant was growing right at the edge of the road grader cut. As I sat down on the sun-warmed, gravely incline of the ditch to steady the camera, I saw a flash of color adorning one of the pinkish flower petals. “Monarch caterpillar,” I thought immediately. Not exactly rocket science, of course, as Monarchs are known to feed only on milkweed and the caterpillars are prettily and distinctively marked.

A Monarch caterpillar feeds on common milkweed Tuesday morning along a county road south of Kimball, Neb.

I moved closer, set my camera to the “super-macro” setting, and began to take pictures. The caterpillar, intent on feeding, seemed not to care about my proximity or the intrusion of a giant, shiny camera lens.

Colorful? Breathtaking?

At one point I paused to peer closely at the inch-and-a-half bug, and was immediately captivated by its beauty. The bright yellow stripes, I knew, were a warning sign to potential predators. “I taste terrible!” Still, the brightly striped insect, perched on a pinkish, star-shaped flower and seen against the vibrant green of the plant’s foliage was breathtaking.

That’s when the flipity-flopping started.

Is it possible to love a butterfly-to-be? I think it must be.

How fortunate I am, I thought, to not only be able to see and experience nature’s beauty on a daily basis, but to be able to take the time to enjoy it, think about it, and in some small way, share it.

My thoughts turned to my great-grandmother, Maude Evertson, who so often told me of her love for the prairie, and her contention that most of it should never have been plowed and farmed. I couldn’t help but wonder whether she’d ever beheld the beauty of a Monarch caterpillar. Perhaps yes, perhaps no. I thought about the wonders she must have beheld back when the prairie was essentially undisturbed, when there were no county roads nor REA lines and fences were few and far between. When Indians still occasionally trotted across the landscape on short, colorful horses.

Maude Holloway and her mother, Louisa Quick Holloway, beside their "soddy" in Frontier County, Neb., about 1895.

I thought about other people across the length and breadth of our nation, the 99 percent who have never set foot on a farm or ranch. Do they find beauty in their daily lives? Do their hearts occasionally lurch from the sheer joy of experience? I hope so. Oh, I hope so.

Johnny went to war

2011-07-05T13:20:00.000-07:00

This July 4 a local Kimball organization honored, as they do annually, one of Kimball’s war dead by raising, flying, and dedicating an American flag to the memory of that fallen service member. This year the honor went to John Burback.

An American Flag is raised Monday morning in Kimball, Neb., honoring the sacrifice of PFC. John Burback during WWII.

I never met my Great Uncle John Burback.

“Johnny died in the war,” was the most I could ever get out of his sister, my Grandmother Helen.

World War II Honor Roll plaque on display at the Kimball County, Neb. Courthouse.

So there was that. They called him Johnny, rather than John. The barest touch of personality added to what was otherwise just a name.

Uncle Johnny was born in Sugar City, Colorado in 1909, the second son of Henry and Anna (Hohnstein) Burback, German-Russian farm laborers who had emigrated from Catherine the Great’s German Agricultural enclave in the land of the Tsars. They came to America in 1905, looking for, as most immigrants did at that time, liberty and opportunity. When they arrived at Ellis Island, their name was Burbach. When they left, their name was Burback.

Of liberty and opportunity, they found it. They were very poor and worked very hard, taking agricultural jobs that no one else would take, sometimes as day-labor in the sugarbeet fields, sometimes as tenet farmers. But they were free, no longer the property of the State or of the Autocracy. They persevered. In 1907 they had a son, Henry Jr. In 1908, a daughter, Anna. Then another son, John, in 1909. Ultimately Henry and Anna raised 12 children, each of whom went to school and mastered English, a language in which their parents never quite became fluent.

After leaving Sugar City, the Burbacks farmed and worked in Morrill and Scotts Bluff Counties, as well as near Broadwater, Neb. In 1927 they moved to Kimball County (which was at the time Antelope County), and began tenet farming north of town.

The 1930’s were, poor, hard-working times for the family. The children did chores before and after school and on the weekends, and spent seemingly endless days in the beet fields during summer “vacation.” Toward the end of the depression, and as the children grew older, life became a little less desperate and a little more comfortable. As the decade came to a close, war, which had been brewing for some time, was declared in Europe. Pitting the Allied versus the Axis Powers, the far-away conflict threatened to draw America into a full-scale World War.

Many Americans were isolationist and wanted to stay out of the war. Some were firebrands who wanted to jump into the conflict at once, to save the world from the Nazis and the Communists. A small but significant minority wanted America to fight on the side of the Nazis and Communists, and against the Allied Powers. President Roosevelt and Congress began offering “lend-lease” and other aid to England, and the Selective Service began calling up draftees to fill an expanding military force. U.S. industries were ordered to war footing, and began turning out guns, ammunition, tanks, planes and other war materials in place of their usual product line of cars, refrigerators and stoves, hardware, clothing, etc.

On Dec. 7, 1941, The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Congress declared war on the Japanese the next day. Germany and Italy, allied with Japan as the Axis Powers, declared war on the U.S. On Dec. 11. Congress immediately responded with a declaration of war against Germany and Italy on the same day. Like it or not, America was now at war.

Though the U.S. began drafting men into the service before the country actually declared war, no one from Nebraska, and in particular, Kimball County, had been called up before Pearl Harbor. This quickly changed, however, as draft boards sprang up seemingly overnight in small towns and villages across the nation. On January 1, 1942, Kimball County’s draft board was organized.

On January 29, 1942, the Kimball County draft board called up the first 10 draftees. The second name on that list was John Burback. He and the other nine men went by bus on Feb. 5 to Ft. Warren, in Cheyenne, for induction physicals. All passed muster, all returned home that night, and all left for basic training within a few weeks.

Here is where Uncle Johnny’s story gets murky. I’ve been unable to turn up any evidence of his service between his call-up and death. Both family lore and contemporary newspaper accounts place his term of service with the Army Air Corps (later Army Air Forces) in the China-Burma-India (CBI) Theater of operations. He allegedly served in India, most likely as part of the effort to air-lift supplies over the “hump” of the eastern Himalayas to Burma and China.

PFC John Burback, 1909-1944.

In late July, 1944, Johnny was air-evacuated to the U.S., suffering from “splenic anemia and complications from tropical disease.” He arrived at Coral Gables Army Hospital in Florida on Saturday, July 29, 1944. He died during the evening on Tuesday, Aug. 2, 1944. His remains were transported to Kimball and Johnny was buried in the Kimball Cemetery on Wednesday, Aug. 9, 1944.

The questions are obvious. Who was this 32 year-old man who went off to war for his country? What were his dreams and plans for after the war? What might have been?

Some 67 years after Johnny’s death, and more than a century after his birth, the questions are largely unanswerable. There is more information out there, and I’ll find at least some of it, but it’ll never really tell me who my Great Uncle was, or what he might have been.

More than 400,000 American men and women died in service during WWII. Each was denied an entire future. Each contributed every single thing they had to the continued existence of our nation.

Thanks, Uncle Johnny. I wish I’d known ya.

The bureaucrats who cried wolf

2011-06-28T16:20:00.000-07:00

When I was a youngster…

(Oh, rats! I remember promising myself that when I got old, I would never, never utter that phrase. Sigh.)

Nevertheless, when I was a youngster way back in the 1960’s, I was fascinated by tornadoes. And quite concerned about them as well.

I think I was concerned because every thunderstorm seemed to bring on adult speculation about whether a tornado was be in the offing. The stronger the storm, it seemed, the closer many adults edged toward tornado panic. They usually tried to hide their fear and worry, but it was there for all the world – including the “younguns” – to see.

Fortunately, there was a severe weather alerting system in place. I didn’t know it at the time, but the system was fairly new. Weather alerts were issued for specific areas and localities. They were issued by regional National Weather Service meteorologists, via teletype, to local law enforcement agencies and the media. Upon receipt of an alert, law enforcement and other emergency service providers would put their response plan into action, and the media – radio and television of course – would broadcast the alert.

There were basically four alert levels. A Thunderstorm Watch meant that conditions were right for the formation of thunderstorms. A Thunderstorm Warning meant that a thunderstorm was present in the area. A Tornado Watch meant that conditions were right for a tornado to form. A Tornado Warning meant that a tornado had actually formed and was near by.

When a Thunderstorm Watch was issued, it was basically a reminder that a thunderstorm might pop up at some point, so you should keep an eye on the sky while you went about your daily business.

A Thunderstorm Warning reminded you that there was a thunderstorm present or nearby. Thunderstorms, as the language of the warning stated, can produce high winds, hail, and lightning. Though never explicitly spelled out, the message was clear. Take a close look at what the storm is doing and act accordingly. Maybe you should get yourself and your tractor out of the field. Maybe you should head your horse for the barn. Or get off the lake or the golf course or get your kids out of the swimming pool. On the other hand, perhaps the storm was passing safely clear and you could continue with whatever activity you were engaged in, keeping a close eye on the weather just in case.

A Tornado Watch meant that the weather in the area – usually including energetic thunderstorms – was conducive to tornado formation. In general, you were supposed to pay a little closer attention to the weather during a tornado watch, and be aware of the increased chance of a tornado forming.

The Tornado Warning, however, was a different kettle of fish. A Tornado Warning meant that a tornado had actually formed and been verified by a reliable observer. It was considered to be a real emergency, and with tornadoes being both unpredictable and destructive, it meant that you should take shelter immediately. In the basement. Or lacking a basement, in the strongest interior room of your house, preferably one without windows. If you lived in a mobile home, you could climb in the bathtub (which were all made of cast iron back in the day) and drag a mattress over the top of the tub. Or you could find a ditch to hunker down in.

I remember spending long, frightened minutes in dank, musty basements while tornadoes flailed about “somewhere nearby.” The experience was always too frightening to be an adventure.

But that was then.

Beginning several years ago, the rules changed. Now the National Weather Service only issues Tornado Warnings. At least in my neck of the woods. Every time there’s a thunderstorm, I get a television announcement and a reverse-911 call, saying, “The National Weather Service has issued a tornado warning for Kimball County. At (time, say 6:15), National Weather Service Doppler Radar identified a thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado at (location) moving (direction and speed).” There’s always a long spiel about taking precautions and an expiration time for the warning. The alerts are usually repeated every 10-15 minutes.

In my opinion, this is pretty much useless information. Worse, it’s taken all the power from the phrase Tornado Warning. People hear the phrase all the time now, pretty much whenever there are dark clouds in the sky. Human nature being what it is, tornado warning now means “dark clouds.”

Perhaps the bureaucrats who designed the “new” alert system never heard the fable of the boy who cried wolf. More likely, they are pre-defending themselves against criticism should there ever actually be a tornado.

In some sense, we’re fortunate that tornadoes developing here in the tri-state region rarely exceed F-0 or F-1 power, producing winds from about 70-112 mph. Though still quite dangerous, they generally lack the destructive force of tornadoes formed at lower elevations.

At any rate, and again, in my opinion, Big Brother has failed in his self-appointed task to protect us (first himself, then us) from everything.

So we’re on our own. Which isn’t an entirely bad thing. We still have powerful minds and good analytical skills at our disposal, and we can all do our own tornado-potential analysis with each and every storm. There’s some very good information on tornadoes available on the internet (a lot of garbage, too, so read carefully). We can all prepare ourselves and use our own initiative to protect ourselves. Just like everyone did back in the old days.

Joplin

2011-06-13T19:38:00.000-07:00

My brother Andy Evertson has been an Omaha Firefighter since the early 1990’s. In addition to fighting fires, he is a paramedic. As a highly skilled emergency responder, he is on the roster of Omaha Rapid Response, an organization which sends volunteer emergency workers to disaster areas.
Andy just returned home from Joplin, Mo., where Omaha Rapid Response spent three days assisting victims of the May 23 tornado. The following is his e-mail report to friends and family, edited only for print style.

Near St. John’s Mercy Hospital in Joplin, Mo., an American flag hangs where the May 23 tornado left it, in the shattered limbs of a tree, surrounded by destruction. Surrounded also by incredible human spirit. Click on the picture for a larger image.

I went to Joplin, Mo. this weekend with a local volunteer group, Omaha Rapid Response. I'm at a loss for words as to what to say about it. We stayed at a local church and were given names and addresses of people that needed help going through their houses for personal belongings before the bulldozers plowed everything under. Mere words cannot describe what we saw. This was 3 weeks after the actual tornado and there had been considerable cleanup. It was still almost incomprehensible to the human eye. I'm still having trouble trying to reconcile the damage. It is as troubling as anything I have ever seen.

Most people had been through their houses several times already and I got the sense most were ready to move on. The ones I spoke with were mostly upbeat and incredibly stoic. I did not detect a sense of resignation, but rather a feeling that they would not be defined by this single event. Many just wanted to talk, and to a person they were grateful to be alive and acknowledged the role that God must have played in their survival.

Very few of these houses have basements due to the high water table. Most of these folks were at home when it hit. I asked over and over where they went (for shelter). They went into hallways, small closets, bathrooms, and in some cases just clung to the ground. Their houses were removed from around them save the spaces where most of them hid. We ate at a diner where the waitress said she and her husband were sleeping in their second-floor apartment and did not realize what was happening until it was upon on them. She said they laid on the floor while everything around them disappeared and they watched their car fly by. She was from Bosnia and had lived in Joplin just over a year. She said she grew up in war and had never seen anything like this. Still, she said she loved Joplin, except for the weather.

St. John’s Mercy Hospital, Joplin, Mo. The large structure on the left is the now-condemned hospital building, which was actually twisted on it’s foundation. On the right, in the parking lot, is the functioning MASH-type tent hospital which is presently being used. Click on the picture for a larger image.

The infamous hospital shown so prominently on the news was apparently rotated several inches on its foundation. It has since been fenced off; pending demolition I suppose. In a parking lot across the street they have established a new "tent" hospital with surgical suites, a functioning emergency room, and 60-plus inpatient beds. Ironically, there is another hospital only blocks away which was unscathed by the storm.

Almost as remarkable are the parts of Joplin not hit that seem oblivious to what has happened. We arrived in town around 1 a.m. and I breathed a sigh of relief because the damage did not seem to be near as bad as I thought it would be. I figured the news reports had been greatly exaggerated. Then we came across the path of destruction and passed into a world of disbelief. The maddening randomness is as hard to comprehend as the damage itself.

To be sure, it destroyed everything in its path. It is a clichéd saying after any disaster, but the mind cannot comprehend how more – many more – people were not killed. I have spent a good portion of this morning looking at aerial photos of Joplin before the tornado to try and decipher what I actually saw there. My response to this point is a very strong desire to vomit.

At this point, I frankly don't know what to say, but feel I should say something. If there is something to take away I suppose it is the resiliency of the human spirit. Like the ant pile that has been kicked in, the people go about the business of reconstructing their lives, most of them grateful that things weren't worse. I went there to help and was afraid at times that they were going to have to take time out their efforts to comfort me. The response appears to have been overwhelming. We were going to go down much sooner but they were so inundated with volunteers that it was becoming problematic.

The relief efforts we dealt with were mostly church based and were run very very well. Apparently in the south, the disaster response of churches has become a cottage industry, particularly with the Baptists. The church we stayed in had 100 beds set up and had a constant stream of volunteers filing through. They fed everybody 3 times a day through donations and still managed to have a church service on Sunday. They carried a full inventory of donated supplies and had them stacked from floor to ceiling yet were organized enough to get the right stuff to the right folks. They had truckloads of bottled water and Gatorade. They had feeding stations throughout the area, many in structures damaged by the tornado. They had health clinics where volunteers could get tetanus shots due to all the nails and other hazards. Four-wheelers regularly came down every street with water, Gatorade, and even ice cream. This was a very impressive logistical endeavor.

The federal government would do well to take some lessons. I will say local first responders did an incredible job and the first FEMA folks also did a good job not only of searching for bodies but of marking the streets and addresses. All street signs were gone after the storm and neighborhoods were virtually unrecognizable. The MASH-type hospital set up in the parking lot was up and running within 24 hours.

I heard about the Joplin tornado on the radio. I didn’t give it a lot of thought, other than to think that, thankfully, loss of life was comparatively small, given the reported destructiveness of the storm. That was about it. I’m a busy fellow, and spend most of my waking hours concerned with and working on my own projects. I’m quite egocentric, to say the least. Which is why I’m thankful to people like my brother, who not only selflessly serve others, but who have the skill to share their keen observations and insight in verbal and written form. Thanks, Brother, for snapping me out of self for a few moments.

More than wildflowers

2011-06-13T19:24:00.000-07:00

“I like it,” said Omaha middle schooler Makayla Lieb when asked what she thought about the native shortgrass prairie and wide-open spaces of the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

Makayla had made the long trek out from the big city with friends Faith and grace Evertson, who also live in Omaha. Grace and Faith’s Dad Andy, an Omaha Firefighter, grew up on the EJE. He brought his kids and their friend out to experience the beauty of the shortgrass prairie in spring.

City girls cool off in a stock tank June 4 during the fourth annual Wildflower Week celebration on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb. From left: Faith Evertson, Makayla Lieb, Grace Evertson, Andy Evertson, all of Omaha. Click on the picture for a larger image.

In addition to participating in the wildflower event, Andy gave the girls a comprehensive tour of the ranch and of Kimball -- including the swimming pool and Dairy Queen. Old hat for his kids, but I believe Makayla was enchanted.

Three friends from Omaha pause along a canyon wall June 4 during The fourth annual Wildflower Week celebration on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb. From left: Makayla Lieb, Faith Evertson, Grace Evertson. Click on the picture for a larger image.

The Omahan’s trip coincided with the fourth annual Kimball Wildflower Week celebration, hosted by the ranch as part of Nebraska’s state-wide Wildflower Week Celebration.

Saturday was actually a make-up event, following the rain-out on the event’s previously scheduled day, May 28.

While May 28 was cold and soggy, June 4 was just about perfect. The sky was deep and blue and clear, with hardly a cloud to be seen. A south breeze was just enough to be cooling without being bothersome. The temperature topped out in the mid-70’s.

And following a couple weeks of much needed spring rainfall, the prairie was vibrantly green and flush with colorful wildflowers.

A group of wildflower enthusiasts move along a canyon trail June 4 during the fourth annual Wildflower Week celebration on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb. Toward the back of the group is an avid reptile hunter and his trusty assistant. Click on the picture for a larger image.

Turnout for the event was a bit smaller than in recent years, due mainly to the last-minute postponement of last week’s event. From my perspective, however, the number of participants is far less important than the fact that I can share the beauty with those who don’t get to see it every day.

One participant, five year-old Aaron Gilming of rural Bushnell, Neb., came prepared to “catch a lizard.” Arriving at the ranch, he climbed down from his father’s pickup with a clear plastic reptile case. Though he didn’t manage to find a lizard, he did capture a great plains toad, which clearly pushed his day onto the success side of the ledger.

In addition to sharing the natural beauty of the ranch with everyone who attended, I was also able to talk a bit about what we do on the ranch. Though by no means comprehensive, my talk was aimed at pointing out the differences between the reality of ranching and the more commonly held ideas most people have about where their hamburger comes from.

I kept my remarks brief and too the point, though, and let the prairie and the peacefully grazing cattle tell their own story.

The smiles I saw, the joy of discovery and delight in the beauty all around – these things pushed the day on the success side of my ledger. I can’t wait to do it again next year. Stay tuned to this space for details of the 2012 – and FIFTH annual – edition of Wildflower Week on the EJE Ranch.

Wet Wildflowers

2011-05-30T13:17:00.000-07:00

The rain started to fall about 9:30 p.m. last Friday, and I wondered whether our annual Wildflower Week event would be affected. Probably not, I decided. The forecast was for clearing skies overnight and partly cloudy skies in the morn, with highs expected in the 60’s and only a slight chance of thunderstorms.

The forecast was a bit off. In fact it rained most of the night and when I rolled out of the sheets at 5 a.m. it was raining hard.

I wasn’t bothered by the rain. In fact, I was happy about it. South of Kimball, where our ranch is located, is the driest part of the Panhandle. We rely on spring rains to make the grass grow so that our cattle can harvest the green bounty and turn it into a valuable commodity. Let it rain!

But the Wildflower event had been planned and publicized for months, and there was a long list of attendees who would have to be notified of the rainout and reschedule. Fortunately, I’d planned for this. I sent out texts and e-mails, posted a rescheduled event (for Saturday, June 4) on Facebook, and made a few phone calls.

I wasn’t sure whether everyone would get the word in time, though, so I headed out to the site at 7 a.m. to catch those who might show up despite the weather. None did.

While I was there, I decided to scout the area and get in a bit of exercise. Hiking in the rain doesn’t bother me at all; I learned a long time ago that I won’t melt.

I set off down a grassy swale covered in rank cool season grasses. Within a few feet my feet and legs were soaked to the knees from walking through the tall, wet green stuff. The rain kept pelting down, bringing the horizon close and adding a vibrancy to the colors of bountiful grasses and forbs. As I moved along, I began to pick out brilliant wildflowers. Yellows, reds, blues, purples, whites. Indian paintbrush. Hoary puccoon. Star Lily. Hood’s phlox. Western wallflower. Penstemon. Prairie buckbean. Nuttall’s violet. Milk vetch. Wild parsley.

As I hiked I pushed along hard to drive up my heart rate. Soon the ol’ ticker was thumping along at about 160 and I was breathing good and hard. Sweat began to run, adding a water and salt burden to my drizzle-soaked clothing, and nicely balancing the heat of exercise with damp coolness. Though I was breathing hard, the great draughts of humid air went in and out of my lungs with ease. A few of my previously injured joints and tendons complained as I strode along, but those are aches and pains I’m accustomed to dealing with.

I scrambled down a familiar canyon path and picked my way along the rocky, sandy bottom. Here the walls of the canyon are forested with chokecherry, wild rose and skunkbush sumac. The chokecherry was beginning to bloom, with great white clouds of perfumed flowers floating among deep green leaves. Rose buds were swelling, as were the sumac buds, ready to burst open and join in spring’s wild dance of prolifity. As I brushed against the sumac it’s pungent aroma filled the air and followed me along, an invisible but welcome companion. Only weeks ago this canyon was drab, brown and sere. Today it had completely changed it’s appearance to vibrant, dripping color. A chameleon landscape.

A colorful horned lizard, washed free of dust by the rain, gleams brightly under overcast and raining skies last Saturday on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

On a grassy tuft of soil near the bottom I spied a surprisingly colorful horned lizard. Washed free of dust by the rain, it’s brightly colored, pebbly skin gleamed brightly in the muted light. Cold and sluggish, it let me take a few pictures. I kicked up a cottontail, then another. They dashed madly from rock to rock, thicket to thicket. I rounded a corner and beheld a mule deer doe and two tiny fawns, perched halfway up the eastern wall of the canyon. The trio looked at me for long moments, then turned and picked their way daintily up and out of the canyon. I turned another corner and a pair of Swainson’s hawks leapt into flight from a high nesting ledge.

Out of the side branch and into the main branch of the canyon, the walking was easier, with established grama and buffalograss to tread upon and less exposed rock and sand. On either side of me the canyon walls, wet from the rain, showed off unusually colorful sedimentary strata. Where erosion had undercut harder rock, mats of prickly pear flourished atop ledges, grasping roots hanging in the air underneath.

After several miles of a great looping route, up and down hills and past windmills and skirting good, tight fences, I returned to my truck. Standing there in cool-down mode, I drank in the beauty of the scene and felt once again the deep, abiding good fortune I’ve been blessed with.

As my heart slowed and breathing moderated, my phone rang. The caller, from Pinedale, Wyo., was checking to see if the wildflower event was still on. I told her about the rain, as well as the makeup day on June 4. She was glad she’d called, and happy about the makeup day. So was I.

In some sense I wished we could have held the event in the rain, to give folks the chance to experience a different, though slightly uncomfortable, view of nature’s beauty. A few, I was sure, would have come, but most wouldn’t have, and the idea is to share the spring shortgrass prairie ecosystem with as many as possible.

If you’re interested, come out and see for yourself on Saturday, June 4. It’s an all-day event, beginning at 7 a.m. and ending sometime after sunset. You needn’t stay all day; come anytime and stay as long as you like. For details go to ‘Kimball Wildflower Week Makeup’ on Facebook.

For the Fallen

2011-05-24T16:30:00.000-07:00

Last week I wrote about enjoying the “bonus years” I’ve had since surviving an aircraft crash more than a quarter century ago. This week I’ll write about, and hope you’ll think about, those who never got a second chance – never got to enjoy the gravy.

Though congress made it a three-day weekend in 1971, Memorial Day is nevertheless still formally a day to remember those who fell in the service of our country, and specifically those who fell during time of war.

Since the Vietnam War, service in the U.S. military has been a volunteer affair. For more than 35 years now, those who have served have had to make the decision on their own, and then have had to voluntarily jump through a bunch of tough hoops to even be allowed to wear the uniform. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. There are good and valid reasons to field either a conscript or a volunteer force. One thing the volunteer force seems to have done, however, is to distance most Americans from their military.

Perhaps this is why so many folks think of Memorial Day in terms of time off from work, rather than as an opportunity to honor and think about the sacrifice of the relatively few for the overwhelmingly many.

For those who served and survived, though, Memorial Day is much more than a holiday. For many of us, it is a time of reflection, a time to brush cobwebs away from painful memories and to think about and honor our fallen comrades.

As I write these words I think of two men in particular, the first and last men I served with who were killed in combat. The memories I have of their last hours and moments, of the nature of their deaths, are sharp and wrenching. I don’t like to think of those times, because they are shot through with a heavy dose of survivor’s guilt. Yet I must remember, I must think of those awful moments, for I must honor the lives and the sacrifice of those men. Neither was larger than life, neither a movie poster hero. Yet both fought to the very last breath, demonstrating a kind of courage which is remarkable and at the same time impossible to describe. To gain a visceral understanding of the ultimate sacrifice, unfortunately, you simply have to be there.

No one joins the U.S. Military with the intent to die in battle. In fact, the military go to great lengths to weed out the applicants who have a death wish. They are simply too selfish and too immature to be reliable, to be a team player, to guard the backs of their comrades.

No, those of us who make the rigorous cut expect and plan to survive. We know the risks, we can each of us calculate the odds. The odds, in the aggregate, are in our favor. But the risk is real, as each of us knows full well.

Regardless of the risk, each of us have determined that our country, the grand, wonderful idea of these United States of America, is worth the possibilities that the risk entails. We go into harms way as a service to our country and to our fellow citizens. Most of us survive. Some of us do not. The fallen are the real reason we celebrate Memorial Day. If you get the chance, perhaps you can take a few moments to reflect on the heroic nature of the sacrifices others have made so that you might enjoy the manifold blessings of life in America.

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) “For the Fallen”

Kimball Wildflower Week

2011-05-04T13:34:00.000-07:00

Nebraska Wildflower Week is May 27 through June 5. The Kimball Community Arboretum and EJE Ranch are hosting Kimball Wildflower Week on May 28 at the EJE south of Kimball, Neb. Everyone is invited and we'd love to see you there. Below is the text from a press release about the event.

May 28 Near Kimball. “Kimball Wildflower Week.” Visit us on Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=175460332498168 Morning yoga (followed by bird hike) at 7 a.m. Morning wildflower hike at 10 a.m. Bring a sack lunch and drink if you want to stay for lunch or visit one of Kimball's restaurants. Afternoon wildflower hike at 2 p.m. Campfire hot dogs and s'mores at 6 p.m. (bring a drink and something to share). Evening wildflower/sunset hike at 7:30 p.m. (sunset 8:18 p.m.). Come and enjoy the wonder of Nebraska's shortgrass prairie ecosystem. This event is free but there is a suggested donation of $5 per adult. Donations go to the Kimball Community Arboretum. Site use donated by EJE Ranch. Make-up day in case of inclement weather will be Saturday, June 4, with the same slate of events. Directions: From the Kimball stoplight (Hwy 71/30) drive 3 miles south, then 3 miles west on CR 28. Turn right on CR 35 and drive 1.2 miles north (crossing over I-80) and follow the signs. Or just follow the purple line on the google map (link below), which begins at the Kimball stoplight and ends at the site! GPS coordinates: N 41° 12.734’ W 103° 42.533’

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=212224935832059816278.00049b86cc1ca59509b58&z=13 Contact: Shaun Evertson, 308-241-0878/shaunevertson@charter.net

Calves at play

2011-05-04T09:43:00.000-07:00

As I’ve said before, spring is a nice time of the year. It can be harsh at times, but it is the season of renewal and the countryside abounds with new life of all kinds; grasses and forbs, buds and leaves on trees and shrubs, new baby livestock and new baby wildlife. And there’s baseball.

In 1990 the renowned columnist and commentator George F. Will published a book titled “Men at Work, the Craft of Baseball.” While you may or may not like Will and his conservative politics, he’s a fine writer and “Men at Work” is perhaps the best baseball book written in the last 50 years.

The thesis of Will’s book is that while it’s true that baseball at the professional level is a boy’s game played by men, the men who get paid for playing the game approach their craft as professional craftsmen. Will writes in great detail about the work ethic and professionalism of four people who were active in the game during the late 1980’s: Oakland Manager Tony La Russa, L.A. pitcher Orel Hersheiser, San Diego slugger Tony Gwynn, and Baltimore’s modern Iron Man Cal Ripkin, Jr. If you’re a fan of the game, you might give ‘Men at Work” a try. It’s a good read.

But this piece is more about calves than baseball. I only mention Will’s book because while we were fixing fence the other day, my hired man and I paused to watch a group of calves at play. As I watched the calves and thought about our fencing labor, I thought, “here we have men at work and calves at play.”

A first-calf heifer and her new baby soak up the warm morning sunshine last week on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb. Click on the image for a larger view.

It’s fun to watch calves go from nearly-helpless newborn to playful, nearly-independent creature in only a few days. When they’re first born, they’re not yet strong or coordinated enough to travel far so mama sticks pretty close. Over the next few days, as the calves fill up on rich milk, they get stronger and more coordinated. Mama needs plenty of food to keep her milk production up, so she parks her calf in a reasonably safe area and grazes ever farther from her baby. Often the calves are cleverly hidden in shallow depressions or in thick brush, where they seem to instinctively know to remain quiet and still until mama returns.

After a few days, cow and calf rejoin the herd. Then the magic happens. The calves check each other out, like school kids on the playground. They’re tentative at first, almost as if they’re shy. But before long they become pals and spend more time together than with their mamas.

Filled with energy, on fine days they begin exploring their surroundings and learning what their new body is capable of. They prance and hop and jump around, butt heads a bit and get into shoving matches, curiously examine grass and fences and weeds and the stray scraps of paper and plastic that blow through the pasture.

Before long they learn that they can run like the wind. A group of eight or ten calves will suddenly take off at full speed, on who knows what signal, and tear off across the prairie, dashing in big, sweeping loops wherever their fancy takes them.

Watching their antics, it’s hard not to think that they are having fun, and it’s easy to equate their behavior with the play of children. They’re not children, of course, they’re young cattle. But they’re still playing, still finding some level of enjoyment in their fresh new lives and in their fresh, new bodies.

Watching the calves at play is part of the reason many of us choose to raise cattle. It’s a small part of the non-monetary compensation package we get. I doubt many of us would enjoy our profession as much if we weren’t able to take the time to watch calves at play. I know I wouldn’t.

Antibiotic resistance in food animals: What's wrong with this report?

2011-04-26T10:51:00.000-07:00

There have been many reports lately in the major entertainment-news media regarding the use of antibiotics in food animals. In only the last two weeks nearly every segment of the so-called major media – television, print, radio and internet – reported on a study purporting to show that nearly all meat products sampled in grocery stores were contaminated by antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. What the entertainment-news media failed to report, however, were the bulk of the actual findings of the study, funded by the Pew Charitable Trust, and the study’s very significant shortcomings.

Firstly, the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production (PCIFAP) was formed in 2006 to “…investigate the problems associated with industrial farm animal production…and to solve them.” Think about that for a moment. Though in its mission statement PCIFAP says it was “…formed to conduct a comprehensive, fact-based and balanced examination of key aspects of the farm animal industry,” the group’s beginning assumption is that there are “problems” with animal agriculture and they are going to “solve” them. With a brief like that, it’s naïve in the extreme to expect findings which are comprehensive, fact-based, or balanced.

Little wonder that in the preface of their 2008 report on US agriculture, PCIFAP calls modern US agriculture “the agro-industrial complex” and equates it with President Eisenhower’s dire warnings about the dangers of the military-industrial complex. If you've followed histrory at all, you might have noted that the military-industrial complex did not, in fact, take over and destroy the world.

The preface of the PCIFAP report closes with this paragraph: “The present system of producing food animals in the United States is not sustainable and presents an unacceptable level of risk to public health and damage to the environment, as well as unnecessary harm to the animals we raise for food.” To see a copy of the report, visit http://www.ncifap.org/bin/e/j/PCIFAPFin.pdf

It’s clear that Pew and their affiliate researchers have taken a one-sided, highly-partisan approach to studying US agriculture. Let’s look at some of the shortcomings of their latest so-called study.

Pew used the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) of Flagstaff, Ariz. to conduct their study. TGen collected 136 samples of meat and poultry from 80 brands in 26 grocery stores in five US cities – Los Angeles, Flagstaff, Ft. Lauderdale, Chicago, and Washington D.C. The company refused to disclose the brand names or the names of the grocery stores. Those who’ve studied statistics and scientific methodology will recognize that 136 is a tiny sample size; far too small a size from which to draw their sweeping conclusion that bacterial contamination of the US meat and poultry supply is “pervasive and widespread.”

When the USDA studies bacteria in the US meat supply, they take thousands of samples from grocery stores across the country, and their report includes store and brand names. The USDA also samples over long periods of time, a strategy which helps to identify trends in contamination. The USDA, in fact, is continuously sampling all food products available to US consumers – not just meat and poultry.

TGen reported that 47 percent (“nearly half”) of the samples they collected were contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus, and that 52 percent of those bacteria were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics. Furthermore, TGen said that DNA testing indicated food animals “as the major source” of the contamination.

Unfortunately, TGen seems to have been fibbing about the source of the contamination. According to Drs. Elizabeth Wagstrom and Peter Davies of the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Population Medicine, isolates of Methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) found in the study were human types, meaning the meat likely was contaminated by people. Methicillin, they added, is not used in food animals.

Moreover, according to Dr. Ellin Doyle of the University of Wisconsin's Food Research Institute, Staphylococcus aureus is found in over half of human nasal passages. The incidence of MRSA is much lower – estimates by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) indicate that only about 1.5 percent of people in the general population carry MRSA. Doyle adds that only two foodborne outbreaks of MRSA have been identified, and both were attributed to food handlers contaminating food – not to the food source itself. S. aureus is also carried by household pets and can be transmitted in health care settings, she said.

The TGen study also failed to sample foodstuffs from non-meat and poultry areas of the grocery stores. Such samples would have provided a “control” of sorts, and provided the researchers data which would likely have helped them understand whether humans or food animals were responsible for the contamination. Were S. aureus and/or MRSA found on canned goods, bakery products, or fruits and vegetables, for instance, the researchers could hardly have concluded that the contamination came from food animals. The culprit would have been identified as most likely human.

Unfortunately, consumers can’t rely on the major entertainment-news media for honest reporting. To arm themselves with the facts, consumers should view most news reporting through a skeptical filter, asking themselves whether what they are being told is fact-based and reasonable or speculation-based and sensational.

In the next installment of this series we’ll look a what pathogenic bacteria are and how they make us sick.

How protective is too protective?

2011-04-26T10:41:00.000-07:00

As I grabbed the hind leg of a new calf, preparing to weigh, tag and vaccinate it, the cow came at me with a will. Bellowing and snorting, she drove her head into my midsection, flinging me back about 15 feet with the power of 1,000 lbs. of adrenaline-fueled protectiveness.

Her charge didn’t stop there, either. She came back at me, head down and bellowing, clearly intent on driving me away from her new baby. As she pushed me back I tried hard to stay upright, leaning forward into her charge with my feet in a wide stance, trading time and distance for balance, instinctively reverting to the old football tactic of being pushed but not controlled. There wasn’t much else I could do. The cow relented after her second rush, then stood there between the calf and I (and my pickup!), watching me closely for any further predatory moves toward her new charge.

Though I was startled by the suddenness, intensity and determination of the cow’s charge, and though it was a frightening experience, I knew that she was only moving me away from her calf; that she wasn’t intent on hurting me. I’ve experienced both, and there’s a big difference.

I wasn’t, however, really surprised at the cow’s behavior. She’d acted in a similar fashion when I tagged her very first calf last April. Similar in the sense that she’d pushed me away, though with much less force and authority. Last year I’d managed to hang on to the calf and flip it in the back of the pickup where I could finish my work in relative peace.

With last year’s experience as a gauge, I was forewarned and cautious this year. I’d be careful and alert as I approached the new pair, but I’d also be calm and confidant. Keeping your attitude and demeanor relaxed and non-threatening is key in practicing low stress cattle handling. Keeping emotions at bay is important, too. From a low stress perspective, the point of tagging at or near birth is to quickly get the pair through the stress of the tagging procedure. We’ve seen that these things pay dividends in healthier, better-performing calves on our ranch, so our low stress approach is one we’ll keep.

Often a cow will be somewhat aggressive in protecting her calf one year, then gradually relax over the next several years. Perhaps they “learn” that the threat isn’t as severe as it first appeared. Perhaps they begin to “understand” the tagging process as a normal state of affairs. Some cows, however, will always be quite aggressive. Researchers believe that aggressiveness is in part genetic predisposition, and in part learned behavior.

As I stood there in the bright sunshine the other morning, separated from my pickup and my tagging chore by a protective cow, I knew that time was on my side. I stood my ground quietly, neither making eye contact with the cow nor moving toward the calf or my pickup. Within a few minutes the calf began to move away and the cow followed. I returned to my pickup, carefully placed my tagging gear in the bed, then settled in to watch the pair. The calf nursed for a while, then lay down in the warm sunshine as the cow moved off a few feet to graze. It was all the opportunity I needed.

I quickly moved the pickup between the pair, calf on my side and cow on the other side. I jumped out, flipped the calf into the bed of the pickup, and hopped in the back myself. By the time the cow had moved around the pickup, both the calf and I were safely above the fray and I could get on with my job.

I quickly tagged, vaccinated, and weighed the calf, checked it for horn buds, then castrated it with an emasculating band. As I worked, the cow dashed around bellowing and carrying on. She acted like she wanted to climb into the pickup bed but couldn’t figure out how to do it. Once or twice she thumped the side of the pickup with her head, leaving shallow dents in the body work. Oh, well, it’s a working pickup.

Finished with my job, I lowered the calf to the ground where his exited mother checked him over carefully. Seeing that all was well, the cow led her newly decorated baby off over a rise, looking for a bit of peace and quiet.

By the next morning, the cow had lost much of her protective demeanor and was grazing several hundred yards away from her calf. She kept an eye on me as I drove through the herd checking cows and calves, but she didn’t seem overly concerned.

But now it’s decision time. With two strikes (literally) against her, can we afford to keep an overly-protective cow in our quiet, very low stress herd?

In the cow’s favor, she’s only been aggressively protective during the first 24-48 hours after birth. Otherwise, she’s quiet and easy to work with. She’s also an outstanding mother, having raised a fine heifer last year – one that we kept back as a replacement. Also, according to the research I’ve studied, temperament is only about 20 percent genetic and 80 percent learned behavior. Considering the circumstances of her first birth and first aggressive behavior, it’s fair to say that I “taught” her, at least to some extent, to be fiercely protective of her calf.

On the other hand, she represents a high level of risk to those who have to work with her during the perinatal period. Too much risk, in my opinion. She’s a great cow, but she’ll be an even better cow in a herd where delayed tagging is practiced.

So as things stand now, this cow will be going to town after weaning.

And next spring I’ll keep a very close eye on her daughter as she has her first calf. We’ll see how it goes.

Farewell fellow traveler

2011-04-20T12:47:00.000-07:00

As I stare at the blank computer screen before me, my mind is in turmoil, my heart heavy with loss.

Award-winning filmmaker and photojouranlist Tim Heatherington was killed in Libya today, covering the fighting there. Also killed was his colleague Chris Hondros. According to news reports, Heatherington was "tweeting" at the time of his death. His last message was aparantly "...in besieged Libyan city of Misrata. Indiscriminate shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO."

I never met Heatherington. Wouldn't know him if I met him on the street. I only know him through his superb work as director of the film Restrepo. http://prairieadventure.blogspot.com/2011/03/restrepo.html

So why the turmoil and grief over the loss of a man I don't know and never met?

Firstly, I was hugely impressed and profoundly affected by Restrepo.

Secondly, we are both combat veterans. The experience of getting shot at forges a bond. That shared experience renders meaningless 99 percent of the superficial rule set found in "normal" relationships.

Thirdly -- I don't know this for certain yet based on Restrepo I believe it to be so -- Heatherington seemed to try very hard to be honest and objective. He didn't stick to the popular narrative. He presented the facts and left it up to the viewer to draw their own conclusions. This is in the finest tradition of journalism.

I honor the life of Tim Heatherington. I mourn his loss. I grieve for his friends, family and colleagues. I pray that his example will inspire at least one more honest, objective reporter. God knows we need them.

Rest in Peace, Tim Heatherington. Thank you for your service and sacrifice.

Night watch

2011-04-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

At 9:30 p.m. it’s dark out. The sun is down with not even a hint of light lingering in the west. Overhead a thin overcast hides the stars and mostly obscures a waxing crescent moon. The air is cooling and damp – about 45 degrees – and the forecast calls for overnight rain. The air is still, without a hint of wind. The quiet sounds of the nighttime prairie are all around; tiny clicks and taps of small animals, the distant yip of coyotes a few miles to the south, the sound of cows browsing a long, slow, evening meal.

My eyes have grown adjusted to the dark and I can clearly see the heifer whose birth progress I’m monitoring. She’s laid up in a dense thicket of last year’s sweet clover, hidden from close view but easily visible from my perch on a hill several hundred yards to the south. I’m far enough away to not be a distraction, close enough to see in general what she’s doing and how she’s progressing. Occasionally I raise well-crafted German binoculars to my eyes for a close, clear view. I cringe a bit when I think about how much I paid for the optics, but they were purchased with just this situation in mind. Over the years they’ve proved worth the cost.

The heifer’s labor began about 6 p.m. with the sun still well above the horizon and pasture bathed in late afternoon light. As the day began to close, the heifer struck out north, heading away from the herd and toward a quiet, sheltered corner of the pasture. She moved slowly with a waddling gait, tail cocked and slightly extended. I’d just finished weighing, tagging and vaccinating four new calves and was ready for my supper. I was taking one last spin through the herd on my way to the house when I saw her moving north with a purpose.

Close observation is one of the keys to keeping calving mortality low. For those fixed to do so, watching the herd closely during calving season allows the producer to catch problems early, before they can kill a calf, a cow, or even both. Though close observation takes time and fuel, both of which add directly to production expense, such costs are more easily borne in the context of live versus dead calves. As they say, you can't sell a dead calf.

As I watched her, the heifer was clearly agitated. She tried to graze, but would take only a few bites of grass before she'd pause and stare off into the distance. Then she would lower her head and sniff the ground, then quickly turn and look back along her flank in an effort to see what was going on back there. In trying to catch a glimpse of her bedeviler, she'd turn sharply in a circle, once, twice, three times – like a slow-motion version of a spinning rodeo bull. Finally she'd stopped, absentmindedly bite at a few dried sweetclover stalks, then abruptly lay down.

Soon she stretched out completely on her side, taking a position cows rarely take except when calving. Soon, I think, soon. Laying in tall, dried sweetclover as she is, it’s hard for me to see the details I want to see. But with my trusty binoculars I can see enough. Time for me to be patient.

In only a few minutes the heifer is back on her feet, repeating her earlier behavior, half-heartedly grazing, staring into the distance, looking back and spinning around, chewing on dried sweetclover, then laying down once again. A northerly breeze begins to flow across the prairie, waving the sweetclover and carrying the sounds the heifer is making to my ear. As she continues her parturition dance, she lows softly and repeatedly.

As I watch over the next three hours, the sun fades over the west horizon and night comes. I begin to worry a bit, wondering whether the heifer will need help or not. My fears are premature, though, for she has not yet produced the amniotic sac or “bag of waters,” let alone any sign of the calf. As the minutes tick by, I reach down at flick on the radio, allowing the magic sounds of nighttime baseball to fill the close air of my pickup cab.

Far away in Pittsburgh, on the banks of the famous Three Rivers, the Rockies and Pirates are tied as the ninth inning begins. I listen to the action, seeing PNC Park with my minds eye, the perfection of an emerald diamond and lush outfield dotted with white- and gray-clad players, surrounded by thousands of intense Iron City fans. I hear the fans roar at the crack of bat on ball, sigh and groan as ball slaps leather and another scoring try is defeated. I think of how remarkable it is that I can sit in a cow pasture 1,240 miles distant and listen in to the action taking place in a ballpark snugged in tight against the Allegheny River.

With baseball sounds and half-seen images as a backdrop, I watch the heifer get on with her business of ushering new life into the world. With the onset of true darkness, she seems to settle down and work with determination. Soon she’s straining with a will, and within ten minutes she’s produced a dark-wet calf. The pair lay still for a few moments, resting after their tremendous effort. Through my binoculars I can see the calf breathing, can see that its nose and mouth are clear. Soon it begins to shake its head and move its legs, which prompts the new mother to get up and investigate.

The cow sniffs the calf at first, then with a deep low of contentment, begins to vigorously lick and nuzzle her new charge. Within a few minutes the calf totters to its feet and makes its unsteady way to the udder. After a few moments its tail begins to flick back and forth as it finds the teat and rich, life-giving colostrum.

I smile as I watch, surrounded by nature’s beauty and the wonder and the magic of baseball. Spring is a wonderful time of the year.

Snapshot of Survival

2011-04-13T13:38:00.000-07:00

This morning a blogger I follow (Katie Bradshaw, who writes at SCB Citizen http://scbcitizen.wordpress.com/ ) posted some pictures of turkey vultures soaring over her neighborhood in Scottsbluff. Along with the impressive pictures she wrote about the ecological value of carrion feeders and pointed out that although many of us look at "ugly" vultures and think "yuck," we need only think a bit more about what they do for us to gain at least a grudging appreciation for their existence.

Here is a story about and some pictures of a unique turkey vulture I "met" during the summer of 2009. The bird unknowingly shared with me a good lesson in living life with adversity. As I'm experiencing some adversity myself just now, I was pleased that Katie's post reminded me of my brief acquaintance with a tough old bird, and the perseverance it demonstrated. Click on the images for a larger view.

At 9 p.m. there was still a warm glow in the western sky though the sun had long since set and full darkness was only minutes away. Speeding east along the county road, a farm truck loaded with freshly harvested wheat was making the day’s last run to the elevator. The big GMC truck had only one headlight – a dim, weak headlight at that – and the driver was moving fast, trying to complete the trip while some twilight remained.

Ahead of the speeding truck a young fox bounded through tall ditch weeds and up onto the road. Startled by the sudden appearance and noise of the truck, the fox paused and stared into the single dim headlight, then turned to scamper out of the way. Too late. The truck driver barely noticed the thud as he ran over the fox, leaving a bloody carcass behind in the slowly settling dust.

Two days later the fox carcass attracted a curious visitor, a visitor that illustrated in plain and basic terms the reality – and wonder – of nature.

The big dark bird arrived an hour after sunrise, soaring in looping, graceful circles in the clear, cobalt sky. Fluttering wingtips proved that the bird was riding rough currents of warm, rising air as an August sun baked the farmland below.

After twenty minutes of lazy circling the bird stooped toward the road, flared a dozen feet above the fox carcass, then made possibly the ugliest, most graceless landing in the history of flight. Slowly, almost painfully, with wings still spread wide, the bird hopped once, twice, three times toward the carcass. Folding its wings, the seemingly tiny, bare red head became apparent, almost glowing in the slanting morning sunlight.

Ah-ha! Turkey Vulture.

The Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura) is far from uncommon across the High Plains, though populations are probably smaller than those of the more commonly seen hawk species. Often called Turkey Buzzards, the big, dark birds are almost exclusively carrion eaters. Graceful on the wing, they are rather clumsy on the ground, and even somewhat ugly with their red, naked head. They serve a useful purpose, though, helping to clean up the remains of dead animals. Turkey Vultures have one of the most highly developed olfactory systems of any animal, and can scent decaying carcasses at incredible distances.

Remarkably, the Turkey Vulture’s acute sense of smell has proven uniquely useful to mankind in recent years, as they have the ability to detect and ferret out small leaks in natural gas pipelines, scenting and homing in on the ethyl mercaptan additive in commercial natural gas.

A closer look revealed the reason this particular Turkey Vulture seemed so clumsy on the ground – it had only a single leg. Other than the missing leg, the bird seemed to be a healthy adult. Whether the missing limb was a congenital or traumatic defect, it didn’t seem to have kept the vulture from thriving.

Author and historian Douglas Brinkley recently appeared on C-SPAN touting his new book, “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America,” the story of the former president’s contribution to the conservation movement. Brinkley noted that Roosevelt, sometimes called America’s only conservationist president, was responsible for setting aside more than 230 million acres of “wilderness” and launching the National Park system.

Like Roosevelt, Brinkley was a sickly child, and again like Roosevelt, he feels strongly drawn to nature and the country’s “unspoiled” lands. Especially smitten by the High Plains, Brinkley said that he travels to the region annually to “...recharge my spirit by getting back to nature,” a practice he highly recommends. Brinkley calls the National Park System a national treasure and a life-saver for millions of Americans suffering from nature deficit disorder.

Those of us who lead rural lives, particularly farmers and ranchers, spend many – if not most – of our working lives outdoors and in the midst of nature. Though few of us live in majestic national parks, we are surrounded by and interact with native and wild flora and fauna on a daily basis. We tend to take our daily experiences in nature for granted and rarely give thought to the hundreds of million Americans who visit nature only during brief, whirlwind vacations.

Though in general use the term “rural” of carries the negative connotations of poverty and backwardness, especially among urban conversationalists, we rural Americans are rich in our nearness to nature and the “real” world, as encounters such as this one illustrate.

Sight

2011-04-12T13:13:00.000-07:00

How does the saying go? If you want to give god a good chuckle, make some plans.

I had planned to post up the first part of a series on the use of antibiotics in food animals this week. But things didn't work out as planned.

I woke up last Friday morning with something wrong with the vision in my right eye. Things were clear in the left, blurry in the right. Not terribly blurry, but enough to bother me. The right eye felt full, too, almost as if someone had popped me a good one and given me a shiner. In the mirror, though, there was no black eye, no swelling. As nearly as I could tell, both eyes looked normal. But the blurry vision persisted, seeming almost like I was looking through a nearly transparent curtain.

As the day progressed, the eye stayed pretty much the same, but toward evening I started seeing fleeting shadows and bright spots in my peripheral vision. There was no pain, and only the fairly mild symptoms I described above. Maybe I was just tired, I thought. With the onset of calving I’d been putting in a lot of hours.

Saturday morning brought no change, however. The eye was no worse, no better. I decided to give it another day. No change Sunday morning. I managed to muddle through the weekend, but by Monday morning I knew I needed to get it checked out. So off to Cheyenne.

I’m blessed and fortunate to be able to get my medical care through the Veterans Administration system. I called ahead, talked to a nurse, and reported to the emergency room at the VA Medical Center.

Almost before I could take a seat in the waiting room, I was whisked in to see the ER doc, then quickly whisked upstairs to ophthalmology. Within a few more minutes the eye doctor was putting drops in my eyes and conducting a thorough examination. When she completed the exam she said that there were signs of swelling at the optic nerve in my right eye. My symptoms and the swelling, she said, were consistent with Giant Cell Arteritis (GCA), also called Temporal Arteritis. GCA is an immune disorder, related to Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). The cause of GCA, just as in RA, is unknown. The pathology of the disease – how it affects the body – is the formation of so-called giant, multinucleated cells in the lining of medium and large arteries, commonly those in the head. The giant cells are a form of swelling, and the swelling reduces the flow of blood through the affected arteries. In my case, the swelling was probably reducing blood flow through the optic artery, which supplies the eye, she said.

If the blood flow to the eye is reduced for long enough, or interrupted entirely, the eye doctor said, it would lead to loss of vision in the eye. Blindness, in other words. This is why, she quickly added, that she would treat my symptoms as a medical emergency. The important thing is to quickly reduce the swelling, she said, and for that they would give me intravenous steroids for 24 hours.

So back to the ER, where I was punctured for lab work and an IV. Within a few minutes the crack ER staff had administered 250 mg of an IV corticosteroid. Over the next 24 hours I received three more doses of the steroid at six-hour intervals. By the time I had the second dose, the feeling of pressure in my eye was easing, though the vision remained blurred.

On Tuesday morning the eye doctor put me on oral steroids and scheduled me for an MRI on Wednesday, to take a close look at my eyes and at the vasculature of my head. “Hmm,” I thought, “maybe there’s something in there after all.”

The eye doctor also scheduled me for a biopsy of my right temporal artery on Friday. The only way to confirm the diagnosis, she said, is to look at a piece of artery under the microscope and see if the giant cells are present.

While this turn of events has been sudden and has come as something of a shock, it looks (as I write this) like we caught the problem soon enough to give me the chance of an excellent outcome. Only time, and a few more tests, will tell.

One thing is certain, though. The care I continue to receive through the VA system is absolutely top-notch and state of the art. The staff of the Cheyenne VA Medical Center are simply wonderful, from top to bottom. They do a tough job and see an enormous number of patients. They are always busy. Yet they take the time to treat each patient as an individual, and go out of their way to treat each veteran as an important person. At some point, nearly every staff member I’ve met has thanked me for my service. The level of concern and quality of care shows that those are much more than empty words.

Regardless of how this thing turns out, I’ll never be able to adequately tell the Cheyenne VA staff how very much their care and dedication mean to me. And by extension, since you taxpayers foot the bill, how very grateful I am to each and every one of you.

It's not rocket science - sensationalizing public health concerns

2011-04-05T11:29:00.000-07:00

Last week I had an interesting exchange with a reader regarding the use of antibiotics in food animals. While we don’t agree on how antibiotics should be used, my reader and I do agree that understanding basic science is extremely important when it comes to assessing reports on this (or nearly any) topic addressed in the media in general.

Let me point out here that there's nothing wrong with, and everything right with, divergent informed opinions. My reader is an extremely bright person and one whose opinion I value a great deal. Objective debate is one of the best learning tools ever developed.

The reader pointed me to an article posted in a blog at Discover Magazine’s Web site. The article – about gene transfer among E. coli bacteria – was interesting, though at a slight tangent to our discussion of antibiotic use in food animals. The name of the blog, however, caught my attention and forced my thinking in a new and promising direction. A tiny “ah-ha” moment in the life of a curious person.

The biggest problem in the debate, which seeks to answer whether the use of antibiotics in food animals causes the development of antibiotic resistant bacterial strains that threaten human health, has nothing to do with food animals, antibiotics, bacteria, or studying public health issues. The problem is getting thoughtful people on the same page so far as understanding the basic science of the debate. The major media and many science writers have fallen short in this.

I'm going to make Katie Couric stand as the typical media journalist here. I’ve taken Couric to task before. It’s not fair to appoint her the representative of her profession, but life isn’t fair, and my points are valid.

The approach Couric chose to take in reporting on the debate was to take sides, assign blame, and sensationalize. These things are forbidden by the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics. To do this she cherry-picked data from several studies, reporting only those data that supported her side of the argument and ignoring data from the same studies which did not support her side.

In essence, her special report stated that U.S. farmers are knowingly putting the health of food consumers in jeopardy by pumping their livestock full of antibiotics. This practice, she argued, causes the development of antibiotic resistant bacterial strains which are directly passed to humans who consume animal food products. She sensationalized the story by announcing that “…drug resistant infections have sky-rocketed over the past two decades, killing an estimated 70,000 Americans last year alone.” U.S. farmers, she said, are knowingly, though indirectly, causing these deaths in their zeal to increase profits.

Branding, vaccinating, and treating calves for parasites during fall weaning on the EJE Ranch near Kimball, Neb.

In thinking about why many major media reporters, and even some scientists, seem to be willing to hide or alter information, I had long ago drawn the conclusion that they were willing to cast aside professional ethics for what was in their mind (or in their collective narrative) the “greater good,” and that they were aided in this by an unknowing and unfortunately scientifically illiterate public.

If so many media types are bent on duping the public, thought I, then my own professional responsibility must be to educate the public. Nice theory, but wrong. I had fallen neatly into the same trap that snapped up Couric and so many of her peers.

Reading the blog post suggested by my reader, or rather, reading the name of the blog, snapped my thinking onto a new avenue. The name of the blog? Not Exactly Rocket Science.

In thinking about the name of the blog, I thought about how true it is as a statement of the fundamental character of science. Not even rocket science is rocket science, at least not by the definition of the very popular phrase. You know the one, where one person chides another who is struggling with a seemingly simple problem. “C’mon Joe, it’s not rocket science.”

But as I said, neither is rocket science. In fact, while rocket science is complex, it is simply the application (for the most part) of Newtonian physics, the basics of which have been known for centuries and which nearly all of us are introduced to in elementary school as the laws of motion.

As I thought about this, I realized it was simply wrong to accuse the U.S. population in general of being scientifically illiterate.

If you’re able to read this, and most of you are, then you’ve almost certainly been introduced to the basics of scientific methodology. And those basics are pretty straightforward. You think about a problem and you wonder “why?” In thinking about it, you come up with a possible explanation, or hypothesis. You think about it some more and come up with a way to test your hypothesis in an experiment. The results of your experiment tell you whether the hypothesis was right or wrong, and if it was wrong, you often get a feel for how far off you were and an idea of how to refine your hypothesis into a theory.

The scientific method seems to be fundamental to the way we all learn and grow in knowledge. From the earliest age, we observe and explore our environment, trying and learning new things, finding what works and what doesn’t work.

In doing science, however, we have to add rigorous honesty and objectivity to the mix. These things are the foundation of science, and when honesty and objectivity are lacking, the resulting product is a sham, little better than astrology or tarot card reading.

In one sense, it’s a bit unfair to expect lay people to apply rigor to the process of understanding the stories they view, listen to or read. But as I’ve said, the world isn’t fair. If the individual wants to better understand the world, the individual must do the work of thinking honestly and objectively.

Journalists, on the other hand, have a code of ethics to fall back on. Manipulating data is ethically wrong, and I hold journalists who do so in contempt. There are some few signs pointing toward a slow, halting return to ethical standards in journalism. This should be strongly encouraged.

Grandkids help bottle feed an orphan calf on the EJE Ranch near Kimball, Neb. This kind of animal husbandry is in sharp contrast to the prevalent narrative of the greedy, profit-at-all-cost farmer and rancher.

I'll write more on the use of antibiotics in food animals. It's an important topic for food producers and consumers alike. From a rancher's perspective, antibiotics provide an important tool for keeping livestock healthy so that they can become safe and nutritious food. From the consumer's perspective, objective information about food production is at a premium, particularly when so many are fed by so few, and only a small fraction of consumers have any experience with agriculture. I hope you’ll follow and enjoy the series, but most of all I hope you’ll read it with a skeptical eye, checking my data and hypotheses and calling me to task where I stray from the path of objectivity.

Food animals and antibiotic resistance in humans

2011-03-30T07:09:00.000-07:00

The U.S. food system, in which American ag producers make up the foundation, has been under attack on various fronts for the past several years. Attacks have come from intellectual leftists, global warming alarmists, trial lawyers, animal rights activists, school administrators and boards, and the major media, among others.

The food system in general, and farmers and ranchers in particular, have been accused of contributing to man-made global warming, of producing and marketing foods tainted with pesticides, herbicides and hormones, and of inhumane and cruel treatment of livestock. In a neat contradictory claim, ag producers have been accused of causing obesity and diabetes by producing too much cheap, nutritious food, while at the same time of causing food anxiety and hunger by charging high prices for under-produced crops.

Few of the claims made against the food system are objectively true. Often a single incident or hypothesis has been the basis for wildly improbable claims. Most of the attacks are logically inconsistent, yet reported with righteous fervor. Recently, in a prime-time exclusive reported by Katie Couric of CBS News, livestock producers were accused of driving up antibiotic resistance in humans through over use of antibiotics in their animals. Couric essentially argued that producers in the U.S. heavily medicate their livestock from birth to slaughter for the sole purpose of increasing growth. More pounds equals more profit, she argued, at the expense of causing a potentially devastating epidemic of untreatable bacterial disease across the country.

Couric’s report was chock-full of inaccuracies, false claims and wildly off-base assumptions and conclusions. On February 10, 2010, the former USDA Deputy Undersecretary for Food and Safety responded to the report. Dr. H. Scott Hurd, now an Associate Professor of Veterinary Diagnostic and Production Animal Medicine at Iowa State University, said that Couric got the story far wrong, and that the story as reported was wrong on nearly every point.

Here are the claims made by Couric, followed (in italics) by Dr. Hurd’s rebuttals. Hurd notes that the facts he provides represent the best available and most current knowledge regarding antibiotic use in livestock and its impact on animals, humans and food safety.

COURIC: A University of Iowa study last year found a new strain of Methicillin-Resistant StaphAureus (MRSA) — in hogs (70 percent), and workers (64 percent) — on several farms in Iowa and western Illinois. All of them use antibiotics, routinely. On antibiotic-free farms no MRSA was found.

HURD: This very small pilot study sampled fewer than 300 pigs. In it, only six farms used antibiotic-free production methods. The claim that usch production is always free of MRSA is not true as there have been organic farms in other countries that have been found to be 100 percent positive for MRSA. On the other hand, in this Iowa study, some of the conventional farms that did use antibiotics were 100 percent free of MRSA. A University of Iowa study which went unreported by Couric found conventional farms with MRSA rates in pigs of 23 percent, not 70 percent. In personnel, the rate was 58 percent, not “nearly two-thirds.” The type of MRSA that has been associated with livestock is unique and has not been found in human disease surveillance. It is very unlikely that the people interviewed for the Couric story had livestock-associated MRSA, rather, it’s much more likely these people had the very common community-acquired strain of MRSA from being in close contact with infected people. also, the antibiotics used in modern pork production are not associated with the development of MRSA. Methicillin has never been used in animals in the United States.

COURIC: Health officials are concerned if workers who handle animals are getting sick – what about the rest of us? Drug resistant infections have sky-rocketed over the past two decades, killing an estimated 70,000 Americans last year alone.

HURD: The drug-resistant infections referred to here have little, to no, relationship to any antibiotic use in animal agriculture. The types of drug-resistant infections that are lethal are often associated with hospital-acquired infections – and the antibiotic used in those facilities. According to the FDA, resistance in food-borne illness is stable to declining over the last several years. Scientific risk assessments conducted by myself and others have shown a person is more likely to die from a bee sting than have a few extra days of diarrhea due to a resistant infection acquired from on-farm antibiotic use.

COURIC: Antibiotic resistance is an emerging health crisis that scientists say is caused not only by the overuse of antibiotics in humans, but in livestock as well. Antibiotics fed to healthy animals to promote growth and prevent disease.

HURD: Strategic use of antibiotics in animal agriculture prevents disease and produces safer food.A side benefit of this use is faster growth. Antibiotics have been used in humans for more than 60 years and in livestock for about 50 years, if there was going to be an epidemic of resistance related to antibiotic use in agriculture it would have occurred by now. The fact that it has not means that antibiotic use in animals is not a major risk to human health.

COURIC: “My fear is that one of these days we are going to have an organism that's resistant to everything that we know, and we'll be left powerless,” said Dr. Thomas Cummins. “There are a lot of concerns about antibiotics being added to animal feeds that may be contributing to MRSA as well as other antibiotic resistance. Certainly the more bacteria are exposed to antibiotics in any shape or form, the more tendency there is for resistance.”

HURD: While the types of antibiotics used in animal feeds do not contribute to the development of MRSA, the concern over the development of antibiotic resistance is why veterinarians and farmers have spent more than 20 years continually improving their antibiotic use. The results of these improvements are evident in FDA-monitoring studies that show that resistance in target pathogens is stable to declining.

COURIC: There are different types of drug-resistant bacteria. Some, like E. coli and salmonella, can be passed on to people by consuming undercooked meat and poultry. Now, scientists are worried that Americans may be acquiring drug-resistant MRSA – not from eating, but from handling tainted meat from animals that were given antibiotics.

HURD: Research demonstrates that when MRSA has been found on meat, it is present in extremely low levels. Because of this, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the European Food Safety Authority both conclude that the likelihood of MRSA being spread by handling or eating meat is very low. As always, when meat is handled and cooked properly, there is virtually no risk of becoming sick from a food-borne pathogen.

COURIC: Evidence of MRSA has been found in the nation's meat supply. But it's unclear how widespread it may be, because only a small fraction is tested for MRSA.

HURD: MRSA is not a food-borne illness, thus testing meat is unnecessary. The CDC and the European Food Safety Authority agree that the risk of MRSA from handling or eating meat is very low.

COURIC: ‘If the bacteria becomes resistant to antibiotics, it can actually spread in many ways,” Hearne said. “It could be in the food supply, but it also can be in waters that runoff in a farm. It could be in the air. It can happen very quickly in many different ways. It's why it's a practice that has to stop on the farms.”

HURD: There is no evidence to support that these routes contribute to the human health concerns around antimicrobial resistance. Food-borne illness rates are declining, and resistance in those pathogens is stable to declining. Environmental spread of these pathogens is largely theoretical.

COURIC: Using antibiotics to help animals absorb and process food so they grow bigger, faster is a selling point pushed by the pharmaceutical industry. Because animals are packed into confinement pens, antibiotics are also used to keep disease from spreading like wildfire.

HURD: Antibiotic use is one very important tool to maintain animal health in farms of all sizes and structures. Other tools used include hygiene, proper diet and nutrition, providing the proper environment and vaccination. Antibiotics help the animals grow healthier, improve animal well-being and help provide safe food.

COURIC: But the bottom line on antibiotic use is this: no one is really monitoring it.

HURD: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates antibiotic use in both humans and animals. The FDA inspects the feed mills that would produce medicated feed. The agency also evaluates the safety of antibiotics used in animals for human safety. And, the FDA works with the USDA to conduct tests in processing facilities to make sure those regulations for antibiotic use are followed. It’s clearly a highly regulated practice.

COURIC: Antibiotics in Denmark are used sparingly and only when animals are sick.

HURD: That is true. So sparingly in fact that farmers and veterinarians are not even allowed to use antibiotics to prevent common illnesses they know are coming. They must wait until pigs suffer and die. The Danish Pilot Program resulted in an increase in diarrhea in pigs and a 25 percent increase in deaths. Many small farmers were driven out of business due to this ban. The number of farms went from 25,000 in 1995 to less than 10,000 in 2005. What appeared to be a ban on antibiotic use in healthy pigs actually pointed out the benefits of its use in helping pigs grow healthy.

COURIC: The experiment to stop widespread use of antibiotics was launched 12 years ago, when European studies showed a link between animals that were consuming antibiotic feed everyday and people developing antibiotic-resistant infections from handling or eating that meat.

HURD: No studies ever showed such a linkage. The government records clearly show it was a precautionary action due to the possibility of risk. Denmark is a very small country which produces fewer pigs than the state of Iowa. Their experiment was not on a national scale in terms of size.

COURIC: Since the ban, the Danish pork industry has grown by 43 percent – making it one of the top exporters of pork in the world. All of Europe followed suit in 2006. But the American Pork Industry doesn't want to.

HURD: In 1997, the Danish pork production was 21.2 million head. In 2008, the industry had grown to 27 million, but about 5 million pigs were exported to other European countries to be fed for market. That means that net growth in the industry was approximately 5 percent, not the 43 percent reported by Couric. The Danish Government’s own report states that since 1998, the first year of the ban, active kilograms of antimicrobials used to treat animals increased 110 percent while animal production has only increased 5 percent.

COURIC: Without growth-promoting antibiotics, it only costs $5 more for every 100 pounds of pork brought to market in this country.

HURD: According to a recent analysis by Iowa State University, a U.S. ban would increase costs by approximately $6 per animal in the first year. The total cost of a ban to all U.S. pork producers, spread across a ten-year period, could be in excess of $1.1 billion and lead to a 2 percent hike in consumer pork prices. Even though the ban raised pork prices and put small producers out of business, cost is not really the issue. The focus should be on public health. Did the ban in Denmark improve public health? Neither the World Health Organization nor I find any evidence that it did.

COURIC: Dr. Ellen Silbergeld said, “I think the Danish and European experience indicate that there will be real and measurable public health benefits. There’ll be improvements in food safety and actually in the prevalence of drug resistant infections in people.”

HURD: The World Health Organization (WHO) has stated there was no evidence of improved public health. In fact, resistant rates in human Salmonella cases have increased, and Denmark is currently experiencing their largest outbreak of methicillin-resistant Staph Aureus (MRSA) in its history. Denmark has seen a largest increase in human MRSA cases since it banned antibiotic growth promotion in animal agriculture.

COURIC: According to one study, when different countries introduced certain antibiotics on farms, a surge occurred in people contracting antibiotic resistant intestinal infections one to two years later. One infection, Campylobacter, increased 20 percent in Denmark and 70 percent in Spain.

HURD: The example of resistant Campylobacter does not relate to the use of antibiotics for growth promotion or even of any antibiotics in feed. The type of antibiotic, fluoroquinolones, was used to treat sick animals, and in the United States required a veterinary prescription. In pigs, they were delivered by giving the animals a shot. The antibiotics that have been used in feed in the U.S. are old— most have been used for more than 40 years. In addition, risk assessments have shown that they do not pose a risk to human health. FDA surveillance shows that resistance to these antibiotics in pork products is steady to declining.

COURIC: After the ban, a Danish study confirmed that removing antibiotics from farms drastically reduced antibiotic-resistant bacteria in animals and food.

HURD: The only resistance that decreased was in Entercoccus spp., which is not a food-borne pathogen. The total tonnage of antibiotic used in Denmark decreased after the ban, however, the amount of product used to treat sick pigs increased 100 percent. The key point is that the type of drug used to treat sick pigs was different than those used to prevent disease. The World Health Organization notes, “It is probable, however, that termination of antimicrobial growth promoters had an indirect effect on resistance to tetracycline resistance among Salmonella Typhimurium because of an increase in therapeutic tetracycline use in food animals. Increased tetracycline resistance among Salmonella may result in additional human Salmonella infections… since persons who take tetracycline for other reasons are at increased risk of becoming infected with tetracycline-resistant Salmonella.” Based on this, there might be more risk now than before the ban because of an increase in treatments. Also, resistance in human food-borne pathogens, such as Salmonella and Campylobacter has not decreased at all.

COURIC: Danish scientists believe if the U.S. doesn't stop pumping its farm animals with antibiotics, drug-resistant diseases in people will only spread.

HURD: That’s simply not an accurate description of what America’s pork producers do at all. Drug resistance in food-borne disease is not the major concern with human-resistance issues. Less than 1 percent of food-borne illnesses require antibiotic therapy. The human-health crisis with resistance is focused on pathogens that are often hospital-acquired. Bans, such as what Denmark implemented, will not address those issues.

COURIC: It costs very little to convert a farm to antibiotic-free. And it doesn't cost consumers much more either. The example was given showing that antibiotic-free pork production would only cost farmers $5 more per hundredweight or 5 cents per pound, so why not just do it to improve human health?

HURD: U.S. economists have shown that if those same antibiotic bans occurred in California, it would add $5 to the cost of every pig. Because I spent three months working in Denmark, I can assure you these effects are real and still present. For this reason, I hope U.S. decision makers will balance this information with the goal of protecting finite resources while feeding a growing population. Attempts to ban antibiotic use in livestock won’t improve human health, and indeed may result in an increase of food-borne disease.

Time to stop wasting time

2011-03-23T09:44:00.000-07:00

I read Gordon Baxter’s “Bax Seat” column in Flying Magazine for more than 25 years. Bax was a funny, warm, down-home east-Texas character who had the gift of bringing the sheer joy and romance of flying alive through the printed word. If you’re curious about Bax look him up on the internet, track down one of his books, or find some old, pre-2005 issues of Flying. You’ll be in for a treat.

But this piece isn’t about Gordon Baxter, exactly. Though I read his monthly column without fail for years, and enjoyed it immensely, I can’t offer up any quotes from memory. In fact, only a part of one column has stayed with me in an intimate fashion, and not even that one with word-for-word clarity.

Bax was writing about his late start in flying (well after WWII, where he’d served in the Merchant Marine), a new wife 20 years his junior, and a conundrum his magazine editors had set before him. The editors, you see, wanted Bax to train for and achieve new pilot ratings, and to write about them.

Bax was worried that the increased workload would mean too much time away from his new bride and new daughter.

Bax’s wife, a woman obviously wise beyond her years, told him to go for it. Her unflinching reasoning was that Gordon had only a finite number of good, useful years ahead of him. The number that sticks in my mind is 20. At the time he must have been about 50 years old. If I recall correctly, as Bax put it, he could look forward to something like “twenty long, fat summers.”

I turned 50 in February.

Bax’s words came to mind. Forty may be the new thirty in the twenty-first century, but statistically, and in reality, I can’t count on much more than twenty more “long, fat summers.”

So I began to take stock of what I had to work with for the next 20 years. I wasn’t entirely pleased with what I found.

I’ve always been active, and that’s a big plus. But I’ve always had a big appetite and a strong lazy streak, and those two negatives outweigh the positive. Consequently, in February, I tipped the scales at 330 lbs. That’s far, far too fat. Other than the lard, I was in reasonably good physical condition for a 50 year-old.

So I set out on a course of reduced caloric intake and increased caloric output. In other words, I began to control how much food I ate and added a course of physical exercise. I’ve always done a lot of hiking, so I decided to continue and expand on that. I had to be a bit careful, because my Achilles tendons are in sorry shape, but a combination of dedicated stretching and slowly increasing hiking distances seems to be doing the trick.

I also added weight lifting to my exercise repertoire. In many ways the weight lifting has been the hardest part. I decided that my routine would be weights in the morning and hiking later in the day. By morning, I mean early morning, pretty much as soon as I get out of bed at 5 a.m.

So I get up, shave and brush my teeth, then launch into a workout. Thirty minutes of stretching followed by thirty minutes of lifting. It’s hard to get out of bed and jump into exercise. In fact, it’s kind of like boot camp. The obvious difference is that I don’t have a Drill Instructor yelling at me and forcing me to work out. Somehow, though, I’ve managed to find an internal Drill Instructor, one that won’t put up with my lazy streak. I have no idea where he came from, but I’m thankful he’s there.

I’ve come to enjoy – at least in a sense – the morning workouts. They make me feel fresh and good physically. They are in fact a wonderful replacement for coffee and a perfect way to start the day.

I’ve always enjoyed the hikes, so it doesn’t take much motivation to get one in each day. Some are as short as two miles and some as long as 10 or 11, depending on how I feel and how much time I have.

Gordon Baxter is never far from my mind as I work out, an ethereal, ghostly companion. Gordon died in 2005 at age 81. Hopefully, if I play my cards right, I’ll get my “twenty long, fat summers,” and then a few more less active ones. But if I don’t, it’ll be okay. I’ve already had more than I might have, and more perhaps than I strictly deserve.

Share your story

2011-03-21T18:32:00.000-07:00

Spring arrived on Sunday, March 20, and so did the EJE’s first calf of 2011(click on the pictures for a larger view).

The little red and white goggle-eyed heifer weighed 75 pounds and was already dried off and had nursed by the time the sun was topping the east horizon. A lively little thing, she was already prancing around a bit in the warming dawn.

As the first day of spring arrived on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb., so did the first calf of the year. This little heifer was born without any problems at all to a four year-old cow.

When I came back to tag her a few hours later she was dozing in the sun, digesting a belly full of rich milk. Tagging, vaccinating and weighing her took no time at all and her mother, a five year-old cow, watched carefully but quietly from a few feet away.

As she sticks close to momma, this newborn heifer calf looks at a brand new world, including the photographer, with curiosity.

It was a good day to be a newborn calf, with temperatures climbing into the low 60’s and only a bit of south breeze.

This little newborn heifer calf seems to be wondering what the bright thing in the sky is as she gazes heavenward last Sunday on the EJE ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

On the day before, Saturday, March 19, a ranch visit by family members from Sidney and Chadron prompted an afternoon prairie hike.

Several members of the Evertson Family enjoy a prairie hike Saturday on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

The weather was nearly perfect for mid-March on the High Plains. The sky was deep and wide and blue, with only a few fleecy clouds hunched around the horizon. The sun was bright and warming but not yet hot, and illuminated a shortgrass prairie ecosystem coming alive after months of frozen winter.

Jake, Julia, Austin and puppy Desi pause for a rest in a canyon cave Saturday as they hiked across parts of the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

Underfoot the ground was pleasantly springy; no longer frozen hard as iron in winter’s arctic grip. While in the long view the prairie still looked drab and sere, covered with dry, stem-cured grass, in the near view the green of new growth was fairly bursting from the warming soil.

Julia, Austin and Jake take a breather in a dry wash Saturday during a family hike on the EJE Ranch south of Kimball, Neb.

As the five of us – myself, brother Matt, and his kids Jake, Julia and Austin – meandered across the quickening prairiescape, we slowly walked through the scattered cow herd. It was a good opportunity to field the endless stream of questions posed by the youngsters. Though they’d all been to the ranch many times, this was their first excursion afoot among the cows, and they were a bit apprehensive at first. “Will they chase us?” Will they stampede?” Will they eat us?”

As they relaxed into the experience, their questions changed. “Are they really going to have babies soon?” “How come that one is pooping?” “Why do they eat this yucky grass?” “Do they really drink that yucky water (from the stock tank)?”

I think that sometimes they ask questions just to hear a story. But at another level, they seem to have a great deal of interest in the how’s and the why’s of ranch life and raising cattle.

Regardless of the motive, though, their questions provided a great opportunity to explain. And explaining our ranching operation, or “telling our story,” is an important part of preserving our ranching lifestyle and heritage.

Whether to family, friends, or visitors, telling our story is vitally important to all of us in the production ag sector. Most people in the US are three or more generations removed from the farm/ranch experience, and most have only a superficial and simplistic understanding of what we do to produce their food. With a very few exceptions, what people “learn” about farming and ranching from newspapers, radio, television and in the classroom is incomplete at best, misleading and dishonest at worst.

The slick anti-ag efforts of HSUS (Humane Society of the United States) and other well-heeled and well–organized activist groups to legislate livestock into extinction are coming closer to fruition each day. HSUS Chairman Wayne Pacelle is on record as saying that he wouldn’t be bothered by the extinction of food animals, as they are essentially “man-made” creatures and therefore not “natural.” He’s also said he has the time and money to spend the rest of his life on a quest to rid the US of animal agriculture.

Pacelle can only succeed with the consent of the American people. But so far, his voice has been the loudest, the most heard, and has carried a superficially reasonable message. Who doesn’t love animals? If you love animals, you must rid the country of “brutal factory farming.”

So share your story whenever you find the opportunity. Be honest, forthright, and open. People are smart, and few if any Americans want Wayne Pacelle to mandate veganism as the law of the land. They’ll understand if they have the opportunity to see and hear the truth.

Circle of life

2011-03-15T05:32:00.000-07:00

I find that grass scouting on foot can be a very enjoyable way to spend time. Monday I hiked out across parts of the ranch where we are running cattle, as well as adjacent areas where we plan to move the herd for calving.

As I strode across a drab and, to the cursory glance, barren prairie, I could just begin to feel the first inklings of spring. Temperatures have been creeping up for a couple of weeks and bright sunshine has both melted the recent snow and begun to warm the ground, slowly releasing winter’s frosty grasp.

The warming air was still coolish. Monday was, after all, only March 14. Yet the breeze was no longer blowing across snow cover, and as the day wore on, the temperature climbed steadily into the low 60’s. I did the math in my head, and deduced that it was the first day of the last week of calendar Winter. By the time many of you read this note, calendar Spring will have arrived.

A week ago the air, though warm at times, smelled sterile and lifeless. There were a few hardy insects out and about in the warmer afternoons, but it was still clearly winter. A fading winter, but nonetheless still winter.

On Monday the coolish air felt and smelled different. There was a strong touch of a muddy, earthy, growing smell in the air. The southwest wind carried the mating song of Western Meadowlark, the first of the season.

Golden-green leaves of crested wheatgrass

Underfoot, the first golden leaves of early grass were making their appearance. So far there was crested wheatgrass, smooth and downy brome, and thread- and needle-leaf sedge. There wasn’t a lot of it; the few tiny golden-green leaves I saw were the first to emerge. The cattle were finding them, though, and I marveled once again at their ability to find and harvest the most delectable and nutritious morsels of browse as they move across the vast and quickening prairiescape.

There will still be snow and frost and hard freezes. Across the south Panhandle the average last day of frost falls sometime in mid-May. But the birdsong, the insects, the smell of warm and fertile soil, and the new golden-green shoots of grass point to the annual rebirth of life across the region. These things put a spring in my step.

A young bull crops new grass

As I hiked along on Monday and meandered through the cow herd, I counted and looked the animals over. Many are beginning to spread in the rear as birth canal ligaments begin to loosen. Most were beginning to “make bag” as their udders swelled with development. They were all obviously far along in their pregnancies, roly-poly fat with calves. They were intent on grazing and on feasting on the new, greening grass. The sun was warm but the breeze cool, and to my eye, the cows seemed content. The youngest cows, still technically heifers, did a bit of pushing and chasing. The bulls, aloof and apart from the rest of the herd, placidly grazed along, heads to the ground.

I finished my inspection and count and came up one cow short. Since I was on the east edge of the pasture, I struck off to the west, knowing I’d likely find the cow off by herself with a new calf. As I hiked along I enjoyed the day, enjoyed the physical exertion, enjoyed watching the prairie wake from her long winter snooze. I topped a rise and spied the missing cow about a half-mile away, just south of a windmill near the slope of an old gravel pit. Sure enough, she was licking off a new calf.

As I drew closer, though, I could see that something wasn’t quite right. The cow was doing more sniffing than licking, and the calf, flat out on its side, didn’t seem to be moving. The cow nervously eyed me as I approached. She would look at me, pace a few steps away, then turn and walk back to the calf, nudging and sniffing.

At fifty or so feet from the pair, I realized that the calf was probably dead. At twenty feet I was certain. The calf was still and motionless, eyes open but glazed and unfocused. As I approached I spoke reassuringly to the cow in a low voice, “easy girl, easy momma, whatcha got here girl?”

The calf was a pretty little red heifer, brockle-faced just like the cow. Looking a the still little form, she seemed a near-perfect miniature of the cow. As I eased closer, the cow was clearly excited by my proximity, instinct and hormones telling her to protect her baby. But her excitement was only half-hearted, as if she knew that something was badly wrong.

I leaned over and placed my hand on the calf’s side, feeling for movement, for heartbeat, for breathing, even though I knew those things wouldn’t be there. The calf was dry and still warm; she must have expired only minutes before I arrived. The cow sniffed my hand, licked the calf a few more times, gave my arm a half-hearted shove with her nose, then took a few steps back and watched.

I sat down on the cool, newly growing prairie next to the calf and did the mental gymnastics of coming to terms with the death of a calf, the death of the first calf of the season.

I was saddened by the fundamental loss of the calf. She seemed pretty and well formed. She was a bit on the small side, only 60 pounds or so, but that was to be expected with an early birth. Still, there must have been some kind of fatal defect. An otherwise healthy, albeit early, calf would have long since been up and about. The sadness I felt was for the life the calf wouldn’t live. No long summer of growth and play and calf-socialization. But nature knows best.

I also thought about the economic impact of a dead calf. This one, had she lived, would probably have made a fine replacement heifer. She had the right genetics, anyway. But even if not a replacement heifer, she would still likely have brought $700-$800 in the late fall. Perhaps more. As they say, you can’t sell a dead calf.

As I hiked away I felt bad about the dead calf. It’s fair to say that I grieve when I lose an animal. Doesn’t seem tough, macho, or manly, but there it is. But I also understand how nature works, and I understand the fundamental nature of the business I’m engaged in. I grieve, but I work through it. I’m fortunate that I’m not a purely emotional being. I know many of those, and I feel bad for them.

I’m fortunate – blessed, really – that I grew up on a ranch and learned about the reality of life and death from an early age. The great circle of life has always been a comfort to me. I’m not sure whether a person who is never exposed to life’s harsher realities can reasonably deal with them when they inevitably crop up.

As I trudged across the awaking prairie my heart was filled with the joy of the season and tinged with the sadness of loss. A bittersweet moment, but on the whole, far more sweet than bitter.

A Llama and new cria were as curious about me as I was about them.

Winter Pause

2011-03-10T14:45:00.000-08:00

I wrote this for publication but got rejected. I'm afraid you poor readers are going to have to suffer through it. Click on the pictures to see a larger image.

As I feed calves on a bright February morning, I hear it calling. A whisper at first, barely audible, borne on the barest whiff of breeze, like the first cranesong of autumn. “Let’s go.”
It gets louder, clearer. “C’mon, let’s go. It’s been too long. Let’s go….” It’s the prairie calling me, and the prairie is right. It’s been too long.

Autumn was long and warm and filled with work. Fencing, corrals, weaning, sorting, moving cattle, setting stock tanks, getting hay in, hauling feed. The sun moved south and the days shortened and the weather stayed unseasonably warm and mild.

Winter arrived with a bone-chilling blast of arctic air. Temperatures fell below zero and stayed there. Dry snow came in spurts and gathered in dirty, untidy piles, blown here and there by a biting, constant wind.

Work became physically hard and demanding. Tough enough in fair weather, feeding cows and calves became a miserable chore when the cold and snow and wind came. Winter conspired to carve away summer fat and pared deep down into the heart of me, to the core of will and duty perseverance.

And then winter paused for a few short hours.

Dried and empty, last year’s yucca pods lend texture to February’s shortgrass prairie landscape in the southwest Panhandle of Nebraska.

Yucca, buffalo and grama grasses and deep blue sky line a prairie canyon rim south of Kimball, Neb. Feb. 19.

The day was one of those you dream about while mired in the arctic depths of winter. The sky was clear and blue and cloudless, the sun was bright, and the air was still and warm, its temperature hovering somewhere in the mid-60’s.

Lovely February days come to the High Plains, but they don’t come every February. Forecasters forecast them, but they don’t always materialize, and when they do, they usually haven’t been presaged. When a lovely February day appears, unbidden and unanticipated, I hear the call. “Let’s go. It’s been too long.” When everything breaks right in mid-February there’s only one thing for me to do. Grab my gear and follow the call.

I stride out across the uneven shortgrass prairie. From a distance, it looks agreeably flat, but hiking it reveals a different truth. Every square foot is a mountain range cast small, with peaks and valleys of native bunch grasses; wheat grass and needle grasses and grama grasses and Little Bluestem and buffalograss, to name but a few.

As evening comes on and the day cools off, cattle graze along a prairie swale Feb. 19 south of Kimball, Neb.

The uneven prairiescape makes good footwear a must, and I hike unashamed in $200 boots and $20 socks. I carry my usual load; rucksack and rifle, pistol and camera, GPS and water. The weight of my load enhances the workout value of the hike. The firearms do too, but more importantly, they ensure that I properly exercise the moral and ethical responsibility which attends my constitutional right.

In mid-February the grass is sere and brown and gray, winter-dormant, roots still gripped by frozen earth. The snow is mostly gone, but there’s no mistaking the winter landscape, nor the feel of deeply frozen ice beneath an inch or so of sun-mushed topsoil.

I head roughly north, where a pair of wells and windmills need checking. They lay over the horizon, two and three miles away. The prairie may call, but water for the herd has priority. Mixing the two is a fine solution.

As I hike along the pain in my ankles is intense and, at first, distracting. Experience tells me the pain will ease at some point, become less bothersome, recede from the forefront of experience. I earned bad ankles during years of service at sea. Walking and running on steel decks causes cumulative injury. For some it’s knees or hips or the back. For me it was Achilles tendons. Surgery has helped, but my young ankles are gone forever, traded away in good cause.

As the pain recedes and muscles loosen I push harder, stretching my stride and driving my heart rate into the fitness range. I begin to sweat and breathe more deeply. As the terrain rises my heart begins to pound and the air rushes in and out of my lungs. I begin to feel the ache of lactic acid building in leg muscles.

As I top a rise and put the first mile behind me, I catch sight of the windmills. I move easily now, muscles warm and working smoothly, heart pulsing and lungs breathing at an elevated but comfortable rate. The pain in my ankles eases and seems but a distant ache. I feel giddy and happy and content. The weight of everyday human existence falls away and I am suffused with a sense of peace. Surrounded by beauty, I go in beauty. The prairie may wear a drab coat this season, but it is no less striking than when it wears the colorful coat of spring and summer.

Ahead of me scampers a jackrabbit, cutting back and forth between clumps of yucca and appropriately-named rabbit brush. With a final zigzag, he disappears down the scree-covered bank of a dry wash. The prairie becomes more broken as I draw closer to what we call the canyonlands, deep cuts and draws and washes accumulated over millennia of natural erosion. High overhead, a pair of Ferruginous hawks soar in the warm air, tracing a broad, mile-wide oval in the crystalline sky. The air may be warm for the season, but it remains winter air, sterile and devoid of growing season odors and insects.

I drive on, pausing only to check my windmills. Both are functioning, turning slowly in the light breeze and pumping cupfuls of water into filling stock tanks. As I finish with the second windmill, I bend my course around to the east, eager to walk the floor of a canyon not visited since summer. Signs of cattle are everywhere; muddy hoof prints and hair-adorned rubbing rocks and piles of fresh manure.

I summit the last of the high ground and find the cow herd spread out before me in the swale leading to the canyon. They watch me closely but are unafraid; they know me and know that I’m as likely to appear before them afoot as in my trusty pickup. The rise is a good place to pause, so I shrug off my rucksack, lean my rifle carefully against it, and squat down to snap a few photographs.

I take in the scene before me, trying hard to pack every detail into the vault of memory. The camera is a wonderful device, capable of producing stunningly beautiful images, but it can’t capture everything, and often misses the most important parts. I know that someday my memories will have to serve when I hear the prairie call.

Rested, relaxed, and memory-filled, I take up my ruck and rifle and enter the canyon. It runs roughly northeast to southwest, in the general direction of home. Eroded out of limestone and siltstone, the canyon floor is mostly sand, packed firm enough for walking by melting snow. At its widest the canyon is about 50 feet, narrowing here and there to not much more than 20 inches. The walls vary from vertical, fractured rock to gentle, grass-covered slope. There are eroded caves scattered along the walls; some tiny and some large enough to shelter in. A few of the larger ones have soot-covered ceilings and other evidence of human habitation.

I climb up out of the canyon along a grassy slope and find myself less than a mile from home. The canyon offered relatively easy walking, but this last stretch is a long march up a steepening slope. I could go around the hill, but I crave the challenge of hard exertion. I drive myself up the slope, pushing hard against gravity and the visceral inclination to shorten my stride. Heart pounds and muscles ache and I’m not sure whether the roaring in my ears is an external or internal sound. Air dashes in and out of laboring lungs and my eight-pound rifle seems to weigh a hundred pounds.

Silly, winter-chasing grin

Finally the slope eases and my pickup, my destination, appears. The prairie becomes mostly level, and as I close in the pounding in my chest moderates and falls away into the background of the moment. At the pickup I lay down my rifle and slip the rucksack from tired shoulders. I’m lightly winded and my clothing is soaked in sweat. I check my GPS device and note that I made 6.5 miles in just over 100 minutes. Free of my load, I step back from the pickup and turn a full circle, taking in the prairie all around me and showing it a grin plastered face. I’ve answered the call and I feel wonderful. For the moment, at least, I’ve chased winter completely from my soul.

Restrepo

2011-03-04T09:54:00.000-08:00

It was the sound of AK-47 rounds snapping overhead, and the looks on the faces of the soldiers of Battle Company, that did it. Those things sucked me in to the film, in to the reality of the experience of combat.

You seldom, if ever, hear the supersonic snap of bullets passing by in movies or in the so-called documentaries shown on the Military Channel or the History Channel. Only rarely do you catch momentary glimpses of battle faces.

Watching the film, I once again experienced that fear kernel in the gut, the elevated heart rate, the sweaty palms.

In Restrepo, a documentary film about the 15-month deployment of Battle Company, 2nd of the 503rd Infantry Regiment to Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, filmmakers Sebastian Junger and Tim Heatherington showed you those things. And more.

Why am I writing about this film?

Because it might be the most important film made since 9/11.

This might seem strange to you. I know it does to me. There’s no way a 90-minute film can explain or even comprehensively cover combat. Forget about an explanation of the war our young people are presently fighting.

Fortunately, the filmmakers did not attempt the impossible. They simply observed, interviewed, and closely followed Battle Company through their 2007-08 deployment to what the army called the deadliest theater of the war in Afghanistan.

And I do mean closely followed. Video and sound recording and playback technology simply can’t reproduce the authentic sounds of battle. Those sounds are too loud, and both the recording medium and playback speakers lack the bandwidth to reproduce them. But they can reproduce the supersonic snap of passing bullets in good fidelity. Not exactly, but close. To do so, both camera operator and camera must be very near to the action, exposed to the same mortal peril as the soldiers. Within five feet or less.

Restrepo follows most closely the soldiers who built and operated from the 15-man outpost named after a platoon medic who was killed in action in 2007. In capturing on film the faces of those men, and in capturing their words, the filmmakers captured, perhaps for the first time ever, the real face of combat.

The authentic face of combat.

Why do I think this film important?

Not because it will explain the war, or tell you how to think and feel about it. A film is, by nature, too short and far too incomplete to do so. In fact, producers Junger and Heatherington say they took pains to avoid explanation.

“This is an entirely experiential film,” they write on their Web site, “the cameras never leave the valley; there are no interviews with generals or diplomats. The only goal is to make viewers feel as if they have just been through a 90-minute deployment. This is war, full stop. The conclusions are up to you.”

What the film does, as I’ve said, is give the viewer a glimpse of real combat. I can’t recall a film that has done a better job of showing the stark, wrenching reality of war.

And that’s why I think Restrepo is important. As citizens who are sitting this one out, yet sending young men and women into harm’s way to protect our nation and our liberty, I believe we owe it to our nation, to our soldiers, and to ourselves to watch, to experience, the film.

We all need to be reminded of the incredible courage it takes to fight in battle.

And we need to be reminded that the men and women fighting today have the same courage, character and determination that “The Greatest Generation” had. As all American soldiers have always had.

The film is out on DVD. It is also presently airing on The National Geographic Channel. You can visit the film’s Web-site at http://restrepothemovie.com/

March Madness

2011-03-01T16:22:00.000-08:00

To the sporting crowd, March Madness means basketball. I think. I don’t follow basketball myself though I know a lot of folks do, with watch parties and office pools and all kinds of basketball talk.

A chokecherry grows in the cleft of a rock it split 50 years ago.

Sports wise, I’m more interested in spring training and spring football, though I don’t follow either one very closely.

March is an interesting time of the year on the EJE Ranch. On March 1 (as I write this) we’re a month away from first calves, and a lot will happen this month.

Eagle Rock

The cows are in their final month of gestation, busy putting final touches on the calves they’ll soon be producing. They’ve been “building” these calves since last summer, and during that time they’ve had to live through an autumn drought, separation from last year’s calves, and an often harsh winter. They’ve used up a good bit of summer condition to get here, and will need good nutrition to finish gestation, calve, and begin lactation.

Windmill in Googie Gulch.

While the days are getting longer and nicer, the ground is still frozen under foot and the grasses are still dormant in their winter slumber. Over the next month the ground will thaw and the grasses (forbs too, of course) will begin to green up. In the meantime, however, those gestating cows will continue to need supplemental feed – hay mostly, but minerals as well – until the grasses boom to life and start producing grazeable biomass.

Aeromotor and gossamer sky

It’s also time to get myself prepared for calving. I’ve yet to round up the equipment and supplies and put them in their calving-season places, but I’ll get that done over the next few weeks. There’s also some work to do in the barn to make sure the calving pen and headgate are ready to go.

March weather is the real madness across the south Panhandle. The days are longer, and many are quite pleasant, but it’s not yet spring. The days can be delightful, but they can also be blisteringly cold and packed with heavy snow. With La Nina conditions continuing to prevail across the equatorial Pacific, meteorologists say we could be in for a wild weather ride including heavy spring blizzards.

Vader Ridge

Last week I hiked out across the prairie on a wonderfully warm day. There was little if any wind, so the hiking was more than pleasant. Yet the warm air still held the sterility of winter. There seemed to be no odors at all. Certainly no odors of growing things were present as I trudged across top-mushy ground that was still frozen rock-hard a few inches below.

Strokeout Butte

When I hiked again two days later, things were entirely different. It was chillingly cold and snowing, with a mild but biting south wind. I stayed off the prairie and stuck to the roads. As I trudged along the snowfall stuck to my clothes, covering me in an even, white blanket. Soon I matched the world I walked in, a potentially dangerous condition since there were a few cars and trucks out and about. I was plenty warm so long as I kept hiking along at an exercise pace; the several layers of clothing I wore and continually-produced body heat saw to that.

As I hiked along I was struck once again at how very different this country can look in a single week. One day I strode out across a brownish prairie, where windbreaks and yucca provided the only hints of color. I could see for miles in the clean, crisp air, and the sky was an enormous inverted bowl of cloudless blue. Then the weather changed, and I found myself hiking a winter landscape two days later. Snow was everywhere, covering nearly everything within my sight. Visibility was less than a quarter-mile, and falling snow blurred the world into a powdery softness.

Both hikes were enormously enjoyable, and each helped, in its way, to chase most of the winter “blah” from my soul. The nice day presaged spring, and the snowy day felt more like spring snow than winter snow.

Today I hiked the prairie again, and nearly all of last week’s abundant snow has gone. The ground is getting softer on top as winter’s frozen, vice-like grip begins to loosen in the soil. Still no green showing, but I did spot a grasshopper and a beetle out and about. The seasons, they are a changin.’

As I count down the days of March, drawing ever closer to calving, I’ll continue to see signs of the annual rebirth of spring. It’s not here yet, and there’s still liable to be far too much snow left in the season, but that’s okay. It’s part of the deal here on the High Plains, and spring is within reach.

Cattle prod: tool or torture device?

2011-02-22T10:01:00.000-08:00

Monday was a pretty good day for the EJE Ranch. We sold last season’s calf crop and the strong feeder market ensured a good price. These were steer and heifer calves we chose to background after weaning, and they gained well in our little home-place feedlot, adding an average of just over 200 pounds per head since Nov. 1.

High corn and hay costs bit deeply into our margin, of course, but the market was strong enough to ensure a reasonably tidy profit.

Shipping day, unfortunately, was not such a good day.

It started badly, when I was late for loading. Just a misunderstanding; I thought 1 p.m. was the appointed time but it was actually 11 a.m. After receiving a call from the boss, I arrived only a few minutes later than the truck.

The boss, a couple of nephews, and the truck driver were already in the pen, moving the calves into the loading pen. My heart sank as I noticed the driver wielding a “hot shot,” or cattle prod. These devices have their place, but our place isn’t one of them.

A cattle prod is essentially a large plastic stick with a battery pack handle and electrodes on the tip. The purpose of the device is to deliver a painful shock. They are supposed to be used sparingly and as a last resort to urge a recalcitrant critter forward. Unfortunately, some folks zap every animal they can reach, and they do it constantly, regardless of the situation. Our truck driver was one of those.

My personal dilemma was figuring out how to educate the driver on the proper use of the cattle prod without losing my temper. My gut reaction – which I did not employ – was to snatch the hot shot from his hands and either smash it or give the driver a dose of his own medicine, perhaps accompanied by a few punches and kicks. There was a time when I would have instantly applied the physical approach. As a responsible adult, however, physicality has to remain a backup method.

Education is really the key, and in this situation, knowing the driver and his personality, teaching by showing seemed to be the proper approach. So I waded into the fray and tried to demonstrate proper low-stress cattle handling techniques.

It didn’t do much good at first. The driver continued to lash out with his hot shot, zapping every calf he could reach, regardless of the situation in the pen. He was also bellowing at the top of his voice, “YAH— YAH — YAH!” The calves swirled around the pen, wild-eyed, skidding and scampering, desperate for a way out. Each lash of the hot shot prompted a pain- and terror-filled bellow.

The scene nearly made me physically sick. And it made me intensely angry. For the first time in their lives, these calves were being mistreated. After nearly a year of watching them grow from birth, of husbanding to their needs and treating them with the care and respect they deserve, I was incensed by the driver’s actions.

Fortunately, he gradually slowed and finally stopped his use of the cattle prod. Perhaps he picked up on my tight-lipped, white-faced anger. Perhaps he realized that my methods were working better (and more quickly) to load the calves. Or maybe his arm just got tired. I don’t know.

But I do know he was physically mistreating those calves, and while such treatment may have been the norm in the past, it needs to be stamped out in the present and future. For many reasons.

Firstly, capturing such treatment on video and posting it on the internet is the dream of every animal rights activist. These people want all animals set free, and for the human consumption of meat to end immediately and forever. These are goals I clearly don’t agree with, but I do agree with such activists when they say that the indiscriminate use of cattle prods is simple torture. So long as anyone in the food-animal production business, including our truck driver, is torturing a single animal, the animal rights folks potentially get free ammunition to use against the production ag sector, and proof that at least one of their claims is true.

Secondly, and most importantly, we have a responsibility to treat our livestock with best practices and with the care and respect they deserve. They feed us and clothe us, make possible our chosen life and lifestyle, nourish our grasslands, and provide us joy and delight in our daily lives. Intentionally mistreating livestock is the antithesis of animal husbandry. It’s a sick and disgusting practice.

Thirdly, proper animal husbandry is an economic plus for the producer. Study after study after study proves that reduced stress for the animals equals increased profitability. Unstressed animals are simply healthier animals which grow better and produce an excellent, flavorful and highly nutritious product. Adding stress decreases health and vigor and adversely affects the meat product.

After Sunday’s debacle, the boss said he’s going to talk to the owner of the trucking company, making it clear that drivers who mistreat our cattle will not be tolerated. We’ve agreed to put signs banning the use of cattle prods around the corrals and loading area. And in the future we’ll clearly brief the help – including truck drivers – on their responsibility to practice low-stress livestock handling techniques on our ranch.

As I said, there is a place for the cattle prod. In the hands of stockman it can be the right tool for the right job. In the hands of a sicko or a fool, however, it's a torture device in the hands of a torturer.

a miss is as good as a miracle

2011-02-10T13:50:00.000-08:00

As I got out of my pickup, parked behind the hardware store, my hand went automatically to the cell phone pouch on my belt. The pouch was flat. Empty. The cell phone was gone.

Bad word!

Where could the darned thing be? My mind began to race. I checked in the pickup, but that was a forlorn hope. I’d never be that lucky. Okay, let’s see…

The tractor! I’d used the tractor earlier to feed cows, since the hydra-bed pickup was down. And I’d lost the phone in the tractor twice before. Something about the seat design (or my body design) seems to push the phone up and out of the pouch sometimes.

After finishing in the hardware store, I sped back out to the ranch. “C’mon, cell phone, be in the tractor!”

But it wasn’t.

I fairly tore the cab of that ol’ John Deere apart, pulling out tool boxes and chains and pins and clevises. I found the small crescent wrench I’d been looking for for two years, and a chain hook that I’d given up on and replaced, but there was no cell phone to be found. Rats!

Oh, well. Nothing to be done. If the phone is gone, it’s gone. As I replaced the gear in the tractor cab, I thought about all the steps I’d soon be making to replace the cell phone. Call the company. Select a new phone. Maybe one of those phones with “aps.” There’s a cool one, GPS enabled, that shows you the stars in the night sky, complete with all the star names. Yep, one of those “3-G” gadget phones with a keyboard for texting. I wondered how much they cost. Will I have to change my plan? Can I afford a phone like that, particularly as I occasionally loose the darn things?

Mind whirling with possibilities, I climbed down from the tractor and strode toward my pickup. Then a glint of light caught my eye, and I looked back toward the tractor. There was my cell phone, laying in the rutted snow no more than three inches in front of the left front tire.

I stood there looking at it for a few moments, thinking. Somehow I’d managed to drop the phone on the ground, drive the tractor right past it (I’d made a jog to the right when I started so I could look at the ice in the corral tank), went and fed cows, drove the tractor back to where I’d begun, minus three critical inches, and managed to save my cell phone from certain, crushing death.

Was it a miracle? I chose to think so. It was my birthday, after all. Had to be a miracle.

Grass 101

2011-02-04T10:47:00.000-08:00

Stemless hymenoxis, a native perennial forb in High Plains rangeland, provides a splash of color on this shortgrass prairie in the southwest Panhandle. Grass species in the photo include green needlegrass, buffalograss and blue grama, and scattered crested wheatgrass.

Though we're mired in the depths of winter today, spring is just around the corner. As air and soil temperatures begin to creep up, the praire, pastures and rangeland of the High Plains will begin to wake up. Grass is more important than you might think, so let's talk grass. If you got here looking for information on hippy lettuce and left-handed cigarettes, you're on the wrong blog.

Whether a herd numbers thousands of head or comprises a single 4-H goat, grass is one of the two most vital requirements for the livestock producer. Without good forage and water, livestock production is simply impossible. Leaving water aside, it follows that grass is so vital to producers that each operation must arm itself with graduate level knowledge of grass in general and an intimate and comprehensive understanding of their owned or leased rangelands.

Nearly all producers possess such knowledge and understanding. They simply wouldn’t survive otherwise. But often their knowledge exists as scattered bits of formal and informal information, institutional memory and habit, and the kind of sixth sense developed over years of experience.

Cows and calves on a native shortgrass prairie south of Kimball, Neb. Grass and grass-like species providing forage on this pasture include threadleaf and needleleaf sedge, green needlegrass, western wheatgrass and crested wheatgrass, buffalograss, blue grama and hairy grama.

In the twenty-first century, and especially here on the semi-arid Wyo-Braska high plains, savvy operators have learned that combining knowledge and experience can pay dividends when it comes to making decisions on grazing and range management. Today’s operator can take advantage of a wide range of information and research in the quest to combine knowledge and understanding into an integrated operational management scheme. Land Grant Colleges like the Universities of Wyoming and Nebraska provide a wide range of Extension services and products. Private ag sector businesses provide many services and products as well. And cooperative ventures such as the High Plains Ranch Practicum allow the free exchange of information and experience between public and private sectors and the operators themselves.

Let’s take a look at the basics of the High Plains rangeland ecosystem, and in particular, grass.

A semi-arid vegetative zone generally has annual precipitation between 10 and 20 inches and an overnight temperature falloff during the summer months. Another characteristic is the wide annual variation in the timing of precipitation, as well as the quantity of precip delivered during the events. The possibility of drought is never far away on the High Plains.

With grass such an important part of livestock production, it pays to know as much as possible about the rangeland used for the operation. Whether owned or leased, the operator needs to know what’s available for grazing, what shape it’s in and what its growth characteristics are to make the best short- and long-term use of this vital asset.

This curious 13-lined ground squirrel stands amid the bounty of the shortgrass prairie, surrounded by cool and warm-season grasses and native perennial wildflowers.

This knowledge starts with a basic understanding of what grass is and what it does. Simply put, grass is the major energy source for all terrestrial (land) animals. Grass photosynthesizes carbohydrate from sunlight, atmospheric carbon dioxide and water, storing the energy-dense nutrient in above ground foliage and below ground roots. Grass makes up the base of the terrestrial food pyramid and constitutes the main (or a significant part of) food source of terrestrial herbivores, which are in turn consumed by omnivores and carnivores. It’s no exaggeration to say that all terrestrial life is grass fed.

Rangeland is a discreet ecosystem, easily as complex as the most pristine rain forest. Rangeland grasses are unique in the plant world in that their root systems are more extensive than their above ground herbage. In shortgrass rangeland root systems can be five or more feet deep; some tallgrass stands root to a depth of better than 30 feet.

These extensive root systems allow grasses to find and use water and nutrients throughout the soil profile, which helps them survive in dry years and explode with herbage production in wet years. They also anchor soils and provide a rich environment where symbiotic microorganisms thrive and boost soil fertility. Many rangeland grasses reproduce through their root systems as well, pushing rhizomatous stems out beneath the soil from which new plants arise.

Here on the Wyo-Braska High Plains, native and reintroduced rangeland grass species include cool and warm season grasses and grass-like plants (sedges). Native range is shortgrass prairie, and reintroduced grasslands shortgrass species with a scattering of mid-height grasses.

Sedges are usually the first to green up in the spring, followed by cool-season and then warm-season grasses. There is considerable variation between species and even within species according to location, but most grass growth occurs during 30-60 day rapid growth periods corresponding to the onset of particular air temperatures. In general, maximum growth in cool-season grasses occurs when air temperatures are 65 to 75 degrees, while max growth of warm-season grasses occurs with 90-95 degree air temps.

Such growth characteristics allow range grasses to produce the bulk of their above ground herbage during a relatively short period each year. The staggered peak growth periods between types and species generally provide a three to four month annual period of lush, palatable and preferred forage for selective grazers, likely as a result of rangeland ecosystem evolution. Peak growth occurs relatively early in the season, and once past this heavy herbage production period, above ground growth slows markedly, with the plants essentially in maintenance mode until hard freeze.

Herbage production and plant growth during peak growth is highly correlated to soil moisture and air temperature. Both are required. Under severe drought conditions grass may remain essentially dormant. If moisture is available, however, peak growth will occur when air temperatures are appropriate and will be limited by moisture availability. In wet years herbage production will be abundant, in dry years production will be sparse.

Aside from herbage production, which is so essential as forage to livestock producers, root growth and development is at its highest level during peak growth. With root systems making up the bulk of grass plants, root development is obviously vital to the range ecosystem. Carbohydrates derived from photosynthesis provide the plant with the energy needed for both above and below ground growth. When carbohydrate production is reduced by grazing, the plant diverts energy from root development to herbage production in an effort to maintain photosynthetic carbohydrate production. This shift from below to above ground growth has been called root mining. Depending on factors like grazing pressure, soil moisture, and air temperature, root mining can be detrimental to the long and short term health of the plant, and by extension, the range ecosystem. Heavy grazing during drought can debilitate an entire pasture, which may take years to recover. Even modest grazing during peak growth results in some level of root mining. The operator’s challenge is to understand his rangeland and livestock as a discrete system and introduce management practices which enhance both profitability and sustainability.

In general, most recommended range management schemes include dividing range into a number of pastures and rotating grazing dates and periods between them from year to year. In a four-year rotation, a particular pasture might be heavily grazed during peak growth one year, rested the next year, then lightly and moderately grazed in the next two years.

Range management plans will necessarily be different for different operations. No two rangeland parcels are alike, weather varies from year to year, and grazing requirements change according to economic and other variables. Designing and implementing a range management plan can be a complex and daunting task, but armed with knowledge and experience, operators can employ powerful strategies to maximize both profitability and sustainability.

Taxpayers may be at odds with 2012 Farm Bill spending

2011-01-31T16:52:00.000-08:00

To paraphrase former Vice-President Al Gore, “the budget economics are settled.” And this time they really are.

Last Thursday the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its new ten-year federal budget baseline and the numbers are shockingly bad, showing an unprecedented $1.5 trillion deficit for this fiscal year – an increase of $95 billion over their last estimate – and the third consecutive year of trillion-dollar deficits.

The Heritage Foundation, a not-for-profit, donor-supported, conservative research organization, notes that the reality is likely far worse than the CBO figures indicate. Researcher Brian Riedl finds that the federal government will add $19.1 trillion in new debt between 2009 and 2021, a whopping $140,000 per household over 13 years. Annual budget deficits will never drop below $1 trillion, and the debt is now projected to reach 100 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2020.

Riedl also found that the trillion-dollar deficits are being wholly driven by rising government spending. While tax revenues will return to their historic norm of 18 percent of GDP by 2018, federal spending will jump to 26.4 percent of GDP, nearly seven percent higher than the historic norm, by 2021.

Our federal budget deficit, of course, is the difference between what the government spends (including interest paid on debt) and what it generates in revenues. Those revenues are almost entirely tax revenues.

Though the 111th Congress (2009-2010) never passed a budget, federal spending in 2010 was $6.037 trillion, or 6,037 thousand billion dollars. Federal revenues were $4.537 trillion, or 4,537 thousand billion dollars, leaving a 1.5 trillion dollar deficit. That’s one-and-a-half thousand billion dollars. Keep those numbers in mind and compare them to federal agricultural spending numbers as you read on.

Why should farmers and ranchers be concerned? Leaving aside the reasonable concerns most ag producers share with other business owners regarding the federal government’s unsupportable spending spree, those of us in the ag sector should understand that taxpayer pressure is likely to force changes in federal spending, including the 2012 Farm Bill, which will fund the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

A study conducted jointly by economists from the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank and Oklahoma State University supports the notion that real changes are likely to be made to federal ag spending beginning with the upcoming Farm Bill. A paper prepared for the study will be presented this weekend at the Southern Agricultural Economics Association annual meeting in Corpus Christi, Tex. To read the full text of the paper, visit http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/98597/2/SAEA%20complete%20document.pdf

The study included a survey of 1,200 consumers and taxpayers from across the country, asking what the spending priorities of the 2012 Farm Bill should be. Respondents were asked to prioritize ag spending in six areas: rural development, food safety and inspection, natural resources and environment, food assistance programs, research and education, and farm support programs.

All of these areas receive federal dollars through the so-called Farm Bill, which when it becomes law usually bears a different name. The 2008 Farm Bill, for instance, is called the “Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008.” Despite this, the roughly pentadal, or every-five-years, acts are almost universally referred to as the Farm Bill.

As a refresher, total spending for the 2008 Farm Bill was $57.6 billion annually for a total of $288 billion over five years. The entire $288 billion equals 0.047 percent of all federal spending in the single year 2010, or just under one-half of one percent. For comparison, 32 percent of federal spending went to Social Security and Medicare, 14 percent to defense, and 14 percent to education.

Of the $288 billion in Farm Bill spending, about 20 percent, or $57.6 billion, went to farm support payments, including federal crop insurance. The other 80 percent, roughly $230 billion, supported non-farm programs, including the five mentioned above. The lion’s share, 60 percent or about $138 billion, went to food assistance programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called the food stamp program) and the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program. The remaining $92 billion funded all other USDA activities, including conservation, food and animal inspection, education and research, among others.

The preface of the study paper notes that while 80 percent of those surveyed favor government subsidization of farmers, more than 80 percent of professional economists feel that farm subsidy payments should be eliminated. The preface also notes that President Obama wants to cut direct payments to “mega-farmers” with more than $500,000 annual sales revenue and reduce crop insurance payouts.

So how did the 1,200 U.S. taxpayers surveyed think new Farm Bill dollars should be divided? What do these non-farming/ranching citizens see as priorities when it comes to federal agricultural spending?

Respondents were asked which of the six primary USDA programs was most important. They were also asked to divide an imaginary $100 between the six programs in the spending ratio they believed proper for federal ag spending.

Food safety and inspection has probably been the biggest ag related topic covered by the major media in recent years, and unsurprisingly, 50.7 percent of those surveyed felt that it was the most important USDA program. In the current Farm Bill, food safety and inspection receives just over three percent of USDA dollars, about $90 million, or $3.14 per $100.

Just over 20 percent felt that food assistance programs were the most important. In the present Farm bill these programs receive $60.40 of each $100 in USDA spending.

Farm support programs were felt to be the third most important priority. Such programs currently receive $22.03 of every $100 spent by the USDA. Respondents felt this number was too high, however, and set their dollar figure at $15.82 per $100.

Respondents were found to be in favor of redirecting some farm support dollars into research, which they felt would benefit both farmers and consumers alike.

In summary, the researchers find that in “…looking at an overall distribution of funds, we can see people prefer a more equitable allocation of dollars. On average, respondents would like to see more dollars going to food safety and inspection, natural resources and environment, research and education, and rural development and less dollars going to food assistance and farm support.”

Congress is going to swim through a lot of red ink as they fumble through the budget process. There’s a good chance that whatever the 112th congress does, it will be historic. Possibly historically bad, possibly historically good. As farmers and ranchers, we make up far less than two percent of the population. We’ll be mostly bystanders.

But we don’t have to be completely silent. Use some of these numbers in your morning and afternoon coffee sessions. Send this article on to your congressional representatives. Write a letter to the editor or put something up on a blog. It might not make much difference, but you’ll have solid facts on your side.

The people that we meet

2011-01-27T17:55:00.000-08:00

The sun rose over an uncharacteristically chill and frosty Cape Canaveral on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 1986. A futuristic rocket ship, poised atop launch pad 39-B, stood silent and inert except for the wisps of vapor seeping from its vents. The gantry and associated equipment dripped rare icicles and the 26 degree air was close and still.

There was a sense of anticipation in the air. The day would mark the twenty-fifth space shuttle mission, and launch was scheduled in only a few hours. The hushed atmosphere was charged with pre-launch tension, and as with so many previous Cape Canaveral dawns, great things were a-brewing.

For a lot of Americans, including literally millions of school kids, Jan. 28 began as a banner day, filled with hope and joy and anticipation. In only a few hours, happy youngsters would gather in front of school televisions across the nation, don party hats and clutch noisemakers, and breathlessly await the moment when they could cheer as America’s first Teacher in Space sped on her way to orbit.

Suspended in that moment, the world had no inkling that it would turn out to be a very hard, very sad day.

In Virginia Beach, the weather was almost balmy. Sunrise found me working in the emergency room at Naval Air Station Oceana. We were busy that morning, but not so busy I that couldn’t make time to watch the televised launch. I had a pair of friends flying in Challenger, and I wanted to witness their triumph.

Mike Smith, Challenger’s pilot, was a 41 year-old Naval Aviator who had flown A-6 Intruders before joining NASA. In a sense, he was the prototypical astronaut, a military man who had survived the rigors of flying tactical jets and test pilot training.

Judith Resnik, or JR as I knew her, was a 36 year-old Ph.D. Engineer who had been one of the first five women selected by NASA for astronaut training.

I met Smith and Resnik in 1985, not long after Oceana was made an emergency landing facility for shuttle flights. They were the astronaut part of a NASA team briefing air station personnel on shuttle operations and contingency plans.

I enjoyed working with them and had the opportunity to chat informally with both. They were friendly and filled with keen and infectious enthusiasm. They seemed to represent the future of American space exploration, a commingling of military and civilian skills and expertise. The best of the old school and the best of the new.

I was especially smitten with JR. In addition to being an astronaut, she was supremely confident, smart, beautiful, and had the deadliest dry wit and sense of humor I’d ever known. As a lifetime worshiper of America’s Space Program, meeting astronauts was always a treat for me, but I can tell you that meeting and visiting with JR was one of the very most enjoyable experiences of my life.

So it was with a great deal of joy and happiness that I watched the first 73 seconds of Challenger’s flight that January morning. The explosion that ended the flight was a savage, gut-wrenching shock.

Having witnessed the death of friends and shipmates, and having participated in the sad business of recovering remains and investigating mishaps, I was honestly surprised by my reaction to the loss of Challenger. The long unfolding of that devastating moment was perhaps more painful to me than any other single experience of my life. Perhaps it was the sudden death of heroes who were also friends. Perhaps it was the sudden realization of the nature of mortal life, the uncertainty and impermanence of human endeavor.

To this day I’m still not sure why my reaction was so powerful, why the hurt was so overwhelming. The pain has eased as the years have gone by, but as I write this and contemplate the events of twenty-five years past, I find the pain is still sharp and my grief still profound.

The crew of Challenger’s last flight. Front from left: Mike Smith, Francis R. “Dick” Scobee, Ron McNair. Back from left: Ellison “El” Onizuka, Teacher-in-Space Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith “JR” Resnik.

I can’t tell Mike and JR how much I appreciated our all-too-brief acquaintance, our nascent friendship. We humans rarely take the opportunity to tell each other really important things. That’s simply our nature. But I can tell you, in this insignificant space, that despite the pain I still carry, despite the ache of loss, my life has been more rich and filled with more joy and wonder than it would have been had my path never crossed the paths of Mike Smith and Judith Resnik.

Fence Radio, or, usin' whatcha got

2011-01-26T10:51:00.000-08:00

As I pull up to the north gate each morning, I turn the heater fan down (in the winter, anyway) and turn on the radio. Along with 850 KOA’s Colorado Morning News, I also get a status update on my electric fence. Now that’s service! No wonder the AM radio station’s call letters KOA stand for King Of Agriculture.

Of course, April (Zesbaugh) and Steffan (Tubbs) don’t actually use their broadcasted words to tell me how the fence is performing. Rather, the fence tells me, through the signal it broadcasts over the AM band, and which my pickup radio detects.

The unit that powers the north fence, called an “energizer,” or more commonly a “fencer,” is powered by alternating current (AC) electricity. Electricity is supplied to the ranch house through the regional power company from the so-called national electrical grid. Electrons flow from the far away power plant, through hundreds of miles of steel transmission cables, booster stations and transformers, until it finally reaches the ranch at a standard household voltage.

The fencer is plugged into 120 volt household current at the garage, and uses an internal transformer to change the AC into direct current (DC) which it sends in pulses through the roughly five miles of electric fence it energizes.

As the 12,000 – 15,000 volt pulses course through the length of the steel fence wire, they excite electrons in the steel, freeing many of them to fly off of the steel and into the atmosphere, making the fence a radio broadcasting station of sorts.

Though the signal is powered by quite a bit of voltage, the amperage, or “push” of the current is quite low, and so is the range of the fence’s radio broadcasting capability. At 20 feet from the fence, my pickup radio can’t pick up a single “pop,” but at 5 – 10 feet it picks up the signal nice and clear.

As the hosts of the morning show report the news Coloradoans need and want to hear with their morning coffee or on their drive to work, I can hear in the background a soft “pop-pop-pop” as the electric charge travels through the wire, then the air, then to my antenna. Hearing that “pop-pop-pop” is a good thing, and it tells me a lot about how the fence is functioning.

If the popping sound is clear and strong, it means that the fence is working properly. If the sound is softer than usual, it means that the wire is slightly grounded, probably giving up some strength to a wet wooden fence post, or sometimes to overgrown grass or weeds. If the sound is intermittent, the wire has probably come loose from an insulator and is probably grounding as it swings in the breeze and occasionally touches a steel post or even the ground. If there’s no popping sound at all, there’s obviously no current flowing through the wire. The problem could be a continuous ground, a broken wire, or a power outage at the ranch house. The fencer might even be unplugged, as happens occasionally when nieces and nephews visit and “explore.”

If I get a strong popping signal in the morning, I can go about my chores with the knowledge that the fence is working correctly and needs no attention. If the popping is weak, intermittent, or absent, I know I probably have a repair to make. Once a week or so I drive the length of the fence, looking for missing insulators and listening to the steady “pop-pop-popping.” Having the radio detect the condition of the fence makes the job quick and easy. Most of the time.

The electric fence I check each day isn’t really vital to the success of the operation. It’s there only to keep the cattle out of shelterbelts and wildlife plantings which surround the pasture. On the other side of the shelterbelts and wildlife plantings is a sturdy four-wire barbed wire fence. Still, it’s best to keep the cattle where they belong, and my pickup radio helps me with the task.