We in Congress are off to the beach, but we'll be back later in September to work on the Farm Bill, you have our word on it. You farmers really should learn to relax more.
Of course most farming in the U.S. is done by corporations, but this is a good proxy for everything Congress is has left hanging. But then for the Republicans, they’ve done everything they can on their main objective of obstructing everything the President has tried to do… Oh, except find a suitable replacement.
It’s official: July was the hottest in all of American history, and the last year was the hottest year. Some scientists are thinking this will be the “new normal.” Which would call for a drink, except my drink just evaporated in this heat……..
A fluke of nature is that even the animals with smallest brains can reproduce, which might explain “deniers”.
Our water resources have been DECLINING for some time, and the current drought is almost a decade long in some areas (like mine). Warming is just PART of the problem, that yes, does exacerbate other “problems”.
There are many different kinds of farms. It depends what section of the country you’re in. If you live in an area with a widespread family culture of farming, the farms are more to the type portrayed in movies and shown in big-city newspapers (only when there’s a drought or other problem). The clue is that the local colleges have serious agriculture and animal husbandry courses, and 4H clubs are common. /
There’s a difference between agriculture and farming. Like everything necessary to provide the huge needs of many people, for the sake of efficiency and convenience, agriculture can become an industry that is more like “food strip mining.” Where there isn’t enough natural rainfall, plants must be irrigated or sprinkled. This causes problems in that salt residue remains in the ditches or the geological aquifer goes low. Various measures are applied to improve things, but in the end they’re only temporary. The agricultural corporation moves on. /
It’s a very fragile system and many farms that produced a century ago are being abandoned or consolidated into larger concerns. Then the force of science is applied but it’s artificial and in the end will not produce as needed. If the local climate shifts, even temporarily for a few decades, the system as formed to our food needs will drastically change. /
(There are subtle gradations down to a family farm, and I am simplifying here. I’d appreciate it if real farmers would participate in these postings.) /
A family farm is the main source of income for groups of people. It has a variety of crops and practices sound agricultural techniques. It has animals that provide manure (and these days, fuel). I used to see such farms years ago. They had herds of dairy cows and sold milk, and also sold livestock for butchering, or butchered it for themselves. They spread manure and crop residue on the fields. It was a cycle that imitated nature. /
That has changed in my area. Unfortunately, family farms of the classic type are disappearing, especially as the cities leach outward. Small farmers (a few hundred acres) must have outside jobs for ready cash to pay the farming bills. Their children break away from the farming culture for better-paying and easier jobs. As the old people die off, the traditions weaken and the land is sold off, sometimes with regret, sometimes gladly. And so the big agricultural combines become larger and larger, for efficiency and profit. People become disconnected from the land, and the land is an enduring reality, change is a reality. /
It’s a big country here, and we’ve become used to steady growth. Is there room to practice agriculture as thoughtlessly (for the long term) as we do now? Will all land eventually become dry, infertile and salty? Otherwise we need right now to start practice farming on every hillside and spare patch of ground such as we see in areas of Asia. We will save our body wastes as “night soil.” I don’t see how land, a finite resource, will continue to provide our food needs otherwise, unless people learn to eat only corn and soybeans, or kudzu. /
The land is not a perpetual motion machine, especially when large groups of people take their needs from it. The sun provides the basic energy, the earth provides the carbon cycle, the oceans provide the moisture. It is a big, but essentially closed system. People of the enormous numbers coming up need to put meaningful input into it to do their part to keep it going for their own benefit. Maybe they can’t. Then what will happen? /
I’d give anything to read history books written 200 years in the future – to see what our descendants think of what we’ve done or failed to do. /
I’m sorry for writing so long, and I haven’t done enough proofreading. I could have written much more. Did all that make sense?
It should be called a Planter Bill because only plantation owners benefit. The Republican House is delaying (Consitutionally the House must originate money bills) action because they don’t way to risk having a bill that helps farmers.
#1: The food prices have already gone up!#2: With no rain, crops don’t grow.#3: If crops don’t grow, no one eats, including the animals#4; If no one eats, riots occur.#5: if riots occur, folks die—even beaches aren’t safe.#6: Enough hay & water for all cannot be brought in. Like the Irish famine-starve or move. Move where?#7: Wait for rain (how long?) or move.#8: Even if rain comes, it’s still four months to the store for you, unless you’re ready.
The weather was warmer than average in the 30’s, but the dust bowl was exacerbated by faulty farming and conservation practices. Mainly plowing the land that turned under crop and plant residues, thus exposing the bare soil to wind erosion, and large stretches of summerfallow that did similarly. The dust bowl was contained with better farming and conservation practices – strip farming, contour cultivation, wind breaks, permanently sowing marginal and arid land down to grasses and forages, elimination or vastly reducing summerfallow by continuous cropping, and most importantly so called “trash farming” – eliminating use of the plow, and invention of the Noble cultivator blade that cut roots below the surface but kept plant residues on the surface to protect the soil from wind erosion. Increased use of fertilizer also produced more crop residues that protected the soil.
Holy cow! What do you call your philosophy that believes so many people are capable of living such measured lives? Sounds as if you grew up in some sort of B.F. Skinner Walden Two colony. /
That’s not meant as an insult, and I always appreciate a reference to poor Sisyphus. I think hapless consumers can be compared to Tantalus, and social engineers of whatever persuasion to Procrustes. (Mythology is what I read instead of comic books.) /
Even with a much smaller sampling of human possibilities, I think the ancients had humanity pretty well figured out. /
And so, don’t you think the old concepts of Fate and Fortune play a bigger role than you’re allowing for? I think we’re all just pretentious primates, subject to primitive psychological reactions, and extinction at any moment by a number of causes. Or to societal chaos in an increasingly crowded behavioral sink. /
Very stimulating post, thanks, and I wrote much more in response for my own amusement and edification. I don’t take myself as seriously as it sometimes appears.
I enjoyed it, too. Nothing gets profoundly settled, but it’s entertainment. /
I’ve always favored ancient lit, and I’m sure the pessimism has tinged my thinking. Do you ever read, for example, Horace and Juvenal? Their explicit observations of humanity are still valid, the politics of their times rather similar to our own. In imaginative translations, they chat from the past. Sometimes they’re pretty nasty. /
So familiar and yet so foreign is their thinking. Possibilities of imminent slaughter, famine, pestilence, or banishment always existed in those times. Not so much now, at least for Americans of recent generations. But what was happening in the world only 70 years ago? Aren’t you glad you weren’t born in the thick of it? /
I still think Fate (call it Probability if you want) exists and begins with the circumstances of our births; and that Fortune is as much a series of accidents as it is conscious effort. (Remember the Princes of Serendip?)/
Scattered anecdotes of success are overwhelmed by tales of failure. But it’s all relative. Success in past times was merely to survive to reproduce, and failure was to die young. By those gauges, most of us today are successes. /
Terence: Quot homines, tot sententiae (How many people, so many opinions.).
It turns out you CAN blame the president for the drought. "Obama, “continues to blame anyone and everyone for the drought but himself,” reads a release from Boehner’s office posted online and distributed to reporters Monday." —The Financial Times. (No one’s really blaming the Republicans for the drought, though their flat-earth science denial doesn’t help find a solution; but they DID unilaterally block the farm bill that would have helped the farmers.)
I think you assume I have a religious or survivalist attitude, but that’s not so. I don’t look forward with either glee or hysteria to catastrophe, but I extrapolate worse times that affect my present pampered middle class way of life if our policy makers continue on certain paths. Many people will be upset (are now) with only a slightly lower standard of living. If we’re lucky the changes will be as gradual as they have been so far. Only old people and record-keepers will notice their magnitude over time./
These paths, mostly in the pursuit of energy supplies, will lead to big changes in the biosystem. They already have, don’t kid yourselves otherwise. Species that get along with humans in these new conditions hang on, while those with whom we compete for space and food are dwindling. (“Bush meat” is increasingly in demand in Africa.) The rain forests are going relentlessly bit by bit, you can see the effects from space. Mining is in need of greater water supplies to implement new technologies for extraction of oil (and where does the waste go?). /
Maybe the rest of nature can hunker down and re-emerge in somewhat changed form later. But people might not be able to or want to. Would the idea of future humanity predominantly represented by New Guinea tribes people be welcome to us Americans? /
Behind it all is the increasing number of human beings. It changes the game and blasts former assumptions of continuing human progress./
The wide open spaces you see figure into ecological equations that factor in land and resource usage per human being. Take away the spaces that don’t support those usages and a dire scenario becomes inevitable with what’s left. Or do we end up sifting every cubic mile of land and ocean for useful elements atom by atom before we’re done?/
Where is Isaac Asimov when I need him to back me up? He left too soon, I’m sure many would agree. His clarity of thought and the ability to put it in words might have convinced you if my feeble efforts do not./
His novels portray humanity far into the future, but how otherwise could he write novels with drama and conflict to reach a wide audience? His short stories are somewhat darker and meant for a narrower group, and he still exercised his irrepressible humor. But many of his science essays are, to me, an indulgence in portrayal of stark realities that are his really valuable legacy. If you find the collection, read OF MATTERS GREAT AND SMALL for his views of the things I speak of here. (I would love to know what his widow, Janet, would say about this.) /
I admire the outpourings of optimism from some of you. Somewhere between your human-institutional optimism and my planetary ecological pessimism is the proper degree of realism./
Yontrop over 11 years ago
Of course most farming in the U.S. is done by corporations, but this is a good proxy for everything Congress is has left hanging. But then for the Republicans, they’ve done everything they can on their main objective of obstructing everything the President has tried to do… Oh, except find a suitable replacement.
trimguy over 11 years ago
And they will find a way to blame Obama. After all, the Koch brothers paid good money to get Congress to deny climate change.
Godfreydaniel over 11 years ago
It’s official: July was the hottest in all of American history, and the last year was the hottest year. Some scientists are thinking this will be the “new normal.” Which would call for a drink, except my drink just evaporated in this heat……..
Dtroutma over 11 years ago
A fluke of nature is that even the animals with smallest brains can reproduce, which might explain “deniers”.
Our water resources have been DECLINING for some time, and the current drought is almost a decade long in some areas (like mine). Warming is just PART of the problem, that yes, does exacerbate other “problems”.
cjr53 over 11 years ago
With his easy to obtain assault weapon.
sw10mm over 11 years ago
Only if they don’t pull a Cheney.
emptc12 over 11 years ago
There are many different kinds of farms. It depends what section of the country you’re in. If you live in an area with a widespread family culture of farming, the farms are more to the type portrayed in movies and shown in big-city newspapers (only when there’s a drought or other problem). The clue is that the local colleges have serious agriculture and animal husbandry courses, and 4H clubs are common. /
There’s a difference between agriculture and farming. Like everything necessary to provide the huge needs of many people, for the sake of efficiency and convenience, agriculture can become an industry that is more like “food strip mining.” Where there isn’t enough natural rainfall, plants must be irrigated or sprinkled. This causes problems in that salt residue remains in the ditches or the geological aquifer goes low. Various measures are applied to improve things, but in the end they’re only temporary. The agricultural corporation moves on. /
It’s a very fragile system and many farms that produced a century ago are being abandoned or consolidated into larger concerns. Then the force of science is applied but it’s artificial and in the end will not produce as needed. If the local climate shifts, even temporarily for a few decades, the system as formed to our food needs will drastically change. /
(There are subtle gradations down to a family farm, and I am simplifying here. I’d appreciate it if real farmers would participate in these postings.) /
A family farm is the main source of income for groups of people. It has a variety of crops and practices sound agricultural techniques. It has animals that provide manure (and these days, fuel). I used to see such farms years ago. They had herds of dairy cows and sold milk, and also sold livestock for butchering, or butchered it for themselves. They spread manure and crop residue on the fields. It was a cycle that imitated nature. /
That has changed in my area. Unfortunately, family farms of the classic type are disappearing, especially as the cities leach outward. Small farmers (a few hundred acres) must have outside jobs for ready cash to pay the farming bills. Their children break away from the farming culture for better-paying and easier jobs. As the old people die off, the traditions weaken and the land is sold off, sometimes with regret, sometimes gladly. And so the big agricultural combines become larger and larger, for efficiency and profit. People become disconnected from the land, and the land is an enduring reality, change is a reality. /
It’s a big country here, and we’ve become used to steady growth. Is there room to practice agriculture as thoughtlessly (for the long term) as we do now? Will all land eventually become dry, infertile and salty? Otherwise we need right now to start practice farming on every hillside and spare patch of ground such as we see in areas of Asia. We will save our body wastes as “night soil.” I don’t see how land, a finite resource, will continue to provide our food needs otherwise, unless people learn to eat only corn and soybeans, or kudzu. /
The land is not a perpetual motion machine, especially when large groups of people take their needs from it. The sun provides the basic energy, the earth provides the carbon cycle, the oceans provide the moisture. It is a big, but essentially closed system. People of the enormous numbers coming up need to put meaningful input into it to do their part to keep it going for their own benefit. Maybe they can’t. Then what will happen? /
I’d give anything to read history books written 200 years in the future – to see what our descendants think of what we’ve done or failed to do. /
I’m sorry for writing so long, and I haven’t done enough proofreading. I could have written much more. Did all that make sense?
hippogriff over 11 years ago
It should be called a Planter Bill because only plantation owners benefit. The Republican House is delaying (Consitutionally the House must originate money bills) action because they don’t way to risk having a bill that helps farmers.
Dtroutma over 11 years ago
^Complex issues, DON’T HAVE simple answers.
corzak over 11 years ago
^Yes, please don’t feed it. Especially when many people are taking the time to make well-thought posts here.
38lowell over 11 years ago
#1: The food prices have already gone up!#2: With no rain, crops don’t grow.#3: If crops don’t grow, no one eats, including the animals#4; If no one eats, riots occur.#5: if riots occur, folks die—even beaches aren’t safe.#6: Enough hay & water for all cannot be brought in. Like the Irish famine-starve or move. Move where?#7: Wait for rain (how long?) or move.#8: Even if rain comes, it’s still four months to the store for you, unless you’re ready.
38lowell over 11 years ago
At least the crows are all dead from starvation.Is that car running on ethanol?Maybe, if you feed the cars ethanol, you can eat them when they die!
Gypsy8 over 11 years ago
The weather was warmer than average in the 30’s, but the dust bowl was exacerbated by faulty farming and conservation practices. Mainly plowing the land that turned under crop and plant residues, thus exposing the bare soil to wind erosion, and large stretches of summerfallow that did similarly. The dust bowl was contained with better farming and conservation practices – strip farming, contour cultivation, wind breaks, permanently sowing marginal and arid land down to grasses and forages, elimination or vastly reducing summerfallow by continuous cropping, and most importantly so called “trash farming” – eliminating use of the plow, and invention of the Noble cultivator blade that cut roots below the surface but kept plant residues on the surface to protect the soil from wind erosion. Increased use of fertilizer also produced more crop residues that protected the soil.
emptc12 over 11 years ago
Holy cow! What do you call your philosophy that believes so many people are capable of living such measured lives? Sounds as if you grew up in some sort of B.F. Skinner Walden Two colony. /
That’s not meant as an insult, and I always appreciate a reference to poor Sisyphus. I think hapless consumers can be compared to Tantalus, and social engineers of whatever persuasion to Procrustes. (Mythology is what I read instead of comic books.) /Even with a much smaller sampling of human possibilities, I think the ancients had humanity pretty well figured out. /
And so, don’t you think the old concepts of Fate and Fortune play a bigger role than you’re allowing for? I think we’re all just pretentious primates, subject to primitive psychological reactions, and extinction at any moment by a number of causes. Or to societal chaos in an increasingly crowded behavioral sink. /Very stimulating post, thanks, and I wrote much more in response for my own amusement and edification. I don’t take myself as seriously as it sometimes appears.
kamwick over 11 years ago
“Mr. Ryan, are you gonna sign the farm bill? "
“Right now I’m gonna enjoy the fair. Do you have Wristband Day here?”
emptc12 over 11 years ago
I enjoyed it, too. Nothing gets profoundly settled, but it’s entertainment. /
I’ve always favored ancient lit, and I’m sure the pessimism has tinged my thinking. Do you ever read, for example, Horace and Juvenal? Their explicit observations of humanity are still valid, the politics of their times rather similar to our own. In imaginative translations, they chat from the past. Sometimes they’re pretty nasty. /
So familiar and yet so foreign is their thinking. Possibilities of imminent slaughter, famine, pestilence, or banishment always existed in those times. Not so much now, at least for Americans of recent generations. But what was happening in the world only 70 years ago? Aren’t you glad you weren’t born in the thick of it? /
I still think Fate (call it Probability if you want) exists and begins with the circumstances of our births; and that Fortune is as much a series of accidents as it is conscious effort. (Remember the Princes of Serendip?)/
Scattered anecdotes of success are overwhelmed by tales of failure. But it’s all relative. Success in past times was merely to survive to reproduce, and failure was to die young. By those gauges, most of us today are successes. /
Terence: Quot homines, tot sententiae (How many people, so many opinions.).
ARodney over 11 years ago
It turns out you CAN blame the president for the drought. "Obama, “continues to blame anyone and everyone for the drought but himself,” reads a release from Boehner’s office posted online and distributed to reporters Monday." —The Financial Times. (No one’s really blaming the Republicans for the drought, though their flat-earth science denial doesn’t help find a solution; but they DID unilaterally block the farm bill that would have helped the farmers.)
emptc12 over 11 years ago
I think you assume I have a religious or survivalist attitude, but that’s not so. I don’t look forward with either glee or hysteria to catastrophe, but I extrapolate worse times that affect my present pampered middle class way of life if our policy makers continue on certain paths. Many people will be upset (are now) with only a slightly lower standard of living. If we’re lucky the changes will be as gradual as they have been so far. Only old people and record-keepers will notice their magnitude over time./
These paths, mostly in the pursuit of energy supplies, will lead to big changes in the biosystem. They already have, don’t kid yourselves otherwise. Species that get along with humans in these new conditions hang on, while those with whom we compete for space and food are dwindling. (“Bush meat” is increasingly in demand in Africa.) The rain forests are going relentlessly bit by bit, you can see the effects from space. Mining is in need of greater water supplies to implement new technologies for extraction of oil (and where does the waste go?). /
Maybe the rest of nature can hunker down and re-emerge in somewhat changed form later. But people might not be able to or want to. Would the idea of future humanity predominantly represented by New Guinea tribes people be welcome to us Americans? /
Behind it all is the increasing number of human beings. It changes the game and blasts former assumptions of continuing human progress./
The wide open spaces you see figure into ecological equations that factor in land and resource usage per human being. Take away the spaces that don’t support those usages and a dire scenario becomes inevitable with what’s left. Or do we end up sifting every cubic mile of land and ocean for useful elements atom by atom before we’re done?/
Where is Isaac Asimov when I need him to back me up? He left too soon, I’m sure many would agree. His clarity of thought and the ability to put it in words might have convinced you if my feeble efforts do not./
His novels portray humanity far into the future, but how otherwise could he write novels with drama and conflict to reach a wide audience? His short stories are somewhat darker and meant for a narrower group, and he still exercised his irrepressible humor. But many of his science essays are, to me, an indulgence in portrayal of stark realities that are his really valuable legacy. If you find the collection, read OF MATTERS GREAT AND SMALL for his views of the things I speak of here. (I would love to know what his widow, Janet, would say about this.) /I admire the outpourings of optimism from some of you. Somewhere between your human-institutional optimism and my planetary ecological pessimism is the proper degree of realism./
And that’s it, no more on this topic from me.