Agricultural Ignorance

As somebody with a foot in agriculture, and a foot outside of it, I have a view of both worlds and how people in one perceive the other.  I don't know that this is always a good thing, but it is something I experience.  One thing about it is it makes it plain how often one group mus-perceives the views and the status of the other.  I've written about this a bit here before, often in the context of how those who have spent their lives in agriculture don't appreciate, in some circumstances, the unique gift they have in the modern world to be able to live on the land, and how they erroneously believe that "good" city jobs are the path to idle richness.

But perhaps a bigger misconception, in the West, is the one held by a select group of liberal environmentalist on how nature actually works, and how that dovetails with real agriculture.  This ignorance, moreover, can bleed over to the general non agricultural population country wide, and can have, or threaten to have, really negative consequences.  It also leads, in part, to the pretty pronounced distrust that agriculturalist have for "experts" outside of agriculture, and of those who brand themselves to be environmentalist.  As somebody who is very familiar with farmers and ranchers, I've sometimes wondered why they seem so opposed to what would seem to be sensible conservation efforts, or what seems to be well established, if controversial, scientific matters.  Or even, in some circumstances, environmental positions.

But, if you spend much time listening to environmentalist, you'd know why.  They can be as blind and ignorant as anyone.

As an example, take the current issue of The New Republic.  I've mentioned the magazine, now just past its 100th year, here before.  This pat issue was an odd one anyway you look at it, but included in its oddity is an article blaming ranchers in the west, and more particularly the dreaded "public lands rancher", for drought in the West.

 Stock tank, several years ago during a drought.  The water is on, but no cattle are to be seen, a  there weren't any in this pasture, which never looks any better than this, but which does support both deer and antelope, and seasonally, cattle.

Bull.

The thesis is, basically, that cattle drink up all the water and cause drought.  Nonsense.

Cattle do require a lot of water, but everywhere the brake on range carrying capacity is grass, not water.  Even in the arid West, in the parts I'm familiar with, there's generally enough water if there's enough grass.  And if there's truly not enough water, all the cattlemen I'm aware of cut back on the number of cattle they have.  In the modern West, I've never seen an instance of cattle drinking a water source dry.  And generally, if there's that little water, there's not very much grass, and cattle numbers were accordingly cut back anyhow.

Beyond that, the old idea that use of water creates drought hearkens back to the long discredited views of the 20s and 30s that "rain follows the plow" or that trees cause rain. They don't.  It was sincerely believed that production agriculture created rain clouds in the 1920s, and seriously advanced as a theory, to the detriment, and over the opposition of, cattlemen.  In the 1930s, when the dust bowl had disproved this (and the plowed ground started going back to rangeland), the new theory about trees was advanced and the Federal government planted them all over in droughted areas under the naive belief that they'd cause rain, when in fact their water consumption did the opposite.

It isn't, of course, that cattle don't drink water, they do, but precipitation in any one year, much of which in the West comes during the winter, isn't controlled by that.  The snow that fell here over the past two days came from moisture stored up in clouds over the Pacific Ocean, not over a local stock pond.

And speaking of stock ponds, one of the real ironies of current environmental baloney on this topic is that it always cites to wildlife, when in fact the creation of ranch based water projects, and some farm based ones, actually caused and supported the boom in wildlife numbers in the middle of the 20th Century.  Old accounts make it plain that prior to stock ponds much of the prairie was devoid of large wildlife as a rule.  Small ponds changed that.  And as wildlife habits differ from those of cattle, stock ponds benefit wildlife more than they do cattle.  Indeed, I've been stopped by a game biologist years ago just so he could ask me about a windmill driven stock tank.

Deep down, I don't t hink that the opposition to agriculture in the West, and this sort of animosity is centered in the West in terms of its focus, really has much to do with the environment in real terms.  If it did, environmentalist would be backing ranchers, not opposing them.  Indeed, the irony of this is pointed out by one of the books written by an anti, a University of Wyoming law professor, who laments early in her book that her view from her house in Laramie is despoiled by a cow, which means that here house, at the time the book was written, was most likely relatively new in Laramie and in fact had directly despoiled the prairie itself.  And that points out what I think is the real root of such views.

Almost all hardcore anti agriculture views of this type, just like hardcore veganism, or the like, come from deeply industrial supported urban lives.  People who life in cities, even if they oppose it, are so deeply supported by industrialism that they can hardly grasp it directly.  It often seems, however, that they sort of sense that, and as they feel uncomfortable with it, they strike out at something.  With some, it causes them to view the wildlands preserved by Western ranching as parkland, for their hobby use, in a deeply industrial supported manner.  The armies of Gortex clad weekend hikers up in the hills are there only because of their petroleum fueled lifestyles, and are even wearing industrially produced synthetic clothing.  They're about as close to nature, in that sense, as workers in a chemical plant, but they don't acknowledge that.  Perhaps they sense that, to a degree, but at any rate with urban jobs supported by an advanced industrial economy that has economic roots and supply lines across the globe, they react by wanting to drive ranchers and farmers, who actually live on the land, off it, and thereby convert the land into what they think will be an even bigger or more pristine park, but what will in fact be busted up into more little divisions and thereby destroy the land itself.

At some point this becomes a real problem, as a society so divorced from real nature, is really in trouble.  And perhaps that's where another radical idea may be in order, at this point.  There's a myth of government supported agriculture in this country, which is largely untrue except in certain specific instances.  But the system of mega agriculture is supported in so far as the American economy is a corporatist capitalist economy.  Some other nations, France being an example, go more for a distributist agrarian model in agriculture, recognizing that there's value in a densely populated nation in keeping a percentage of that population on the land, and grounded in reality.  With our nation becoming so distant from nature, and yet with so many people yearning to be part of it, or part of agriculture, perhaps we should consider something of the same.