The Agrarian's Lament: Blog Mirror: Couple Donate Legacy 38,000-Acre, $2...

The Agrarian's Lament: Blog Mirror: Couple Donate Legacy 38,000-Acre, $2...:   Couple Donate Legacy 38,000-Acre, $21 Million Cattle Ranch To Keep It A Ranch

Friday Farming. Um. . .large farmers.

N.C. Wyeth, The Farmer.  1911.

On Friday, this blog tries to post something about farming, but it often lets everyone down by failing to do so, posting instead on various other inanities, such as a legislative committee passing a goofball ignorant bill on chemtrails.

Och!

Anyhow, we've been watching the news as first soybean farmers, and then later cattle farmers, have come on the news and stated, effectively, "we didn't think leopards would eat our face!" after Donald Trump took the tariff club and beat them upside the head and then decided that the Golden Arches could serve up Big Mac's with carne molida rather than ground beef.

What a bunch of amadán breallach.  Oh well, it's hard to feel sorry for them.  Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Put that in your Happy Meal, bucko.

But this thread isn't on that.

Rather its on this.

We admire farmers and ranchers, as is rather obvious.  It's our true vocation, even if an unfulfilled one. And we are familiar with actual farming, not the Green Acres/Hallmark/Homesteading type of agriculture.

But we're also agrarians.

Anyhow, I can't help but note this, even though its rude.

The spokesmen for soybean farmers have, at least on some occasions, been enormously fat.

That's a bad look.  They're huge.  And they're not huge in the way that some large people are who are pretty fit, and I've known more than a few.  Indeed, I've known some outdoor employed people, both blue collar and in the sciences, who were really big, but quite fit.  You could tell that what was at work with them was genetics.  But many of these farmers, or at least the snipped I've seen, are just flat out fat.

This isn't the case with working ranchers.  

I guess that shows us the extent to which mechanized farming has become, well, mechanized.  At least one of these great big farmers has been interviewed in his farm machinery as he and it are working in his fields.  And that's just not conducive to living well.  Ranching is still a pretty physically active line of work.

With these guys, I suspect, but of course don't know, that they're still consuming a farm diet that developed prior to the 1980s.  Say, perhaps, before World War Two. Big breakfast, followed by heavy activity, big lunch, followed by heavy activity, and a  lighter dinner. . .sometimes followed by heavy activity.  Now, however, you can omit the heavy activity.

Which gets us back to, I guess, the state of the world in general.  Our technology is, frankly, killing us.  We really weren't meant to live that way, or much of the way our technological world is having us live.

And, as a minor fwiw, you really can't come on to television seeking sympathies for farmers if you look like, to use an analogy, a fat cat.  You guys have obviously been eating well.  Yes, that really shouldn't matter, and its not a moral failing, but it doesn't look good in the presentation.

Lex Anteinternet: Trump Announces Beef Price Reduction Deal with Arg...

Lex Anteinternet: Trump Announces Beef Price Reduction Deal with Arg...:   Trump Announces Beef Price Reduction Deal with Argentina, US Supplies Expected to Fall in 2026 In other words, screw US cattle producers t...

Of course, if you check Twitter, it's now full of agriculturalist posting "Mr. President, we support you, but. . ."

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.  You thought Trump was your pal?

Foothill Agrarian: Getting to Know a Place

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Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Cattle Drive

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Cattle Drive: With the grass back home chewed down pretty good, we found some pasture in Johnson County to hold the cows down for the fall and winter. So ...

A bankrupt policy. Trump shafts American consumers and does so again for 大豆

I had a draft post at the time of the last election I never published why farmers and ranchers routinely vote to have themselves shafted by voting for the GOP.  Democrats typically have farm policies that actually benefit farmers, including preserving the lands.  Republicans tend to be in favor of land rape to benefit the wealthy.

I really have no good explanation for it.

Well, no surprise, soybean farmers are getting pounded by Trump's tariff polich. D'uh.

Trump's trade battle with China puts US soybean farmers in peril

I love this quote from one soybean farmer:

“Overwhelmingly, farmers have been in President Trump’s corner,” said Ragland, the president of the soybean association. “And I think the message that our soybean farmers as a whole want to deliver is: ‘President Trump, we’ve had your back. We need you to have ours now.’”

Well, I'm a type of farmer, a livestock farmer, and frankly Ragland, screw you and the John Deere you rode in on.  You are getting just what you deserve.

Trump bets the soybean farm on tariffs | Wall Street Journal

But, have no fear, socialized farming through the GOP will come to the rescue.  Trump is going to take $10B from the national sales tax, i.e., tariffs, to bail out farmers.

So, the American consumer is getting taxed, as in the end it's us who pays the tariffs, to bail out soybean farmers.  

Good old free enterprise at work there.

Farmers are getting stiffed by Trump's taxes, and will continue to get stiffed by them, and he hopes to balance the table by handing over money the American public handed over via tariffs. 

A better plan would just be to let soybean farmers go bankrupt.  

That's way harsh, of course, but there is a certain element of justice to it.  People voted for it.  If they voted for it, you get what get and you don't have a fit.

Locally there's some of this going on, oddly enough, with nuclear energy.  I support nuclear energy, and apparently the Trump administration does as well, and of course Wyoming has uranium and once had a nuclear mining industry.

People are having a fit, including a lot of people who are diehard right wing populists.

I guess that's their right, but farmers  have no right to have the implications of a policy that Trump was very clear about implementing relieved from them.  Trump always was in favor of tariffs and made no secret about it. What did they think was going to happen?

Moreover, the "we supported you" argument is only a good one if its something unexpected.  This amounts more to political payola.

The Agrarian's Lament: Large sales.

The Agrarian's Lament: Large sales.: 

Large sales.

A Ranch Four Times the Size of New York City for $79.5 Million

Texas real estate giants sell historic western ranch last asking $115M

Another Huge Wyoming Ranch For Sale; More Than 5 Times Bigger Than New York City

I noticed all of these in the news recently.  

I feel like I should have a comment on them, but I really don't. 

Well, I do.  I don't mind their prices, but agricultural land should always go to actual farmers and ranchers.  In a just society, it would.

The Agrarian's Lament: Where Do Farmers Get Their Food From? The answer is logical, rational, and ludicrous

The Agrarian's Lament: Where Do Farmers Get Their Food From? The answer i...:   

Where Do Farmers Get Their Food From? The answer is logical, rational, and ludicrous

 

The last garden I put in, 2017.

This is an interesting item, particularly as information for those not associated with agriculture.

Where Do Farmers Get Their Food From?

The answer is logical, rational, and ludicrous

I've split both worlds, of course, for decades, although more by fate than choice.  Anyhow, one thing that's always amazed me is, to some degree, agriculturalist don't make full use of their own land.

I'm much more familiar with ranching than farming, so I'll start there.  Almost every rancher I know eats their own beef.  We eat our own beef.  For this reason, beef prices at the grocery store are always a bit of a mystery to me.

If you know somebody who raises pigs, and occasionally we do, we get one from them. Again, that means we're paying below grocery store prices.

Okay, all this is common.  

But what absolutely amazes me is that lots of farmers and ranchers don't take advantage of what's right before them.

I used to put in a huge garden every year.  I don't anymore, as my town job took control of my life and I lost the time to do it.  I hope to take it back up if I ever get to retire.  I can't see a good reason that almost every farm and ranch doesn't have a garden.  Yes, it takes time, but not that much time if you are right there.  It'd cut food bills, as they're mostly getting their produce from the grocery store, and fresh produce is always better.

I also don't understand why farmers and ranchers don't hunt, and fish, more.  I know that "time" will be the argument, but I've been around agriculture my whole life and farmers and ranchers have more time than city people do. They simply do.  Their time commitments tend to be seasonal, and intense, but they have the time.

At various times in my pre married life, I used to live on wild game.  And I know for a fact that prior to the 1980s, a lot of ranchers either did the same, or supplemented their meat supply that way.  One student I knew when I was in US as an undergrad was an older (in his 30s) student, and had grown up on a ranch were they lived on wild game. Frankly, they poached it.  I don't advocate poaching, but I also know more than one ranch family that poached pretty routinely into the 1970s.  

Here, farmers and ranchers can get landowners licenses and I just don't see why they don't.  And even if they don't, they usually have time after the fall to hunt and could on a regular license..  Indeed, as noted, they have more time than people in town do.  Outdoors writer John Barsness once noted in one of his columns that when he was a boy, he had a ranching uncle that became a full time elk hunter after shipping.

As noted, I just don't get it.

Shoot, it was my dream, which I will not succeed at.

If I could do whatever I want. . .

If I'd had my way, I would have lived full time in the sticks as a rancher, I'd have gardened in the war months, and hunted in the fall.  If I'd broke even, that would have been fine with me.

The Agrarian Dream.

Related threads:

If I could do whatever I want. . .

Labels: Agrarianism, Agriculture, Alaska, Daily Living, fishing, hunting, nature, Sic transit Gloria Mundi, Work, Wyoming

Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Years Ago: The Last Fresh Vegetable Month

Labels: 1910s, 1920s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Agrarianism, Blog Mirror, Food, Garden, Localism, Retail, Transportation, World War One, World War Two

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 I don't think a person really needs to worry about it, but an interesting article.

How to Survive the End of the World

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Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the cornfield.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the cornfield.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

Stark named interim director of UW Ranch Management and Agricultural Leadership Program

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The Agrarian's Lament: Broken Promises: Over 30,000 Farmers Denied Funds

The Agrarian's Lament: Broken Promises: Over 30,000 Farmers Denied Funds:   Broken Promises: Over 30,000 Farmers Denied Funds

Well that didn't take long. . .

 Trump’s Immigration Threats Are Already Wrecking the Food Industry

Immigrant farm workers are too scared to show up to work.

The past election featured a lot of really dimwitted comments by those who decided to vote for Trump about making the price of food "go down".  

Dimwitted.

The government has very little ability to make the price of anything whatsoever go down.  There are a few options.  For one, if an item is imported and taxed at the border, you can remove the tax.

That's the exact opposite of what the Genius with Really Good Genes proposes to do. That's going to raise prices.

Another is to impact the price of something the government actually controls, such as privatizing an industry or releasing a supply of something held by the government.

Neither of those are options right now.

Trump's really good brain has so far simply proposed to the Saudis that the produce a lot of oil.  The Saudis are likely laughing. 

If they did, that would drop the price of oil, which drops the price of everything else.  It also makes US oil completely unviable economically as its very expensive to drill for. We already know this as a few years ago there was a glut of oil, which dropped its price and stopped US drilling dead in its tracks.

One of the things Trump promised his followers that he would do, which he can do to some limited extent, is deport aliens.  Hopefully they're illegal aliens, but to a lot of his supporters, any alien will do, as long as the alien has brown skin.

Donald Musk and Ted Cruz, born respectively in South Africa and Canada, can stay, which is a real shame.  I'd be okay with deporting both of them.

US agriculture depends heavily on illegal aliens from Mexico.  It has for decades.  It's a situation which never should have been allowed to develop, but it was because both Republicans and Democrats turned a blind eye to it.  Now, the US is dependent on that migrant population.

Trump promises to deport all these people as quickly as possible.  That means administering a massive shock to the farm economy, which means the prices of everything at the grocery store will go up, up, up.  Trump will ignore that.  Consumers won't be able to, and those who knew that this would occur ought to be plastering these on self check out lines:

It won't end there of course.  The economic genius has fallen in love with tariffs, something that fell out of favor as they helped create the Great Depression, bring Hitler into power, and cause World War Two.  

Trump really doesn't seem to be the smartest bulb in the bunch and apparently he skipped lessons in history.  Part of the reason he cited for wanting to change the name of Denali to Mt. McKinley is that McKinley, who was President before income tax was legal, used tariffs to fund the rather small U.S. budget of the time.

What a boofador.

Trump tends to think like, and talk, like a gangster.  As we discuss in an upcoming post, he may have in fact learned a lot of his "art of the deal" by having to deal with the mafia on New York construction projects.  The mafia operates, in fact, a lot like Trump. They make big threats, and then hurt people, until a rival gang knuckles under or regular people give in.

The problem here, of course, is that countries aren't criminal gangs, usually (Russia sort of is), and they don't behave that way. Democratic nations particularly don't.  Trump is getting the middle finger from Canada and Mexico right now, but the besotted American public hasn't noticed.  If Trump imposes the tariffs he threatens to, Canada is threatening to flat out cease exporting into the US.  What Canada has in spades, oil and lumber, it can sell elsewhere.  We can't replace what we get from them.

That'll spike the price of oil massively. We can't offset the oil deficit that would result in as we're already, in spite of the moronic "drill baby drill" comments people make, drilling at capacity.  That would easily add 1/3d to the price at the pumps, if not 3 times to it.

And the removal of lumber would simply end the construction industry.

Canada is also a major exporter of hydroelectric power into the US.  If Canada starts taxing that, and it can, at a rate to offset tariffs, living in New England will be extremely expensive.

As for Mexico, go to the grocery store and see how many things are "grown in Mexico". With California in trouble due to Trump's immigration policies, and a retaliating Mexico you'll get to eat what can be produced locally.

Um, yum.  Canned corn will still be there.

It'd be tempting to say "people will get what they deserve, but Trump didn't even take 50% of the popular vote.

Let's say that again.  He didn't take even 50% of the popular vote.

He took 49.8%, which is regarded as impressive in American politics, but in reality is not.  50.2 % of the American public voted against him.

Third parties may have put Trump in office.

In some systems, if a person doesn't take over 50% of the vote, there's a runoff election between the top two vote getters until somebody does.  If that had been done, would Trump be President?

Anyhow, with about 50% voting for him, and 50% voting against him, Trump doesn't have a mandate to do squat.  Quite a few of his insiders know that which is why they're rushing to put in their projects while they can, which is really only until the next mid term election when an enraged public turns on the GOP.  It's going to happen.

In the meantime, the 50% of the country that didn't vote for Trump is going to endure rising prices, destroyed retirement accounts, a Federal government that won't help with local disasters, and the increasing slide of the country into a mean, childish, brutish, thugocracy.

USDA Forecasts Higher Retail Egg Prices for 2025

 What the crud?

USDA Daily Radio Newsline

December 27 Stories

USDA Forecasts Higher Retail Egg Prices for 2025

Census of Aquaculture Reveals Top Selling Seafood Types

Top Ten Weather Stories of 2024 – Southern Plains Wildfires

Top Ten Weather Stories of 2024 –Western Wildfires

Actuality: Notable Western Wildfire Season

Higher egg prices?  Donald promised to lower prices.  That simply can't be true.  Prices must go down.

The Agrarian's Lament: The irony.

The Agrarian's Lament: The irony.: 

The irony.

 Same day, same paper.

One ad celebrating agriculture, and one celebrating its destruction.