Cheyenne Wilson

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Re-weaning

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Re-weaning: If at first you don't succeed, try again. Last fall we weaned our two calves for two weeks. Then, threw them back in the herd. I knew th...

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Bautista

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Bautista: There aren't a lot of men and women left around Johnson County who are first generation from the Basque region of Spain and France, but ...

The Agrarian's Lament: Trump Says He’s Bailing Out Farmers. Here’s who REALLY benefits.

The Agrarian's Lament: Trump Says He’s Bailing Out Farmers. Here’s who RE...:  

Trump Says He’s Bailing Out Farmers. Here’s who REALLY benefits.

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

Foothill Agrarian: Getting to Know a Place: For some time, I’ve thought a great deal about how long someone needs to really know a place. To know its geography, for sure, but also to k...

Foothill Agrarian: In Defense of Wood Heat

Foothill Agrarian: In Defense of Wood Heat:   Or, I might have a firewood problem… Tonight, my new woodshed is full of firewood - a combination of white oak from my neighbor’s property...

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

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Doyle Creek Drive

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Doyle Creek Drive: 135 years ago, Wyoming was officially made a state. No better way to celebrate that gift than with a cattle drive in the Bighorn National Fo...

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

How to Survive the End of the World

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Trailing Yearlings

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Trailing Yearlings: I'm always up for something new, like trailing yearlings. I've been around them plenty, but never to this degree. No better way to l...

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Ranching Freely

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Ranching Freely: Memorial Day is a day to remember and give thanks to all who have sacrificed themselves for our freedom. No better way of doing that than by...

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

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Horse Shoeing

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Horse Shoeing: Thankfully, Chief is not lame this spring like he was last fall. That was worrisome. To prevent it from happening again, I think we better s...