What is this "rape and scrape" you speak of? Sounds like an alternative to catch and release incarceration for convicted sex offenders. If so - I think I like it!
New 2020-2021 WIHA map is out
- Thread starter Carl Spackler
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He's probably referring to the brainwashing by Big Ag, their subsequent control of the Ag Education curriculum at Ag focused Universities and Big Ag dictating Legislative Ag policy and what it's been doing to the farming landscape.
I know there are numerous farmers/landowners on here and I definitely do not lump everyone into this category at all....I've yet to meet Mike - hope I can someday but I feel when some express thoughts such as this I dont know if he thinks we are painting with a broad brush - so my disclaimer is not everyone.....- but there is a broad swath of people this applies to. Any casual observer that gets out and has driven the backroads over the years can see the changes in philosophy and practices. Anyone with an inkling for business can evaluate and simply scratch your head why in the world some of the decisions are made. A lot of it is mind boggling.
Short term focus with very little for the long game - much like happened at the turn of the 20th century and led to the dust bowl.
I unfortunately think it will only get worse especially if robotics starts to take over in farming and large farming operations are corporately owned by folks on the Coasts who only care about share price and nothing else.
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Are you sure? Certainly plenty of brainwashing going on in our institutions of higher education, but pro-industry waves are not generally among them. Perhaps he meant to say he misses the era of small "dirty" farms, perfect for our wonderful hobbies. Me too! But I opted for other ways of earning a living because of the associated economic hardship and risks. It is, indeed, disheartening but I think it is demand driven - ever expanding cities, suburbs and towns filled in no small part with recent immigrants, many with high reproductive rates. This drives demand for housing, food, schools, libraries, WalMarts, transportation etc etc - that suck up the very resources we cherish. Street signs where there weren't any when I had less gray hair (well, any hair) surround our place now. Along with wind power towers where prairie chickens used to be (GONE) and a big fat micro-wave tower. I hate it. But I don't think Big Ag is the primary culprit, at least not in my neighborhood. And that is exactly what I meant to say!
I dont know where you live presently but I'd say in crop country Big ag pushes their agenda pretty well - no one says you need dirty farming - but there's no way if you put pencil to paper and look at the big picture - farming to the extent you have property as clean as a golf course with all the input and economic requirements is the only way to make money. You know what they say about skinning a cat.
I've witnessed a handful of ranchers spraying their pastures. God forbid there's a weed in the pasture or any plant variety there, ya know cattle would never eat plants some ranchers view as weeds. What is done to the flint hills every year is a travesty in itself - I believe in fire but there's the extreme of no burning and the opposite extreme which is what is done to the flint hills yearly. The one thing that's been nice to see is the removal of trees the past few years if there is one positive on what flint hills landowners have been doing.
Anyways my .02 is most people take a very short view of the land and history is doomed to repeat itself.
My roots run deep. I own a beautiful acreage in the Flint Hills, and have for many decades. The FSA actually requires periodic burning or herbicide application on the CRP, so that noxious weeds don't spread to the detriment of the community. So, there's one of those regs you advocate for. Exactly what history do you feel we are repeating? If you are thinking Dust Bowl - I don't think Big Ag did that. Rather, the federal government at that time advocated and supported farming fence row to fence row. So we did.
Serious question. What percent of Big Ag companies were held, controlled or extensively influenced by Chinese enterprises 30 years ago, vice today, vice will likely be the case 5 years from now? I don't think the very real threats to our way of life are, primarily, ranchers or Big Ag - can we agree on that much?
I found this extremely ironic given some of our conversation here. Ive noticed the monarchs are next to non existent now. As a kid living in Butler County outside of Wichita in the 80s during what I remember as fall or spring (dont recall) I was obsessed with butterfly collecting (so rib me for their decline) but my mother would make sure I had a butterfly cage - would catch the different ones and study them -- Monarchs were very very plentiful - we were surrounded by pastures and no one soaking them with poison.
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Losing crucial Kansas habitat, federal agency to decide whether to protect Monarchs
BY SARAH SPICER
DECEMBER 14, 2020 05:01 AM,
UPDATED 3 HOURS 52 MINUTES AGO
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Duration 1:07
Watch a monarch butterfly emerge from its chrysalis
Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden dropped off monarch chrysalis. I set up a time lapse video of it. BY JOHN D. SIMMONS
This week, a decision is expected as to whether the Monarch, the famously recognizable orange and black colored butterfly, will receive endangered species status in the U.S.
Perhaps considered “native Kansans,” Eastern Monarchs lay vast proportions of their offspring in the state, their caterpillars depending on Kansas’ native milkweed as their sole food source.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to decide by Dec. 15 if the Monarch’s plummeting population warrants listing and will be protected federally under the Endangered Species Act. If the agency decides that Monarch Butterflies are protected, it will make it illegal to kill, harm or harass the insects and restrict the destruction of certain plants, like Milkweed.
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Habitat loss and climate change in Kansas and North America have caused an estimated 85% reduction in the Monarch population since the 1980s, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.
Monarch Butterflies are counted when they land on fir trees and winter in Mexico by counting the acres they take up. Researchers have estimated that 6 hectares, or 15 acres, is the level where Monarch butterflies begin to go extinct.
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The most recent count found Monarch butterflies in only 2.83 hectares or 7 acres, less than half the extinction threshold.
“Scientists think that they’re not gonna rebound,” said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, who has been working on getting Monarch’s protected status for seven years.
Worse off are the Western Monarch butterflies, which winter in California. This year, fewer than 2,000 Western Monarch butterflies were counted, falling from 27,000 two years ago and a couple million in the late 1990s.
CLIMATE CHANGE
With increased severe weather events and hotter, drier conditions across North America, climate change causes several problems for the Monarch butterfly, according to Curry. As March temperatures in Mexico and Texas warm up, the butterflies get confused and migrate too early, leading to high mortality rates.
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“If it’s too warm in Mexico in the winter now and they stay active and deplete their body condition,” Curry said. “Then they fly north again too early, and we get a freak spring storm snowstorm and it kills them.”.
Researchers have also observed that Monarchs aren’t able to get enough food for their migration during hot and dry weather.
“In the winter in Mexico, there aren’t as many flowers, so they have to put on all the weight to migrate to Mexico, survive the winter, and fly north again,” Curry said. “If it’s hot and dry and the flowers are dried up, then they just don’t get there in good enough body condition to survive the winter.”
The Monarchs overwintering in the mountains in Mexico, which are warming due to climate change. Unfortunately, these sites are the Monarch’s “Achilles’s heel,” and without them, the butterflies cannot survive, according to Dr. Orley Taylor, who founded and is the current director of Monarch Watch in Lawrence, Kansas.
“The predictions are that they’ll get pushed off the mountains by climate change,” Taylor said. “There’s just not gonna be any space left on that mountain...Warming temperatures at the overwintering sites are going to cause physiological stress of the Monarchs, to move further north or further up in elevation, but there’s only so far that they can move.”
HABITAT LOSS AND FARMER IMPACTS
Monarchs have lost an estimated 147 million acres of habitat since the early 1990s, a space nearly three times the size of Kansas.
Research found that most Monarch butterflies were being produced in Kansas corn and soybean fields with milkweed. Still, as more acres were being farmed and an influx of herbicide-resistant crops were introduced, Monarchs began dying, according to Taylor. Monarchs have lost approximately 147 million acres of habitat since the early 1990s, a space nearly three times the size of Kansas.
“Monarchs took a double hit, and then they have continued to lose habitat at a rate of an aggregate of two million acres a year since that time,” Taylor said. “The fragmentation that is provided by the intensification of agriculture just makes it more and more difficult for these butterflies to reproduce.”
Concerns that the listing may penalize farmers if they remove milkweed from their land has led to some criticism of the possibility of Monarchs’ listing as an endangered species. But farmers have little to worry about, according to Curry.
“I don’t think that the Fish and Wildlife Service will list them in such a way that it would significantly interfere with farming activities,” Curry said.
If the Monarchs are listed as an endangered species, there will be a public comment period, during which support and concerns can be voiced.
KANSAS CONSERVATION PLAN
Kansas developed a Monarch Conservation Plan that was finalized in Sept. 2019 to address specific threats posed to Monarch, such as mismanagement, habitat loss and breeding issues, according to Chris Berens, Chief of Ecological Services for the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism.
Under the plan, the state has created pollinator plots, restored habitat in state parks, and worked with private landowners to develop habitat conservation plans. Still, lack of funding has been a setback for the plan’s implementation, according to Berens.
The federal listing of the Monarchs under the Endangered Species Act would create a federal recovery plan for the butterflies and add much-needed funding to help conserve their habitats and populations, according to Curry.
Conservation and animal rights groups originally petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2014 for Monarch protections and later sued in 2016.
Help us cover your community through The Eagle's partnership with Report For America. Contribute now to help fund reporting on the effects of climate change in the Midwest, and to support new reporters.
Interesting, thanks. I would never rat you out for those Monarchs, or much of anything else (but it might be a good idea if you buried your net). Used to have relatives in Augusta - near you? Nice part of the world and the very nicest people you could ever hope to find, with rare exceptions.