From Out Of The past

This whole big brouhaha is not something we've never seen before.

This clip could be as recent as yesterday, but it's from 13 years ago.

We have to stop being the stoopid country.

Closing A Loop

Turning skeeters into eggs and fertilizer.

A Health Influencer

BTW - when 23 million Americans aren't getting enough to eat, it's time to make some real changes.

Fuck the rich

Feed the poor

Or feed the rich to the poor

But yeah - fuck the rich

History

History teaches the lessons, and lets us retake the test as often as we want.

Farmer Lady

Facts don't give a fuck about your feelings - markets do.

Cuts

The suicide rate among American farmers is still 2 to 3.5 times higher than the general population.

So what happens? DOGE cuts funding for the suicide hotline.

Republicans really don't given one empty fuck about anything but stroking the billionaires' tax dicks.

What the fuck are we doing?

Colorado farmers just lost their most important mental health lifeline

The $10 million program offered services to farmers and ranchers, whose suicide rate is at least two times higher than the average population

Colorado farmers and ranchers lost access to a critical lifeline when the U.S. Department of Agriculture last week froze funding for a program that supports the mental health of a population whose suicide rate is at least two times higher than the average population, and whose profession is marked by uncertainties in the weather, market and cost of operating.

LeeAnne Sanders, spokesperson for the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, said annual funding for the union’s AgWell program in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico is just $100,000 to $160,000, but that funding helps counter the stresses of farming and ranching, which contribute to mental health challenges and the statistically higher rates of suicide.

AgWell funding comes from a $10 million federal grant to the USDA’s Farm and Ranch Assistance Network funneled in part through the Western Regional Agricultural Stress Assistance Partnership. The Western regional partnership recognizes that high levels of stress are present in agricultural communities from causes like unstable finances, carrying the pressure of multigenerational farm lineage, injury, acute illness, adverse weather and climate change. The partnership helps producers in 13 Western states from Washington to New Mexico as well as Alaska, Hawaii and four U.S. territories.

And neither Chad Franke, president of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, nor AgWell founder Dan Waldvogle can understand why a program costing so little would be slashed when it helps people do the critical work of providing food for America and the world as their challenges loom larger all the time.

“There is a recognition that mental health in general is an area of concern in the United States, but within the ag community, the stress is unique and pervasive,” Franke said. “Farmers and ranchers really don’t control their own destiny. When it comes to business, it rains too much. It doesn’t rain enough. It hails. The wind blows. It snows too soon or it doesn’t snow enough. There’s just so little that farmers and ranchers really, truly have control over that it’s a unique situation as far as stress goes.”

Waldvogle conceptualized AgWell in 2018 after four ranchers living near the ranch he was working on in southern Colorado all died by suicide within a matter of months.

“One of those individuals moved cows for us up in the high country in the summers,” he said. “Another one, I was actually their mentor. He was a beginning farmer. And then another was an old timer that was, you know, probably a sixth-generation rancher just upriver from us. So it definitely heightened my awareness of the issue at that time. And at the same time, I was going through some issues and joined the Farmers Union as a staff member. I had the opportunity to kind of create the program, and then federal funding for it was enabled through the 2018 Farm Bill.”

The “business card” that can change everything

AgWell has helped producers in the Eastern Plains town of Peetz, says Danny Wood, a 61-year-old dryland farmer who grows corn, wheat and grain and who is the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union director for his region. Wood spoke to The Colorado Sun from his fields on Tuesday.

“I’m out here in my fields right now, and it is so dry, we are in such a drought, it’s stressful,” he said. “The economy is stressful. It was hard for everybody to get their operating lines (of credit) renewed this year because we lost money last year. And we’ve lost money for the last three years. So there’s the added stress of that now.”

Franke says AgWell was created out of the understanding that farmers and ranchers “tend to be solitary, do-it-yourself kind of people, who will do what they need to do to get things done,” but “when it comes to mental health, you can’t do that. You can’t do it alone.”

AgWell, he said, “has really honed in on not so much talking about strictly mental health and mental wellness, but about the need for community, the need to watch out for our friends and our neighbors, and how to do that.”

To that end they offer summits “where we invite just the general public to come in. This is not just for our members,” he said.

“And we do things like Pizza4Producers, where we will pay for the pizzas and invite producers to come out, just talk, and build that connection among neighbors, while sharing some of that information of, this is what you need to look out for in yourself and your neighbors. These are some of the resources. We’ve got little business card-sized handouts that have a list of those crisis management resources.”

Wood says he has used those cards three times in the past six months to help producers in his community.

“They have contact numbers on them of places you can call if you need to talk to someone,” he said, adding they can get six free sessions of anonymous, professional counseling.

He gave the first card to a high school junior who approached him in distress.

“Now, can you imagine approaching a gentleman who’s 61 years old” that you know but aren’t close to “and telling him ‘I need some help?’ I mean, that had to be a milestone killer for him to do it.” But Wood was able to pull out the card and direct the young man to help.

The second person was a single mother caring for her child and her ailing parents, who reached out to Wood’s wife implying she wanted to die by suicide. He was able to give her a card, too, connecting her to a therapist.

And the third was an older man having a hard time with his farm who couldn’t get an operating line of credit. Wood gave him a card, and the man said, “Well, do you want me to let you know what happens?”

“No, no I don’t,” Wood answered. “That’s not what this program is about. This is a resource to give them the contact, and it’s completely anonymous. They talk to this therapist or the specialist. And I don’t want to know what happened. That’s not my business.”

“This is the most amazing program, and I can’t believe the funding got cut for it,” he added.

“They wouldn’t cut it if they had any idea how important this is. Because there’s folks just like me. I’m out here spraying all day. And it’s dry, it’s bleak, it looks horrible. I mean, it’s depressing. And this was a horrible time to have a cut, I guarantee you.”

Helping a new generation adapt to the challenges of agriculture

Leah Ricci, interim executive director for the Quivira Coalition, which supports new ranchers and farmers interested in regenerative agriculture in several Western states, says AgWell funding has helped participants in the coalition’s New Agrarian program adapt to the isolation associated with working in agriculture.

“One of the things we have heard directly from our participants and from alumni is that isolation is one of the number one challenges they face when trying to enter careers in agriculture and particularly in the West, when people are often like, no joke, two hours from the nearest grocery store,” she said.

“They may be working and living somewhere where literally the only people they see are their boss and their boss’s family members. So being able to access opportunities that support their social well-being, help them feel connected to other beginning ranchers and farmers and just to provide a regular space for them to gather is critical to helping them navigate the type of isolation they have to deal with.”

With AgWell funding, Quivira has been able to create a “weekly wind-down” Zoom call that’s modeled after a call AgWell first offered to ranchers and farmers in Colorado.

“It’s essentially a weekly space that anyone can show up to, and if someone has something hard to talk about, they know the space is there,” Ricci said. “But more importantly, it’s a consistent space that anyone can show up to if they want to just connect with others, and they know that there’s going to be a staff person there who’s welcoming and supportive, and other farmers and ranchers who they can connect with.”

“Those meetings are based on a recommendation that the number one protective factor against mental illness and suicide is having a supportive social network,” she added. “Particularly in these rural communities, when there aren’t very many third spaces, anything we can do to provide that social network is a protective layer.”

Finding other funding is crucial

Franke said the AgWell program is so important not only to producers but to rural communities that the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union is committed to shuffling its budget, finding new partners and seeking out new grant opportunities to keep it going.

Supporting producers through mental health programs is crucial, he said, because of the service they provide, the food they grow, for America and the world.

“But when you look at the numbers, in the last five years, we’ve lost around 400,000 family farm and ranch operations in this country. That is rural America,” he said. “You know, the eastern Colorado towns, the mountain towns, the reason they exist and continue to exist is because of agriculture. If we lose family farms and ranches, the small towns across this country will continue to die off and just shrink in population and no longer have a reason to exist.”

Franke said the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union met with the USDA Thursday and USDA reiterated that all Farm and Ranch Assistance Network grants have been suspended.

Four Democratic state lawmakers introduced House Bill 1321 earlier this month that would send $4 million from the state’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act cash fund to the governor’s office to support the state’s legal defense against Trump administration actions slashing federal dollars meant for Colorado.

“The additional funding will ensure that Colorado is ready to respond swiftly and effectively to future federal actions that threaten nonnegotiable services like health care, early childhood education and public safety,” said state Sen. Jeff Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat. He’s one of the lead sponsors of the measure.

The bill passed the state House and on Thursday its first vote in the Senate. Republicans are fighting the measure but do not have the votes to block it.

Farm Guy To Farm Guy

About That Climate Change Thing

I really don't want this to seem like I'm kicking them when they're down - that's not what this is about, even though it's going to be construed that way by some.

I'm hip, I get it, I feel your pain - and I'm more than willing to do what I can to help these folks. In fact, that's very much exactly what "the libtards" have been trying to do for more than 50 fucking years.

But boneheaded "conservatives" have been voting for dog-ass coin-operated politicians who have lied us all into a pretty shitty situation, and I'm not going to sugar-coat it.

This shitty situation is a shitty situation because deliberately ignorant Republican voters keep lining up to have outfits like DumFux News fill their fool heads with the worst kind of toxic political sludge anyone on any dozen planets can imagine.

NYT: (pay wall)

‘The Worst Thing I Can Ever Remember’: How Drought Is Crushing Ranchers

North Dakotans can’t grow enough feed for their cattle, so they’re selling off the animals before they starve.

TOWNER, N.D. — Darrell Rice stood in a field of corn he’d planted in early June, to be harvested in the fall and chopped up to feed the hundreds of cows and calves he raises in central North Dakota.

“It should be six, seven, eight foot tall,” he said, looking down at the stunted plants at his feet, their normally floppy leaves rolled tight against their stalks to conserve water in the summer heat.

Like ranchers across the state, Mr. Rice is suffering through an epic drought as bad or worse than anywhere else in this season of extreme weather in the Western half of the country.

A lack of snow last winter and almost no spring rain have created the driest conditions in generations. Ranchers are being forced to sell off portions of herds they have built up for years, often at fire-sale prices, to stay in business.

Some won’t make it.

“It’s a really bad situation,” said Randy Weigel, a cattle buyer, who said this drought may force some older ranchers to retire. “They’ve worked all their lives to get their cow herd to where they want, and now they don’t have enough feed to feed them.”

Since December, in the weekly maps produced by the United States Drought Monitor, all of North Dakota has been colored in shades of yellow, orange and red, symbolizing various degrees of drought. And since mid-May, McHenry County, where Mr. Rice ranches and farms, has been squarely in the middle of a swath of the darkest red, denoting the most extreme conditions.

The period from January 2020 to this June has been the driest 18 months in McHenry and 11 other counties in the state since modern record keeping began 126 years ago, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“I’ve been ranching for 47 years and then this year had to come along,” said John Marshall, who ranches with his son, Lane, not far from Mr. Rice in this sprawling county where the county seat, Towner, bills itself as the cattle capital of North Dakota. “It’s the worst thing I can ever remember.”

Drought conditions that are affecting nearly half the land area of the lower 48 states are helping send beef prices higher in America’s grocery stores. But ranchers here say they aren’t seeing that money — slaughterhouses and other middlemen are. If anything, the ranchers said, they are losing money because they are getting less from the forced sale of their animals.

The Marshalls have already sold about 100 cows and plan to sell at least another 120, which would leave them with about two-thirds of their usual herd. “Never had to do it before,” Mr. Marshall said.

Mr. Rice’s corn, which is stored as silage to feed his animals later in the year, is so short that if he tried to harvest now it he couldn’t. “It’s unchoppable,” he said.

If he gets some rain — a big if, as the forecast into the fall is for continued heat and dryness — the corn may reach six feet, or half its usual height. Even then he would be looking at a shortage of feed, and would very likely have to have his cows weighed at the communal ranchers’ scale off Main Street in Towner and then sold to a buyer elsewhere.

“If we don’t get silage,” he said, “the cows are going to town.”

Rachel Wald, who works for North Dakota State University advising and supporting ranchers, said that livestock auction houses, called sale barns, had been very busy this spring and summer. “We’ve got 2,000 critters heading down the road each week” in the county, she said. By some estimates, half the cattle in the state may be gone by fall.

For ranchers who have spent years building up the genetics of their herd, that can mean a giant step backward. “Every year we try to better our breed,” said Shelby Wallman, who with her husband, Daryl, has been ranching for decades in Rhame, in the southwestern corner of the state.

“It’s a calling,” she said. “You spend your entire life with these cattle. I can tell you, there’s going to be tears.”

North Dakotans have seen drought many times before. One in 1988 was particularly bad, although John Marshall and others who made it through that year said the current drought is worse.

Ranchers point to the variable nature of the climate here — where a dry year or two may easily be followed by a wet period — instead of talking about climate change. Yet climate change is occurring in North Dakota, as it is everywhere else.

“We’re at the epicenter of a changing climate,” said Adnan Akyuz, the state’s climatologist and a professor at North Dakota State University. The state has warmed by 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1.3 degrees Celsius) over the past century, he said. That’s one of the largest increases in the United States.

North Dakota’s climate is expected to become even more variable, with more extreme rainfall and heat. And as elsewhere, droughts are expected to grow in intensity and frequency.

Conditions are highly variable in large part because North Dakota is so far from the oceans, which have a moderating effect on climate. When the state doesn’t get moisture from them, it relies on local sources, including lakes, rivers and reservoirs, along with moist air that funnels into the region in late spring and summer from the Gulf of Mexico.

But that Gulf moisture did not arrive this year. And heat has dried up many of the local water sources. The result is air that sucks all the moisture it can from the soil and from plants.

Signs of drought-stressed vegetation can be seen across McHenry County. Stunted silage corn like Mr. Rice’s is called pineapple corn, because the tight leaves make it look more like a pineapple plant. Elsewhere, soybean plants have flipped their leaves over to reduce photosynthesis and thus the need for water, giving them a paler green appearance.

And in the Marshalls’ pastures, grass that would normally be green and reach the knee is brown and stubby.

The Marshalls rely on clean well water pumped into troughs for most of their cattle. But they and other ranchers also use watering holes, which collect snow runoff and rain. And as watering holes dry up, nutrients and other compounds in the water become more concentrated, which can sicken animals.

In one of the Marshalls’ watering holes, the level had dropped by several feet. Ms. Wald, from the university, tested for sulfates and dissolved solids and told the Marshalls that the water was still good. But she noticed something else.

“Lane, one of the things I’d watch out for here is actually blue-green algae,” she said. Amid the heat the organisms were flourishing and could eventually release toxins that could harm cattle. “If a bloom occurs you have to move the animals out of here and find them a new water source,” Ms. Wald said.

Like other ranchers, the Marshalls have bought supplemental feed. But with the drought sending feed prices higher, at some point it makes more financial sense to sell animals.

That has kept auctioneers busy. At a recent sale at Kist Livestock Auction in Mandan, just across the Missouri River from Bismarck, ranchers in pickup trucks, trailers in tow, lined up to unload cattle they couldn’t afford to keep.

Tom Fettig and his wife, Kim, were there with 60 yearlings, about half of a herd they were helping their son raise on the outskirts of Bismarck. The animals had been bought in February with the goal of fattening them until October, when they would be sold to a feedlot.

The drought ruined those plans. “We’ve only had them out on pasture since June 1,” Mr. Fettig said. “And there’s nothing left.”

Their hay crop has been abysmal as well. In a normal year they’d end up with 800 to 900 bales. So far this year they have only 21.

Inside the semicircular auction ring, the Fettigs sat on a bench and waited for their yearlings to come up for sale. They watched as a parade of other animals entered and the auctioneer, Darin Horner, rattled off prices in a droning hum. Weights and prices flashed on screens above the auctioneer’s head.

“There’s a nice set of steers right off the prairie,” Mr. Horner announced as the Fettigs’ animals crowded the ring in two groups of 30. They sold for about $1,250 apiece — perhaps $150 a head less, Mr. Fettig said, than if they’d been able to feed them all summer.

The Fettigs and John Marshall are fortunate in that their sons have followed them in the ranching business. But Jerry Kist, a co-owner of the auction barn, noted that older ranchers whose children have left the land were the most vulnerable in this drought, as were younger ranchers who don’t have ranching parents they can rely on to help them become established.

“You just don’t want to see these guys folding and selling their whole cow herd,” Mr. Kist said.

Today's Tweet

Wonder how much he thinks they can get for beans and wheat that's mostly slime by now.

Good news, Farmers, he loves you.

He loves you like a billionaire loves a porn star. https://t.co/xvfntdYkDR

— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) December 3, 2018

And how much suffering are the rubes willing to endure just so they can avoid having to admit they're getting played?

Connections

I think this guy is trying hard to get "conservatives" to look at things from a perspective other than from inside their own bowels; using his take on John Mellencamp's music to illustrate their basic inability to hear what "the American people" are really trying to tell them.

David Masciotra at The American Conservative:

One of the problems of movement conservatism is a resistance to—and often flat out rejection of—complexity. Too much of the American right is dominated by a mentality that views its country with childlike simplicity and awe. Any invocation of American iconography must be worshipful, and for those who combine Christianity with nationalism to create a civil religion, any sign of the cross must be celebratory of everything American.

Not that I have a lot of confidence in anybody's ability to get these meatheads either into line or out of the party, but I can tip my hat to a guy who's making some effort to move people away from the adolescent insistence that all we need is a little common sense and that every problem (and therefore, every solution) can be reduced to simple 10-word phrases that fit neatly onto bumper stickers; or that can be perfectly reflected in a 3-minute pop tune.