What do the mice know that I don't?

Last Bite

As you may know, I blog from an old feedlot. There are no cattle here now, because its too close to the sensitive nostrils of town folks, who think that agriculture ought to be cashed in on but not smelled. So the feedlot office is surrounded on all sides by fields planted alternately to corn and soybeans. There must be millions of mice within a mile of the feedlot.

Twice every year many of these mice make a concerted effort to get into my office building. In the spring, when the fields are planted, and again in the fall at harvest time when their happy dens get torn up by the machinery, I can always expect a flood of little furry refugees. What mouse wouldn't want to move in with an old duffer that has plenty of food and only sweeps up his crumbs three or four times a year?

For the last couple of weeks, however, I've been getting invaded by hordes of mice for no reason I can see. The fields are in corn this year, the weather is normal and there has been plenty of moisture. Why the little rascals should want to go looking for new digs now is beyond me. I have to check my trap line twice a day. I wonder if the mice know something I don't.
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Speaking of trap lines reminded me of an old place that DadGum and I shared for a few years. It was an old one-room school house divided into rooms by wooden doors. We called it the Bayou and it had a relaxing "trap room":

The Trap Room

I'd get a cat, but the last ones I had here didn't like the fact that I keep the thermostat set at about 55ºF all winter. They were old, and both of them caught pneumonia and died the first winter they were here. For a good cat story, check out Jeffro's Poor Farm post about his cat Rooster.

Save the Rodeo

Bull Rider - Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo

Texas Fred wants everyone who likes the Rodeo to help show the anti-rodeo animal rights wackos just how small their vocal minority really is. Here's the story:

MSNBC has run a story about animal rights activists targeting Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo, they have a poll along with this story, at this point the animal rights folks are winning this poll, it seems you can only vote once so please vote NO and forward widely so we can show how much support rodeo has, here is the link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25725545/

Rodeo is not a cruel sport.

Please vote against this new rights agenda.

Go to a Rodeo and see for yourself if possible.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25725545/

The way I see it, animals have no rights whatsoever; not animal rights, not civil rights, not legal rights, none, nada, zip. Human beings do have responsibilities when it comes to animals. They are a gift to us from the creator and we must treat them as such. Its pretty simple, even if your god is money.

I don't find anything wrong with rodeos at all. The danger and excitement reflects and intensifies the everyday world, with its everyday risks and rewards. I feel the same way about the bullfight.

Even if the rodeo isn't your style, don't you think its worth a little effort to tell the animal rights spoilsports that most folks don't agree with them? The rodeo, or something like it, is a popular tradition in cattle and horse country everywhere.

Vote to save the Rodeo. Check out Texas Fred's 'related' video,

Wind Damage at the Feedlot

Wind starts to blow - click for video

A nasty storm with winds I estimate at about 90 mph came up very suddenly yesterday afternoon. It only lasted a few minutes, but severely damaged crops, trees, power lines, and some buildings in a swath extending from Fremont, Nebraska, through Omaha and on into Iowa. The storm killed two young folks in Council Bluffs just across the Missouri River from Omaha. A tree crushed the car they were using to get out of the wind driven rain.

The old feeder was tending his garden yesterday when the sirens in nearby towns went off. There was a dark cloud off to the west, but it looked like just an ordinary summer thunderstorm. Seeing no danger, I kept pulling weeds, figuring that whoever has their finger on the storm siren button was jumpy after a tornado tore through Omaha earlier this month with no sirens sounding beforehand.

I should have paid attention. The wind, rain and small hail sneaked up behind me. By the time I got to the house I was as wet as if I'd fallen into a lake. I saw some shingles, plywood and big lengths of irrigation pipe flying through the air. My camera was by the front door because I had planned to take a picture of the corn here to prove to my friends in Northwest Iowa that it was almost 6 feet tall already. I went out and snapped the picture above, and captured this short video clip of the wind beating up on the corn. As soon as I got back inside, the wind got worse and the electricity went off.

Today, I took these photos:

The corn this morning - quite a bit of it is down

I haven't been out to look at other fields, but I heard a report on the radio of corn being down in between Valley and Omaha. This sort of damage is depressing. Corn is pretty tough, and will often stand up again after the wind lays it down. It can still produce if the stalks break above ears that have already set. But it won't make anything but silage when the stalks are snapped off near the ground like these:

Updated: Click here for more You-Tube videos of this storm.

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Update: From Fox 42 News:

Roughly 100,000 acres of farmland in Douglas, Saunders and Dodge counties was either shredded or flattened.

It was going to be a great year for farmers north of Elkhorn. Instead, the storm leveled cornfields, corn that was 6 feet tall.

The longer term economic effects of this crop damage will be worse than the downed trees and power outages in town. Nebraskans tend to forget that most of the wealth of our state grows out of the ground.

Some of this land can be replanted to soybeans, and some of the damage is covered by insurance. It costs money to replant, and insurance payouts aren't manna from heaven. The storm's cost to agriculture can't be made to go away.

Cow Farts Got You Worried?

Add Beano to their Feed

Scientists at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research in the UK have a notion to change the diets of our meat animals to something less gassy. In spite of the fact that the man-made global warming scare has been mostly de-bunked, anyone that thinks they can get some sort of giver-mint grant to solve the non-existent problem are still hard at work. Never mind that volcanoes and rock concerts create more greenhouse gas than our herds of succulent meat animals, nor that farmers have a limited menu to offer in their pastures and feedlots.

I've got a better, more practical idea that doesn't involve changing the entire agricultural system. Just add Beano to the feed we already use. The stuff works, and the total cost to the ag economy would be small compared with trying to get farmers to change the way they have been feeding their livestock for so long. Once my Beano plan is implemented, all we'd have to do is make all those mountains of manure stop giving off methane.
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Perhaps switching to smaller cattle would help. Those little steaks would be cute.

Ethanol: Sensible Advice

Sensible advice from the Nebraska Cattlemen: "let the marketplace determine input needs for ethanol production." Read more at Southwest Nebraska News.

Odd Crop Report Headline

Big John Deere Planter

I saw this headline in a clipping service e-mail from Brownfield's Ag News Network: Nebraska Corn Board chairman relishes rain. The headline would have you believe the article will deal with grain farmers' worries that a) fields will be too wet, delaying planting or b) already drought suffering fields will be too dry later. When I read the article it was mainly a warning to farmers planning to plant seed corn using Syngenta's Agrisure RW MIR 604 biotechnology. Be careful to keep this stuff out of the Japanese market. They don't like biotech food, but will eat deadly poisonous raw fugu blowfish. Go figure.

The last two paragraphs, beginning with, "In other matters...", the author, Omaha's Peter Shinn, gets around to talking about the recent rain. That is what I started out to write about. The rain has delayed the grain fields surrounding the feedlot only slightly. No problems, but grain farmers always have to have two or three good reasons to worry and complain in reserve. Just in case the weather changes.
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Here is an nice farm report from transplanted Nebraskan Genevieve at Prairie Bluestem. Read how farmers rated in Brobdingnag. The King of B-Town also thought Europeans were "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

Grain Farmers - always something to complain about

Big Crop - Big Picker

America's grain farmers, God bless 'em, figure that any crop news is bad news. The latest crop estimates indicate a bigger than expected harvest this year. We suffered through some nasty drought conditions, but late rains proved to be a spoiler.

A spoiler, you ask? You might think a good harvest prediction would make farmers happy. not so. The good news about the coming harvest is really bad news for many Nebraska grain farmers. This seems counter intuitive, but much of farming in today's market is counter-intuitive. The government has so many fingers in the agricultural pie that the 'invisible hand' of Adam Smith can't move prices freely. In this case, the better the crop, the less government drought assistance will be forthcoming from Washington.

Says the Lincoln Journal: "The outlook for the nation’s corn and soybean crops is good enough it may hurt the effort in Congress to spend billions of dollars in drought aid." Is it any wonder that grain farmers are always crying about imminent ruin? Nothing in the farm economy makes sense unless you are Mike Johanns. Federal government choices, (socialist economic choices, if you ask me) made during and after the Great Depression have condemned the farmer to cursing a bumper crop and hoping to profit from disaster.

Let the state run the world and the world will be stood on its head in short order. Marxist thought stinks on ice.

Milkweed

Common Milkweed - Asclepias syriaca

Like many old rural homes, the house here at the Feedlot has a bit of an aroma. Warm, humid weather seems to bring out dank old scents as would have put Proust off writing. Of course, there is the 'boar's nest' smell of a lone old coot living a provincial and more or less rustic lifestyle. Previous occupants, who must have smoked truckloads of cigarettes and cigars in here over the years, added a permanent olfactory undertone. What comes out most on these hot days is the outright stink left behind by thousands of cattle, dozens of dogs and legions of mice.

I need an air freshener but, being as tight as a drum, I don't want to pay for it. This is where the handsome milkweed plant comes in. These noble weeds grow wild here, and blossom at the exact time I have a use for their sweet perfume. Their aroma is cloying to some; it certainly is strong. It reminds me of old fashioned perfume. Luca Turin describes the fragrance of Canoë perfume as the "pungent odor of poisonous milkweed".

All I do is bring in one or two of the purple blossom clusters into the house, and the effect is like a pleasant incense, but without the smoke. Certainly better than one of those nasty plug-in devices that cook off chemical fragrance oils. Those fire hazards use costly electricity, make my eyes burn and my clothes stink.

Be sure to shake the bugs off of the blossoms before bringing them in the house.

Milkweed Blossoms (click to ID bug)

The photos above are milkweeds growing at the edge of my grove. I deliberately avoid mowing them off, and even give them some water when they get dry. In return I get air freshener and raw materials for field expedient medicine. In fact there were so many medicinal uses for the various milkweeds that Linnaeus named the genus Asclepias after Asclepius, the Greek god of healing.

The US during WWII tried to make rubber out of the latex or milk that gives the milkweed its name, but the effort wasn't successful. Milkweed was able to help the war effort by supplying a substitute for Japanese controlled sources of tropical kapok, used to stuff life preservers. The floss that wafts milkweed seeds on the breeze could not only be used in place of kapok, but is also a good insulator. The hippies at Mother Earth News even suggest making a field expedient winter coat using milkweed fluff. Somehow, I think a nice furry hide would be better.

Milkweed Seed Pods - Floss

Believe it or not, there is a 'milkweed business' these days. It is small and struggling. Nebraska is trying to promote milkweed agriculture and to develop a market for milkweed products. Just this month, Governor Dave Heineman awarded a $33,400 grant "to educate farmers about uses for the alternative crop syriaca, better known as milkweed. The money will go to some outfit named Syriaca, and matching funds will come from the Nebraska Syriaca Cooperative, along with Natural Fibers Corporation of Ogallala, Southeast Community College and some local weed growers. They use the downy floss to make hypo-allergenic pillow stuffing and such. Growing milkweed to attract butterflies is becoming popular in some circles.

Milkweed farming: the next ostrich ranch.

It can't be anthropogeneric global warming

Dry Corn at the Feedlot

On the national scene this afternoon, it looks like the bad guys are on the ropes. Jihadis, commies, useful idiots, dupes, moonbats and eco-nuts are having a rough time lately. The Democrat party came out with a cut and run war platform. I can't even hear Senator Chuck Hagel crying "It's Viet-Nam! It's Viet-Nam!" over the fuss about Representative John Murtha's retreat to Okinawa redeployment scheme. Even the

Things are good with the world at large. But, here at the Feedlot, it is too hot and too dry. The corn is starting to roll up its leaves. Al Gore would say it must be anthropogeneric global warming. It can't be just an ordinary geology book climate shift, the sort variously blamed on solar fluctuation, volcanic eruptions, comet or meteor impacts. And it can't be God's wrath, as with Noah, because cats like Al Gore are Godless, no? But mere physics can't take the credit for punishing the human race for their wickedness and greed. Maybe Al believes in some kind of vengeful planetary numen, like a touchy, bitchy Mother Nature. One we could appease. Al doesn't think it is too late for absolution and salvation, does he? Repent! The Heat Wave is near!

To think that this miserable heat and dryness has been caused by people and their wicked, greedy ways is utter bunk. Sure, if you shit where you live, you'll be sorry, but that can't be causing the whole darn world to heat up. The world is still a big place. Believing that we humans, with our barely discernible scratching and fire-making on the surface of the earth could do a job that properly belongs to the sun and our own earth's vast core is the hubris of our age. The most recent example of such thinking was the mistaken belief that an 'all out' nuclear war would destroy life on earth. Same kind of bullshit with no science to support it, only the big scare.

Brueghel the Elder explored earlier examples of human arrogance in myth and from the Bible. This is a good excuse to post two of my favorite paintings:

The Fall of Icarus (big)


The Tower of Babel (big)

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How dry is it? Nebraska Governor Heineman has authorized farmers and ranchers to cut hay along the state's roadsides.

Nebraska Crop Report

Young Corn - Grant Wood

Nebraska's corn and bean planting is nearly completed. The weather has been warm and dry, facilitating this spring's field work. You can read the seedy details here at the Sioux City Journal. The link on their page to the Nebraska Agricultural Statistics Service wouldn't work for me, but if you can find out anything from their convoluted web site, you are a better internet navigator than I.

For you armchair farmers in the city, you can watch the area corn crop grow at Iowa Farmer Today's Corn Cam. The Corn Cam action is many times more exciting than watching paint dry. Watching the corn that surrounds the Feedlot is much better. For those of you who don't know, the corn in these parts grows almost fast enough to see it move. Sometimes corn will put on as much as 4-5 inches per day. Soybeans grow boringly slow by comparison.

It is still too early to make any sort of sound crop yield predictions for this year, but that doesn't stop commodities traders from trying. Omaha's own DTN has a niche market helping producers and traders see into the future. More progressive, Mother Earth News type farmers and traders might want to try a different form of divination: a corn reading.

America's Feedlots: Breaking the US Foreign Oil Habit

Gasoline from Manure

A Japanese researcher has developed a process for producing gasoline from manure. This is wonderful news, especially for those who were disappointed to discover that America's grain farmers weren't going to be able to solve our myriad energy problems with ethanol.

Sakae Shibusawa, an agriculture engineering professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, said his team has successfully extracted .042 ounces of gasoline from every 3.5 ounces of cow dung by applying high pressure, a catalyst, and heat.

Cattle produce plenty of manure. I can only hope the Japanese process is efficient, unlike the net energy consuming process for producing the less powerful ethanol currently in vogue. Instead of making relatively low-energy alcohol from grain, we could feed the grain to cattle and let them help turn the grain into good old high-test gasoline.

An added bonus, which should be considered in the efficiency calculus, we would get to eat the cows as they fatten. Effectively, we would be eating that part of the grain which the cows couldn't turn into manure. It sounds efficient.

Give us real gasoline and real meat!
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I tip my hat to Scott Segal at nerac for this great news.

Ethanol: a Trick on Farmers

Coal Power makes Ethanol

The old feeder used to illustrate the relationship between red indians and white men in the USA with an anecdote. It was the bad old smog days in southern California, and the solution du jour was to 'go electric'. This clean energy would reduce the fossil fuel emissions that were blamed for the smog.

At the very same time, some huge coal-fired electrical plants were built in the Four Corners area. This is where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona come together, and is home to numerous large red indian reservations. These plants not only were touted as a job boon for the poor res cats, but were going to enable the increased 'clean' electrification of the smoggy cities on the coast. It amounted to a trick on the indians. The totality of the transaction was merely to shift the dirty air from white folks' neighborhoods to red folks' reservations.

Something of the same sort is happening right here in the Great Plains. Today, a dearth of clean energy is the problem, and ethanol is the solution du jour. Naturally, most farmers think that laws forcing drivers to use gasoline adulterated with low energy alcohol are a good idea. When a businessman gets the government to force the public to buy his product, he knows in his heart that what he is doing is wrong. It isn't nice to get the government to push your neighbors around for your own benefit. So the businessman must also have some salve for his conscience. In this case the salve is green: using ethanol means clean air.

But this green salve, like most rationalizations, is only as good as its main premise, here: the resulting clean air. We must ask just how much clean air do we get for our moral lapse? And just exactly who gets to breathe this clean air? The answers would suggest that the push to force ethanol into our gas tanks is just as insidious a trick on farmers as the Four Corners coal burners were on the indians.

The production of ethanol requires an input of energy. The corn or other biomass must be ground, fermented and distilled. Where does the energy to make the ethanol come from? Well, here in Nebraska it comes from burning coal. Coal that is burned right here in Nebraska, at coal plants that are built specifically to service the ethanol plants. Think I'm kidding?

Here are two separate press releases from Archer Daniels Midlands. The first one announces the expansion of ethanol production with a planned new ethanol plant in Columbus, Nebraska. The second one announces the planned construction of a coal fired power plant to be built in Columbus to power the ethanol plant. Nobody wants another coal fired plant in their neighborhood. Just ask the cats in California, where they haven't built a new one in decades. The new Columbus plant will also burn high-sulphur coal, old tires and other trash for fuel. I can smell it already!

Nebraskans choke on the smoke, so city folks can feel green and breathe free. Wise up, grain farmers. Don't sell 'the good life' so cheaply. Ethyl alcohol is for drinking; it is a lousy fuel that takes more 'green' than it gives.

"Farmer's Snow" Causes Calving Problems In Nebraska

Moo

The big snow we just had here at the Feedlot was considerably worse to the west of us. Up to 25" in some places. While this represents much needed soil moisture for farming, it is making trouble for cattle feeders because it comes during the spring calving season. As Nebraska Department of Agriculture Assistant Director Jamie Karl said, "a cold and wet cow doesn't pay as much attention to her new-born calf as she might if she were comfortable". Keeping your steaks happy and affordable is hard work. Read more about the difficulties caused by the recent snow in this article from Cattle Network .
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Jeff Soyer, who writes one of the best gun blogs on the 'net, Alphecca, and who happens to be gay, says he has to post a something 'gay' now and then just to keep up his cred among the secret gay agenda crowd. Similarly, I feel like I need to post a real 'cattle feeder' story every so often, so the Plains Feeder's farm and ranch readers won't think I'm a city slicker.

Buy Danish Pork

Its Automatic!

The Danes have put lots of thought into their Welfare State. You have to hand it to them, having to rationalize the added costs of their cheesy Utopia at every turn. Their agricultural economy is dominated by the co-operative plan, which got it's start during the same restless decades that produced Das Kapital.

The industry that produces fine Danish Crown hams and other pork products of Denmark is a vertically integrated co-operative in which the farmers own the whole business from farm field to shipping dock. As you might expect, the Danish Welfare State extends it's promise of cradle-to-grave care not just to people, but to it's farm animals as well. Thus, one of the added costs the Danish farmers need to rationalize is the added cost of keeping their hogs happy. In the USA, we allow the consumer to decide if they want to buy (and pay more for) meat from happy pigs. Just ask the butcher at Wild Oats. We can still get cheaper pork chops, cut from presumably more depressed pigs raised under drearier conditions.

The old feeder was surprised to see how automated the Danish hog production has become. As a student at Iowa State University, I did a stint as the janitor at the ISU Meat Lab. They had a small kill floor and processed all sorts of livestock. Not only did I learn to sharpen knives from the cats there, but I got a real appreciation for how our cuts of meat land up in our stores. That was 'way over 30 years ago; how times have changed!

At ISU the hogs went right from the trucks into a pen on the kill floor, where the hapless creatures could see and smell their pals getting stunned by a pneumatic hammer or electric shock, hoisted by their heels and 'stuck' right in the neck. The hogs would nervously maneuver to avoid being the next selectee. Unlike cattle, which always seemed to be rather blasé at the prospect of being butchered, the hogs reacted more like I would in the same circumstances. The subsequent steps, eviscerating, hair removal, splitting and cutting were time consuming and looked to me like hard work.

In the new Danish hog production facilities the whole business is not only designed to comfort and relax the hogs in their last hours, but the slaughterhouse workers are largely replaced by robotics. The hogs go into a lairage system, where they are allowed to relax from their transport. By law, the doomed pigs must be allowed or encouraged to move in happy little groups of their own free will through the pen system until the group is unwittingly lowered by elevator into a 'room' full of carbon dioxide. Hogs are even bred to have a gene that keeps them from smelling or being irritated by the gas. The idea is: less struggling equals better meat.

Once the hogs are stunned, their work is finished. Robots do almost everything else besides final cutting and inspection. The automated steps include:

• Automatic bung cutter, throat cutter and ham divider
• Automatic carcass opener
• Automatic evisceration
• Automatic back finning (pre-cutting of loins)
• Automatic back splitting

I couldn't find a picture of the bung cutter, but most of the other steps are pictured in this fine article about Danish Crown's big plant in Horsens, Denmark. (Just click the small pictures in the right column.) Fascinating, no?One other thing I couldn't help notice that sets the Danish hog facilities apart from our own meat packing houses was the apparent lack of 'people of color' working there. All the folks in the pictures look to be, well, Danish. And I don't mean to include the browner, more towel-headed Danes you see in the news these days. I guess there are some jobs the Mohammedans just won't take. This is the opposite of what we find here in America, where our packing plants are staffed in significant numbers by immigrants from south of the border. Mexicans, mostly, taking those jobs whiter folks just don't want. So, if you want pork products untouched by brown hands, buy Danish Crown.
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The blood of Danes has been declared Halal by some fundamentalist Mohammedans. At least the Danish hogs need never worry about having their throats cut while conscious as Halal slaughter requires !

Jyllands-Posten

State 29: Corn Burning Stoves

With winter coming soon, the old feeder's thoughts turn to wood stoves. Oh, I've had to live in a house in town with 'forced air' central heat. Fate has also landed me in big cities for years at a time, with noisy, leaky steam radiators. I could stand it when I was younger, but I just don't have time to waste on it any more. I like rural , even rustic life. I like wood stoves. Fireplaces just aren't the same.

Not only are they homey things, but feeding them is as good for you as having a treadmill or a bow-flex. And they appeal to the old feeder's penny pinching nature. I've never had a modern one, though. The fanciest one was an enormous old Monarch cook stove, complete with numerous lids, warming ovens and a hot water reservoir. The most humble was an old 'trash burner', pictured here, and which I think DadGum still has.

The fall smell of other wood stoves in the air inspired these fond remembrances like Proust's madeleine. Now comes State 29 with a post titled Corn Burning Stoves to add interest to my nostalgia. The feeder has burned wagon loads of cobs, but never corn itself. These modern contraptions are made by Even-Temp Incorporated of Waco, Nebraska, and are apparently so popular this winter as to be almost unavailable.

It isn't the first time Great Plains folk have burned corn to keep warm. The Great Depression was the last time the practice was widespread. The Buffalo County Nebraska Historical Society web site has this story that describes Depression corn burning in Nebraska: The Plow That Broke The Plains by Michael W. Schuyler.

The first major shock waves of the depression did not strike the farm belt until 1931 but, by 1932, had destroyed nearly all that was left of the farmers' foreign markets and had driven farm prices down to disastrously low levels. By 1933 farm income was less than half of what it had been only a year earlier. Many farmers in the County burned corn for fuel when the price fell to only nine cents per bushel.

I hope this renewed interest in burning corn is merely a reaction to the high cost of traditional fuels this winter, and not a sign that 'hard times' are again upon us. Its a good thing the Feedlot bought a propane contract for this winter.
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Reposted to stay on top today- because it's such a nice warm fuzzy post - ptg

Grain farmers get Katrina heads-up

Welcoming homeless hurricane survivors, sending volunteers with supplies and raising money to help, American private citizens have comported themselves well. Now we face the prospect of doing with less (read: real budget cuts - pork slashed), one way or another, to pay for the public sector's role in the rebuilding.

I hope we can do it without too much of our public money getting lost to bureaucratic inefficiency, eaten up by corruption or just plain stolen. Maybe we can also do it without whining or squabbling over our share of the doing with less.

I came across this article: Proper grain storage could be more important than usual this year, at Agriculture Online, Successful Farming mag's website. Grain farmers are taking steps to mitigate the economic impact Katrina may have in store for the crops in the fields now.

David Shelton, a UNL agricultural engineer at the Haskell Agricultural Laboratory near Concord, Nebraska said "Proper grain storage could be more important than usual this year" because "Producers may want to store grain longer than usual this season in hopes that grain prices will improve once Gulf Coast ports return to full capacity".
Mitigation.
Responsible folks mitigate their damages. No wonder we don't see much of it.
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Linked with Wizbang's Carnival of the Trackbacks. If you got here from there, welcome . Plains Feeder isn't really about farming. There's more.

Rewilding the Great Plains

The tweed jacket with elbow patches crowd are at it again. They know what we need to make ours a better world. They have a plan: the rewilding of the Great Plains: USA Today.

My Dad tells about picking up a New Yorker at the airport in Des Moines. On the long drive across Iowa to Omaha, the vistor commented that she had, "never seen so much wasteland." Because it wasn't developed, it was just wasteland, I guess. I wonder what she would think about western Nebraska or Wyoming?

These rewilders aren't just the 'give it all back to the buffaloes' crowd, whose chief proponent, Jane Fonda's ex, Ted Turner, has been buying up huge tracts of the Great Plains for years. These new cats want to rewild our prairies with African wildlife. Lions and elephants and more would roam the 'wasteland', if they get their way.

These pointy headed professors must think nobody owns this land now, or if they do, they just haven't found any good use for it yet. Grazing cattle and raising feed crops don't fit into their PETAfied view of proper land use. If Bush doesn't care about blacks, then these vapid elitists don't care about farmers and ranchers. Peasants, I guess.

I'm going to predict that this rewilding baloney never happens.

More proof Nebraskans won't like rewilding: Monkeys shot for escaping zoo!
**OK, they were chimps. Chimpanzee, orangutan, baboon, ape, it doesn't matter. They are all monkeys to me. It won't make any difference to you, either, when they get into your chicken house.

The Beef State and PETA

Today Is International Eat An Animal For PETA Day. I wouldn't have known this except for the sharp cats at Wizbang, who can turn any story into an excuse to run some titty pictures.

( I am pinning my hopes for bloggy success on emulating the Wizbang tit policy.)

This sort of Special Day goes pretty much ignored here in the
Beef State.

Yes, we love our meat and tolerate our PETA freaks. Even pinko Omaha, the home of Omaha Steaks, Gorat's (Warren 'BillionaireLib' Buffet's favorite), Farmer Brown's (although their best location is in Waterloo, just west of Elkhorn), dozens of other steak and chop joints, and countless barbecue fans, puts up with a bit of meat-eating. Witness their short-lived slogan campaign "Omaha, Rare Well Done":

But the evil, out-of-touch Omaha city council recently passed a city ordinance that would ban having a charcoal grill on an apartment balcony. This pissed people off so bad they had to tell the police they didn't have to enforce it. The cops didn't want to be pressed into becoming the cook-out police. They changed their slogan to O! (Remember the Story of O!) Did I mention that the Omaha city government is crazy? Who wouldn't want to a part of all this?

King Corn

State Senator Jack Kibbie of Iowa is introducing a bill mandating that all gasoline sold in the state include 10% ethanol, as in Minnesota, the only state that presently requires this. The timing of the wiley old farmer couldn't be better due to the war in Iraq and consumer concerns about fuel costs and the environment. Ethanol is supposed to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and provide a cheaper and cleaner burning fuel. One problem is that ethanol doesn't perform as advertised according to the EPA and the National Academy of Sciences. It could conceivably worsen air quality, cost more and reduce gasoline mileage.

The corn lobby is powerful, as Senator Diane Feinstein learned after an unsuccessful attempt to prevent ethanol from replacing MTBE in California gas. Minnesota already has a government/agri-business hard-on to raise their requirement to 20% by 2012. For those who would like to see the development of hydrogen fuel and other alternatives, the ethanol industry will undoubtedly become a special interest roadblock. And for those, like myself, who would like some freedom of choice at the gas pumps, don't look for it in Minnesota and, quite possibly, Iowa.