A Farmer Far Afield

Dustings

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By John Mattingly The morning after a light snow is a revealing time to walk in the brush lands of the northern San Luis Valley. Fresh snow provides a relief map of the previous night’s activity, engaged in by other creatures that live here. The footprints of various rabbits and hares, mice and moles, numerous …

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WHAT NEXT? Part 1

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By John Mattingly Everybody knows that The Virus will gut-punch parts of the U.S. economy. Regardless of “what might have been,” the sheer cost of dealing with the disease—as it behaves alternately like a glacier and wildfire across the States—will be considerable. To approach “what next,” consider the parable of the $100 bill. A banker …

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Dry Times

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By John Mattingly Songwriter Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” should include the dicta: we need the rain like the rain needs the sky. The Sangre de Christo mountains are as bare as most of us have ever seen them in mid-May. On average, peak runoff from the Sangres is the last two weeks of May, and …

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A New Water Rush

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By John Mattingly The right to domestic water, like the right to own guns, is constitutional. (Imagine Charlton Heston pointing at a glass of water.) The Colorado Constitution states no citizen of the state shall ever be denied access to clean drinking water. It’s a guarantee from the early days of statehood, when the East-West, …

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Going Virtual, Part 3

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By John Mattingly Ballot Measure 1A passed handily in the November 6 election, meaning there will be a small sales tax increase to raise an estimated one million dollars to fund activities that will protect forests, waters and open spaces. On November 5, Commissioner Felt offered a guest opinion in the Mountain Mail advocating for …

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A Farmer Far Afield: Watch Out For the Words

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By John Mattingly

I remember the days of, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” And, “I am rubber, you are glue so what you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” Codicils to these were: “Talk is cheap,” and “Actions speak louder than words,” and “BS walks.”

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Warm Winters

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By John Mattingly

The most common “thoughts and prayers” during an unseasonably warm winter are mixed between taking advantage of the warm weather and the perennial concern in the West for snowpack and water supply.

Having farmed for over forty years, I’ve spent most of my life outside, where luck and livelihood depended on the weather. My memories and records of the weather are testimonial and cover a de minimis time period, but suggest warm winters have come along about two out of five winters since 1968. There have been several Januaries during which I had to suppress the temptation to plant wheat, and one January, in 1976, when I did plant wheat, it went on to be harvested in June. “You got away with one,” an old timer told me.

Maybe. In recent years, as noted in a prior column, winter wheat (Hard Red Winter Wheat), is becoming common in places that were previously too cold. And, ironically, this should signal that we may need to “get away with one” (or two) if Earth’s climate changes in ways less favorable to mammals. We know this is a possibility; we see evidence accruing, and recent storms have both stimulated probity and caused many to bury their head in a pew.

Ed Quillen wrote a piece years ago articulating problems with mobilizing today to prevent or influence outcomes that manifest several generations in the future: (a) it’s hard enough for 7.6 billion people to secure their daily bread and shelter, let alone change their behavior to benefit the still unborn, (b) many of the necessary sacrifices are required of those least capable of making them, and finally (c) the difficulty of arbitrating fairness between those who probably contributed to the problem and those who may deserve extra credit for prior restraint or inability.

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A Farmer Far Afield: Gardening in Circles

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Part Two

By John Mattingly

Farmers and gardeners look to the scientific method for guidance, after exhausting their instincts, intuition, indications from their bones, and the testimony of others, which is likely based on instincts, intuitions and bones.

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John Mattingly: Wild Cherry Creek

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In the northern San Luis Valley, County Road AA – known sometimes as Alanon Afterway – intersects Colorado Highway 17 about five miles south of the intersection of Highway 17 and U.S. 285. Highway 17 at Road AA is the corner of four surveying quadrangles, the northeastern of which is the Mirage Quad. Looking to the south from that point, you often see mirages rising off the flat floor of the Valley. To the west on Road AA is one access to the Saguache County Landfill, which explains why that stretch of Road AA is frequently littered with trash, blown out of untarped trucks on their way to the landfill.

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Cut My Hair

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By John Mattingly

Not long ago, I was dining out with a friendly group of Republicans who went on and on about the glories of the Reagan years. It’s difficult to stay quiet on this topic if you actually lived in the Reagan years and paid attention. But, before I could give the discussion a booster shot of reality, before getting to the Reagan-guided deregulation of financial systems that laid the foundation for a greed-and-bubble economy, or the Iran Contra Affair in which Reagan “knew in his heart” that he did the right thing even though it was a felony, or before I could get to the bulging taxes and deficits and expansive militarism of Reagan’s actual term in office, a song came over the radio in the cafe …

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A Farmer Far Afield – Morgan Goat Company

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by John Mattingly Colorado Central readers who have driven through the San Luis Valley on Hwy. 17 and looked east between Roads Z and X may have noticed large herds of cloven-hoofed and horned creatures interrogating the grass and brush inside a six-foot-high woven wire fence enclosing about 800 acres. The above-mentioned creatures are, for …

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A Farmer Far Afield – Apocalypse When

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by John Mattingly Homo sapiens has a long history of durable histrionics when it comes to the End of Times. Before science de-mystified many of the most frightening cosmic events in our world and universe, ancient humans understandably saw apocalyptic potential in earthquakes, volcanoes, comets, eclipses and so forth. Today, even though humans understand much …

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A Farmer Afield – American Schnitzel: The War on Peace

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by John Mattingly Note: This is the second in a three-part series that looks at the current cultural sausage being made by our U.S. military, starting with the curious case of the American Sniper, followed by the troubling question of military honor and why our high-powered, big-dollar U.S. military keeps losing wars. The final piece …

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A Farmer Far Afield–American Schnitzel: The War on Peace

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by John Mattingly Note: this is the first in a three-part series that looks at the current cultural sausage being made by our U.S. military, starting with the curious case of the American Sniper, followed by the troubling question of military honor and why our high-powered, big-dollar U.S. military keeps losing wars. The final piece …

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A Farmer Far Afield – My Better Half

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by John Mattingly I  recently acquired eight female jenny miniature donkeys and one miniature male jack, together with three youthful donkey offspring. This occurred in a complex trade involving 111 goats, a terracer blade, a jayhawker, an angular boring tool and a rusty Fresno. But I digress. Having donkeys around has reminded me of all …

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A Farmer Far Afield – The Unimportant ‘Merican (TU‘M)

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by John Mattingly Inner Old Man yields the page to The Unimportant ‘Merican, also known as TU‘M. As with IOM, the views of TU‘M should never be confused with those of the author. Here in Central Colorado we stand protected from war, fracking, heavy industry, rabid police, mis-speaking billionaires, racial tension, ebola, fat-old-white men against …

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Waste Not, Want Not

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By John Mattingly
I heard recently on the radio that U.S. consumers waste about 40% of the food they purchase from restaurants, supermarkets, and box stores. At first I wondered how this statistic was gathered. There must be a lot of dedicated “garbologists” out there, running various waste proxies and decomposition algorithms on their laptops.

Coming from a family of clean plates, leftovers, bulk-buying, and a general respect for the food placed on the table, I doubted the 40% figure, but not the observation that people in this country waste quite a bit of food. Part of this stems from the fact that, despite sensations to the contrary, food is actually cheap in the U.S. when expressed as a percentage of citizen income, and especially if we look at the cost of food, not processing, packaging, and preparation.

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Writing

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By John Mattingly
When I started farming back in the late 1960s, I had a little time in the winter, during which I started writing. It became my hobby. A lot of farmers are able to pull a hobby out of their profession by fixing up antique tractors, or tinkering with various kinds of collections, or restoring old guns, but I settled on writing.

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A Farmer far Afield – Climate Report

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John Mattingly
In 2008, George Mason University conducted a thorough, fine-grained survey of U.S. citizens to learn how much people actually knew about climate change. One of the more curious findings was that, when asked whom they believed to be the most reliable source of information about climate change, 66% of those responding gave the name of a television weather person. Al Gore barely got more votes than those who said there was no one they trusted on the topic.

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Too Big to Succeed

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By John Mattingly

I’ve always thought of farming, ranching, and mining as fundamentally related activities.

The mining museum in Leadville tells us that nothing happens until someone digs something, or pulls something, out of the ground. Though farmers aren’t usually thought of as digging things out of the ground, they dig spuds, sugar beets, carrots, and other root crops. Farming is a process by which minerals are mined from the topsoil through plants with a farmer’s guiding hand.

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Dreams of Fields

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By John Mattingly
I look out the window to see my new center pivot on the loose, crossing a road in front of heavy traffic. Cars and trucks are jammed and honking as the machine spreads out like a praying mantis on the warpath, pulling its electric line out of the ground like a giant umbilical cord. It takes out a fence and three power poles, causing flares of flame as the wires arc to ground. The pivot collides with a house and the end tower starts to ascend to the roof.

I wake up in a cold sweat.

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A Farmer Far Afield – Rosen vs Quillen

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By John Mattingly
On May 5, 2011, I happened to be driving back from Denver, listening to “The Mike Rosen Show” on 850 KOA. I have an inclination (perhaps flawed) to periodically hear what the likes of Rosen and Limbaugh have to say about Goodman, Flanders, and in this case, Quillen.

I was surprised when Rosen announced that he and Ed Quillen had written columns in the Denver papers on the same day regarding the death of Osama bin Laden. My first thought was, “Hey, I know Ed. Ed’s going to be on the radio. Go Ed!”

Rosen, however, didn’t invite Ed to call in. Instead, Rosen compared his column with Ed’s, amplifying the “incredible” difference between them. I recall Rosen doing this several times in the past with other columnists who disagreed with him, never entertaining a rebuttal. But, as Rosen would say, “It’s my show, and I can do what I want.”

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A Farmer Far Afield – Unexpected Consequences

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By John Mattingly
Throughout our history, conditions and perceptions have affected several events with unexpected consequences, including:

1. Incorruptible Peasants, aka Land Barons. When the U.S. opened up the Western United States to homesteading, the intent was to stimulate the Jeffersonian “incorruptible peasants” by granting them 160 acres – or 320 acres to a peasant and his wife, thus creating a landed peasant class, unique to the U.S. Going west from Washington D.C. out to the 100th meridian, which is approximately the Colorado-Kansas border, 320 acres was, for the most part, an economic unit for a peasant. The ground was fertile enough, and received enough natural moisture to sustain an incorruptible operation.

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A Farmer Far Afield – Tat for Tit

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By John Mattingly

Most of what I know about farming I learned from other farmers, and many who influenced me the most never spoke to me. Unlike most other professions, a farmer’s work is out in plain sight. A farmer’s roof is the sky; open air his workplace. Some farmers will try to make their crops look good next to the road by making an extra fertilizer or cultivating pass, but another farmer can detect these venial deceptions.

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A Farmer Far Afield – Farm as Solar Collector

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By John Mattingly

Back in the late fall of 1976, I traveled down to Springfield, Colorado to participate in the Farmer’s Strike.

I’d started farming in the late 60s when the markets got really good, especially in 1973 after the first Oil Embargo when commodity prices reached record high levels. When commodity prices fell off precipitously in 1976, I was all for letting the world know it was wrong.

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A Farmer Far Afield – The Payoff Pitch

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By John Mattingly

In previous articles the past couple months, “The Elephant in the Room,” and “Debt is a Four Letter Word,” I suggested:

A. The world economy is locked-in on a growth ethic. Though I believe there are good examples of the limits to growth, and although such limits make common sense, it must be acknowledged that over the last 50 years in particular, and perhaps the whole of human history in general, all predictions of such limits to growth have been swept away by innovation, substitution, and expanding (or manipulated) capital markets.

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A Farmer Far Afield – The Elephant in the Room , Part 1

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by John Mattingly

Four blind men describe an elephant: one at the trunk, one at a leg, another at a side, and the fourth holding the tail, resulting in radically different accounts of the pachyderm’s anatomy. So it is with those of us offering descriptions of The Economy. In this four part series on Economic Growth, Debt, Accounting, and the Stock Market, I confess to being one of the four blind men.

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Don’t Get It, Part 2

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by John Mattingly

Though loathe to admit it, I’m officially the ornery, cranky old farmer I said I’d never become. Of course, the fact that I, or anyone, is here on earth to complain about it is, in itself, a miracle. The likelihood of any person being alive in the universe is on the order of 10,212 to one.* With this firmly in mind, there is no such thing as a bad meal, cold coffee, an insufficient trade, an unsatisfying lover, a wayward policy, a bad day, or even a tragedy.

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A Farmer Far Afield – Job Creation

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by John Mattingly

Imagine these two words spoken a thousand years ago, or five hundred, or even a hundred years ago, when most people were so survival-shackled the last thing they wanted was more jobs to be created.

An extreme contrarian might suggest that a 10 percent jobless rate in the U.S. is actually a sign of our success. We’ve reached a state in which one in ten people aren’t working and the nation isn’t falling apart. Not yet, anyway. In fact, this may be the new reality: obsolescence of the human worker. As a species of tool makers, we may have tooled ourselves out of a lot of work. Economists point out that innovation vanquishes certain jobs while creating new ones, but who knows? This time, maybe not. Maybe ten, or even twenty percent of the population won’t have a job.

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Goat-Oriented

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by John Mattingly

I don’t admit this in the mixed company of cattle ranchers, but I used to have goats. Yes, the fact is, I had many goats, such that it was the profits from various goat operations in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s that enabled me to get into the cattle business and expand my farming operation. I owe much to goats, but that’s another story. Suffice it to say I have always had a great fondness for the species. They are clearly among the more intelligent mammals (and I include most politicians in a group that goats could easily challenge), in addition to being a species that helped humans progress, giving them milk, meat and fiber – endowments that ultimately resulted in a larger brain for homo sapiens. Mother never told me, “Be sure to eat your goat meat,” but we all know the rest of the story.

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Don’t go to College

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A Farmer  Far Afield

by John Mattingly

This the second in a series of annual, contrarian views expressed in Farmer Far Afield. The first, A HOUSE IS JUST A HOUSE, provoked an unexpected volume of perturbed responses from folks convinced their home was an “investment.”

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