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.
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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.