Circle of life

I find that grass scouting on foot can be a very enjoyable way to spend time. Monday I hiked out across parts of the ranch where we are running cattle, as well as adjacent areas where we plan to move the herd for calving.

As I strode across a drab and, to the cursory glance, barren prairie, I could just begin to feel the first inklings of spring. Temperatures have been creeping up for a couple of weeks and bright sunshine has both melted the recent snow and begun to warm the ground, slowly releasing winter’s frosty grasp.

The warming air was still coolish. Monday was, after all, only March 14. Yet the breeze was no longer blowing across snow cover, and as the day wore on, the temperature climbed steadily into the low 60’s. I did the math in my head, and deduced that it was the first day of the last week of calendar Winter. By the time many of you read this note, calendar Spring will have arrived.

A week ago the air, though warm at times, smelled sterile and lifeless. There were a few hardy insects out and about in the warmer afternoons, but it was still clearly winter. A fading winter, but nonetheless still winter.

On Monday the coolish air felt and smelled different. There was a strong touch of a muddy, earthy, growing smell in the air. The southwest wind carried the mating song of Western Meadowlark, the first of the season.

Golden-green leaves of crested wheatgrass

Underfoot, the first golden leaves of early grass were making their appearance. So far there was crested wheatgrass, smooth and downy brome, and thread- and needle-leaf sedge. There wasn’t a lot of it; the few tiny golden-green leaves I saw were the first to emerge. The cattle were finding them, though, and I marveled once again at their ability to find and harvest the most delectable and nutritious morsels of browse as they move across the vast and quickening prairiescape.

There will still be snow and frost and hard freezes. Across the south Panhandle the average last day of frost falls sometime in mid-May. But the birdsong, the insects, the smell of warm and fertile soil, and the new golden-green shoots of grass point to the annual rebirth of life across the region. These things put a spring in my step.

A young bull crops new grass

As I hiked along on Monday and meandered through the cow herd, I counted and looked the animals over. Many are beginning to spread in the rear as birth canal ligaments begin to loosen. Most were beginning to “make bag” as their udders swelled with development. They were all obviously far along in their pregnancies, roly-poly fat with calves. They were intent on grazing and on feasting on the new, greening grass. The sun was warm but the breeze cool, and to my eye, the cows seemed content. The youngest cows, still technically heifers, did a bit of pushing and chasing. The bulls, aloof and apart from the rest of the herd, placidly grazed along, heads to the ground.

I finished my inspection and count and came up one cow short. Since I was on the east edge of the pasture, I struck off to the west, knowing I’d likely find the cow off by herself with a new calf. As I hiked along I enjoyed the day, enjoyed the physical exertion, enjoyed watching the prairie wake from her long winter snooze. I topped a rise and spied the missing cow about a half-mile away, just south of a windmill near the slope of an old gravel pit. Sure enough, she was licking off a new calf.

As I drew closer, though, I could see that something wasn’t quite right. The cow was doing more sniffing than licking, and the calf, flat out on its side, didn’t seem to be moving. The cow nervously eyed me as I approached. She would look at me, pace a few steps away, then turn and walk back to the calf, nudging and sniffing.

At fifty or so feet from the pair, I realized that the calf was probably dead. At twenty feet I was certain. The calf was still and motionless, eyes open but glazed and unfocused. As I approached I spoke reassuringly to the cow in a low voice, “easy girl, easy momma, whatcha got here girl?”

The calf was a pretty little red heifer, brockle-faced just like the cow. Looking a the still little form, she seemed a near-perfect miniature of the cow. As I eased closer, the cow was clearly excited by my proximity, instinct and hormones telling her to protect her baby. But her excitement was only half-hearted, as if she knew that something was badly wrong.

I leaned over and placed my hand on the calf’s side, feeling for movement, for heartbeat, for breathing, even though I knew those things wouldn’t be there. The calf was dry and still warm; she must have expired only minutes before I arrived. The cow sniffed my hand, licked the calf a few more times, gave my arm a half-hearted shove with her nose, then took a few steps back and watched.

I sat down on the cool, newly growing prairie next to the calf and did the mental gymnastics of coming to terms with the death of a calf, the death of the first calf of the season.

I was saddened by the fundamental loss of the calf. She seemed pretty and well formed. She was a bit on the small side, only 60 pounds or so, but that was to be expected with an early birth. Still, there must have been some kind of fatal defect. An otherwise healthy, albeit early, calf would have long since been up and about. The sadness I felt was for the life the calf wouldn’t live. No long summer of growth and play and calf-socialization. But nature knows best.

I also thought about the economic impact of a dead calf. This one, had she lived, would probably have made a fine replacement heifer. She had the right genetics, anyway. But even if not a replacement heifer, she would still likely have brought $700-$800 in the late fall. Perhaps more. As they say, you can’t sell a dead calf.

As I hiked away I felt bad about the dead calf. It’s fair to say that I grieve when I lose an animal. Doesn’t seem tough, macho, or manly, but there it is. But I also understand how nature works, and I understand the fundamental nature of the business I’m engaged in. I grieve, but I work through it. I’m fortunate that I’m not a purely emotional being. I know many of those, and I feel bad for them.

I’m fortunate – blessed, really – that I grew up on a ranch and learned about the reality of life and death from an early age. The great circle of life has always been a comfort to me. I’m not sure whether a person who is never exposed to life’s harsher realities can reasonably deal with them when they inevitably crop up.

As I trudged across the awaking prairie my heart was filled with the joy of the season and tinged with the sadness of loss. A bittersweet moment, but on the whole, far more sweet than bitter.


A Llama and new cria were as curious about me as I was about them.



Winter Pause

I wrote this for publication but got rejected. I'm afraid you poor readers are going to have to suffer through it. Click on the pictures to see a larger image.

As I feed calves on a bright February morning, I hear it calling. A whisper at first, barely audible, borne on the barest whiff of breeze, like the first cranesong of autumn. “Let’s go.”
It gets louder, clearer. “C’mon, let’s go. It’s been too long. Let’s go….” It’s the prairie calling me, and the prairie is right. It’s been too long.

Autumn was long and warm and filled with work. Fencing, corrals, weaning, sorting, moving cattle, setting stock tanks, getting hay in, hauling feed. The sun moved south and the days shortened and the weather stayed unseasonably warm and mild.

Winter arrived with a bone-chilling blast of arctic air. Temperatures fell below zero and stayed there. Dry snow came in spurts and gathered in dirty, untidy piles, blown here and there by a biting, constant wind.

Work became physically hard and demanding. Tough enough in fair weather, feeding cows and calves became a miserable chore when the cold and snow and wind came. Winter conspired to carve away summer fat and pared deep down into the heart of me, to the core of will and duty perseverance.

And then winter paused for a few short hours.

Dried and empty, last year’s yucca pods lend texture to February’s shortgrass prairie landscape in the southwest Panhandle of Nebraska.

Yucca, buffalo and grama grasses and deep blue sky line a prairie canyon rim south of Kimball Feb. 19.

The day was one of those you dream about while mired in the arctic depths of winter. The sky was clear and blue and cloudless, the sun was bright, and the air was still and warm, its temperature hovering somewhere in the mid-60’s.

Lovely February days come to the High Plains, but they don’t come every February. Forecasters forecast them, but they don’t always materialize, and when they do, they usually haven’t been presaged. When a lovely February day appears, unbidden and unanticipated, I hear the call. “Let’s go. It’s been too long.” When everything breaks right in mid-February there’s only one thing for me to do. Grab my gear and follow the call.

I stride out across the uneven shortgrass prairie. From a distance, it looks agreeably flat, but hiking it reveals a different truth. Every square foot is a mountain range cast small, with peaks and valleys of native bunch grasses; wheat grass and needle grasses and grama grasses and Little Bluestem and buffalograss, to name but a few.

As evening comes on and the day cools off, cattle graze along a prairie swale Feb. 19 south of Kimball.

The uneven prairiescape makes good footwear a must, and I hike unashamed in $200 boots and $20 socks. I carry my usual load; rucksack and rifle, pistol and camera, GPS and water. The weight of my load enhances the workout value of the hike. The firearms do too, but more importantly, they ensure that I properly exercise the moral and ethical responsibility which attends my constitutional right.

In mid-February the grass is sere and brown and gray, winter-dormant, roots still gripped by frozen earth. The snow is mostly gone, but there’s no mistaking the winter landscape, nor the feel of deeply frozen ice beneath an inch or so of sun-mushed topsoil.

I head roughly north, where a pair of wells and windmills need checking. They lay over the horizon, two and three miles away. The prairie may call, but water for the herd has priority. Mixing the two is a fine solution.

As I hike along the pain in my ankles is intense and, at first, distracting. Experience tells me the pain will ease at some point, become less bothersome, recede from the forefront of experience. I earned bad ankles during years of service at sea. Walking and running on steel decks causes cumulative injury. For some it’s knees or hips or the back. For me it was Achilles tendons. Surgery has helped, but my young ankles are gone forever, traded away in good cause.

As the pain recedes and muscles loosen I push harder, stretching my stride and driving my heart rate into the fitness range. I begin to sweat and breathe more deeply. As the terrain rises my heart begins to pound and the air rushes in and out of my lungs. I begin to feel the ache of lactic acid building in leg muscles.

As I top a rise and put the first mile behind me, I catch sight of the windmills. I move easily now, muscles warm and working smoothly, heart pulsing and lungs breathing at an elevated but comfortable rate. The pain in my ankles eases and seems but a distant ache. I feel giddy and happy and content. The weight of everyday human existence falls away and I am suffused with a sense of peace. Surrounded by beauty, I go in beauty. The prairie may wear a drab coat this season, but it is no less striking than when it wears the colorful coat of spring and summer.

Ahead of me scampers a jackrabbit, cutting back and forth between clumps of yucca and appropriately-named rabbit brush. With a final zigzag, he disappears down the scree-covered bank of a dry wash. The prairie becomes more broken as I draw closer to what we call the canyonlands, deep cuts and draws and washes accumulated over millennia of natural erosion. High overhead, a pair of Ferruginous hawks soar in the warm air, tracing a broad, mile-wide oval in the crystalline sky. The air may be warm for the season, but it remains winter air, sterile and devoid of growing season odors and insects.

I drive on, pausing only to check my windmills. Both are functioning, turning slowly in the light breeze and pumping cupfuls of water into filling stock tanks. As I finish with the second windmill, I bend my course around to the east, eager to walk the floor of a canyon not visited since summer. Signs of cattle are everywhere; muddy hoof prints and hair-adorned rubbing rocks and piles of fresh manure.

I summit the last of the high ground and find the cow herd spread out before me in the swale leading to the canyon. They watch me closely but are unafraid; they know me and know that I’m as likely to appear before them afoot as in my trusty pickup. The rise is a good place to pause, so I shrug off my rucksack, lean my rifle carefully against it, and squat down to snap a few photographs.

I take in the scene before me, trying hard to pack every detail into the vault of memory. The camera is a wonderful device, capable of producing stunningly beautiful images, but it can’t capture everything, and often misses the most important parts. I know that someday my memories will have to serve when I hear the prairie call.

Rested, relaxed, and memory-filled, I take up my ruck and rifle and enter the canyon. It runs roughly northeast to southwest, in the general direction of home. Eroded out of limestone and siltstone, the canyon floor is mostly sand, packed firm enough for walking by melting snow. At its widest the canyon is about 50 feet, narrowing here and there to not much more than 20 inches. The walls vary from vertical, fractured rock to gentle, grass-covered slope. There are eroded caves scattered along the walls; some tiny and some large enough to shelter in. A few of the larger ones have soot-covered ceilings and other evidence of human habitation.

I climb up out of the canyon along a grassy slope and find myself less than a mile from home. The canyon offered relatively easy walking, but this last stretch is a long march up a steepening slope. I could go around the hill, but I crave the challenge of hard exertion. I drive myself up the slope, pushing hard against gravity and the visceral inclination to shorten my stride. Heart pounds and muscles ache and I’m not sure whether the roaring in my ears is an external or internal sound. Air dashes in and out of laboring lungs and my eight-pound rifle seems to weigh a hundred pounds.

Silly, winter-chasing grin

Finally the slope eases and my pickup, my destination, appears. The prairie becomes mostly level, and as I close in the pounding in my chest moderates and falls away into the background of the moment. At the pickup I lay down my rifle and slip the rucksack from tired shoulders. I’m lightly winded and my clothing is soaked in sweat. I check my GPS device and note that I made 6.5 miles in just over 100 minutes. Free of my load, I step back from the pickup and turn a full circle, taking in the prairie all around me and showing it a grin plastered face. I’ve answered the call and I feel wonderful. For the moment, at least, I’ve chased winter completely from my soul.

March Madness

To the sporting crowd, March Madness means basketball. I think. I don’t follow basketball myself though I know a lot of folks do, with watch parties and office pools and all kinds of basketball talk.


A chokecherry grows in the cleft of a rock it split 50 years ago.

Sports wise, I’m more interested in spring training and spring football, though I don’t follow either one very closely.

March is an interesting time of the year on the EJE Ranch. On March 1 (as I write this) we’re a month away from first calves, and a lot will happen this month.


Eagle Rock

The cows are in their final month of gestation, busy putting final touches on the calves they’ll soon be producing. They’ve been “building” these calves since last summer, and during that time they’ve had to live through an autumn drought, separation from last year’s calves, and an often harsh winter. They’ve used up a good bit of summer condition to get here, and will need good nutrition to finish gestation, calve, and begin lactation.


Windmill in Googie Gulch.

While the days are getting longer and nicer, the ground is still frozen under foot and the grasses are still dormant in their winter slumber. Over the next month the ground will thaw and the grasses (forbs too, of course) will begin to green up. In the meantime, however, those gestating cows will continue to need supplemental feed – hay mostly, but minerals as well – until the grasses boom to life and start producing grazeable biomass.


Aeromotor and gossamer sky

It’s also time to get myself prepared for calving. I’ve yet to round up the equipment and supplies and put them in their calving-season places, but I’ll get that done over the next few weeks. There’s also some work to do in the barn to make sure the calving pen and headgate are ready to go.

March weather is the real madness across the south Panhandle. The days are longer, and many are quite pleasant, but it’s not yet spring. The days can be delightful, but they can also be blisteringly cold and packed with heavy snow. With La Nina conditions continuing to prevail across the equatorial Pacific, meteorologists say we could be in for a wild weather ride including heavy spring blizzards.


Vader Ridge

Last week I hiked out across the prairie on a wonderfully warm day. There was little if any wind, so the hiking was more than pleasant. Yet the warm air still held the sterility of winter. There seemed to be no odors at all. Certainly no odors of growing things were present as I trudged across top-mushy ground that was still frozen rock-hard a few inches below.


Strokeout Butte

When I hiked again two days later, things were entirely different. It was chillingly cold and snowing, with a mild but biting south wind. I stayed off the prairie and stuck to the roads. As I trudged along the snowfall stuck to my clothes, covering me in an even, white blanket. Soon I matched the world I walked in, a potentially dangerous condition since there were a few cars and trucks out and about. I was plenty warm so long as I kept hiking along at an exercise pace; the several layers of clothing I wore and continually-produced body heat saw to that.

As I hiked along I was struck once again at how very different this country can look in a single week. One day I strode out across a brownish prairie, where windbreaks and yucca provided the only hints of color. I could see for miles in the clean, crisp air, and the sky was an enormous inverted bowl of cloudless blue. Then the weather changed, and I found myself hiking a winter landscape two days later. Snow was everywhere, covering nearly everything within my sight. Visibility was less than a quarter-mile, and falling snow blurred the world into a powdery softness.

Both hikes were enormously enjoyable, and each helped, in its way, to chase most of the winter “blah” from my soul. The nice day presaged spring, and the snowy day felt more like spring snow than winter snow.

Today I hiked the prairie again, and nearly all of last week’s abundant snow has gone. The ground is getting softer on top as winter’s frozen, vice-like grip begins to loosen in the soil. Still no green showing, but I did spot a grasshopper and a beetle out and about. The seasons, they are a changin.’

As I count down the days of March, drawing ever closer to calving, I’ll continue to see signs of the annual rebirth of spring. It’s not here yet, and there’s still liable to be far too much snow left in the season, but that’s okay. It’s part of the deal here on the High Plains, and spring is within reach.

Cattle prod: tool or torture device?

Monday was a pretty good day for the EJE Ranch. We sold last season’s calf crop and the strong feeder market ensured a good price. These were steer and heifer calves we chose to background after weaning, and they gained well in our little home-place feedlot, adding an average of just over 200 pounds per head since Nov. 1.

High corn and hay costs bit deeply into our margin, of course, but the market was strong enough to ensure a reasonably tidy profit.

Shipping day, unfortunately, was not such a good day.

It started badly, when I was late for loading. Just a misunderstanding; I thought 1 p.m. was the appointed time but it was actually 11 a.m. After receiving a call from the boss, I arrived only a few minutes later than the truck.

The boss, a couple of nephews, and the truck driver were already in the pen, moving the calves into the loading pen. My heart sank as I noticed the driver wielding a “hot shot,” or cattle prod. These devices have their place, but our place isn’t one of them.

A cattle prod is essentially a large plastic stick with a battery pack handle and electrodes on the tip. The purpose of the device is to deliver a painful shock. They are supposed to be used sparingly and as a last resort to urge a recalcitrant critter forward. Unfortunately, some folks zap every animal they can reach, and they do it constantly, regardless of the situation. Our truck driver was one of those.

My personal dilemma was figuring out how to educate the driver on the proper use of the cattle prod without losing my temper. My gut reaction – which I did not employ – was to snatch the hot shot from his hands and either smash it or give the driver a dose of his own medicine, perhaps accompanied by a few punches and kicks. There was a time when I would have instantly applied the physical approach. As a responsible adult, however, physicality has to remain a backup method.

Education is really the key, and in this situation, knowing the driver and his personality, teaching by showing seemed to be the proper approach. So I waded into the fray and tried to demonstrate proper low-stress cattle handling techniques.

It didn’t do much good at first. The driver continued to lash out with his hot shot, zapping every calf he could reach, regardless of the situation in the pen. He was also bellowing at the top of his voice, “YAH— YAH — YAH!” The calves swirled around the pen, wild-eyed, skidding and scampering, desperate for a way out. Each lash of the hot shot prompted a pain- and terror-filled bellow.

The scene nearly made me physically sick. And it made me intensely angry. For the first time in their lives, these calves were being mistreated. After nearly a year of watching them grow from birth, of husbanding to their needs and treating them with the care and respect they deserve, I was incensed by the driver’s actions.

Fortunately, he gradually slowed and finally stopped his use of the cattle prod. Perhaps he picked up on my tight-lipped, white-faced anger. Perhaps he realized that my methods were working better (and more quickly) to load the calves. Or maybe his arm just got tired. I don’t know.

But I do know he was physically mistreating those calves, and while such treatment may have been the norm in the past, it needs to be stamped out in the present and future. For many reasons.

Firstly, capturing such treatment on video and posting it on the internet is the dream of every animal rights activist. These people want all animals set free, and for the human consumption of meat to end immediately and forever. These are goals I clearly don’t agree with, but I do agree with such activists when they say that the indiscriminate use of cattle prods is simple torture. So long as anyone in the food-animal production business, including our truck driver, is torturing a single animal, the animal rights folks potentially get free ammunition to use against the production ag sector, and proof that at least one of their claims is true.

Secondly, and most importantly, we have a responsibility to treat our livestock with best practices and with the care and respect they deserve. They feed us and clothe us, make possible our chosen life and lifestyle, nourish our grasslands, and provide us joy and delight in our daily lives. Intentionally mistreating livestock is the antithesis of animal husbandry. It’s a sick and disgusting practice.

Thirdly, proper animal husbandry is an economic plus for the producer. Study after study after study proves that reduced stress for the animals equals increased profitability. Unstressed animals are simply healthier animals which grow better and produce an excellent, flavorful and highly nutritious product. Adding stress decreases health and vigor and adversely affects the meat product.

After Sunday’s debacle, the boss said he’s going to talk to the owner of the trucking company, making it clear that drivers who mistreat our cattle will not be tolerated. We’ve agreed to put signs banning the use of cattle prods around the corrals and loading area. And in the future we’ll clearly brief the help – including truck drivers – on their responsibility to practice low-stress livestock handling techniques on our ranch.

As I said, there is a place for the cattle prod. In the hands of stockman it can be the right tool for the right job. In the hands of a sicko or a fool, however, it's a torture device in the hands of a torturer.

a miss is as good as a miracle

As I got out of my pickup, parked behind the hardware store, my hand went automatically to the cell phone pouch on my belt. The pouch was flat. Empty. The cell phone was gone.

Bad word!

Where could the darned thing be? My mind began to race. I checked in the pickup, but that was a forlorn hope. I’d never be that lucky. Okay, let’s see…

The tractor! I’d used the tractor earlier to feed cows, since the hydra-bed pickup was down. And I’d lost the phone in the tractor twice before. Something about the seat design (or my body design) seems to push the phone up and out of the pouch sometimes.

After finishing in the hardware store, I sped back out to the ranch. “C’mon, cell phone, be in the tractor!”

But it wasn’t.

I fairly tore the cab of that ol’ John Deere apart, pulling out tool boxes and chains and pins and clevises. I found the small crescent wrench I’d been looking for for two years, and a chain hook that I’d given up on and replaced, but there was no cell phone to be found. Rats!

Oh, well. Nothing to be done. If the phone is gone, it’s gone. As I replaced the gear in the tractor cab, I thought about all the steps I’d soon be making to replace the cell phone. Call the company. Select a new phone. Maybe one of those phones with “aps.” There’s a cool one, GPS enabled, that shows you the stars in the night sky, complete with all the star names. Yep, one of those “3-G” gadget phones with a keyboard for texting. I wondered how much they cost. Will I have to change my plan? Can I afford a phone like that, particularly as I occasionally loose the darn things?

Mind whirling with possibilities, I climbed down from the tractor and strode toward my pickup. Then a glint of light caught my eye, and I looked back toward the tractor. There was my cell phone, laying in the rutted snow no more than three inches in front of the left front tire.

I stood there looking at it for a few moments, thinking. Somehow I’d managed to drop the phone on the ground, drive the tractor right past it (I’d made a jog to the right when I started so I could look at the ice in the corral tank), went and fed cows, drove the tractor back to where I’d begun, minus three critical inches, and managed to save my cell phone from certain, crushing death.

Was it a miracle? I chose to think so. It was my birthday, after all. Had to be a miracle.

Grass 101

Originally published February 4, 2011.

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Stemless hymenoxis, a native perennial forb in High Plains rangeland, provides a splash of color on this shortgrass prairie in the southwest Panhandle. Grass species in the photo include green needlegrass, buffalograss and blue grama, and scattered crested wheatgrass.

Though we're mired in the depths of winter today, spring is just around the corner. As air and soil temperatures begin to creep up, the praire, pastures and rangeland of the High Plains will begin to wake up. Grass is more important than you might think, so let's talk grass. If you got here looking for information on hippy lettuce and left-handed cigarettes, you're on the wrong blog.

Whether a herd numbers thousands of head or comprises a single 4-H goat, grass is one of the two most vital requirements for the livestock producer. Without good forage and water, livestock production is simply impossible. Leaving water aside, it follows that grass is so vital to producers that each operation must arm itself with graduate level knowledge of grass in general and an intimate and comprehensive understanding of their owned or leased rangelands.

Nearly all producers possess such knowledge and understanding. They simply wouldn’t survive otherwise. But often their knowledge exists as scattered bits of formal and informal information, institutional memory and habit, and the kind of sixth sense developed over years of experience.

Cows and calves on a native shortgrass prairie south of Kimball, Neb. Grass and grass-like species providing forage on this pasture include threadleaf and needleleaf sedge, green needlegrass, western wheatgrass and crested wheatgrass, buffalograss, blue grama and hairy grama.

Let’s take a look at the basics of the High Plains rangeland ecosystem, and in particular, grass.

A semi-arid vegetative zone generally has annual precipitation between 10 and 20 inches and an overnight temperature falloff during the summer months. Another characteristic is the wide annual variation in the timing of precipitation, as well as the quantity of precip delivered during the events. The possibility of drought is never far away on the High Plains.

With grass such an important part of livestock production, it pays to know as much as possible about the rangeland used for the operation. Whether owned or leased, the operator needs to know what’s available for grazing, what shape it’s in and what its growth characteristics are to make the best short- and long-term use of this vital asset.

This curious 13-lined ground squirrel stands amid the bounty of the shortgrass prairie, surrounded by cool and warm-season grasses and native perennial wildflowers.

This knowledge starts with a basic understanding of what grass is and what it does. Simply put, grass is the major energy source for all terrestrial (land) animals. Grass photosynthesizes carbohydrate from sunlight, atmospheric carbon dioxide and water, storing the energy-dense nutrient in above ground foliage and below ground roots. Grass makes up the base of the terrestrial food pyramid and constitutes the main (or a significant part of) food source of terrestrial herbivores, which are in turn consumed by omnivores and carnivores. It’s no exaggeration to say that all terrestrial life is grass fed.

Rangeland is a discreet ecosystem, easily as complex as the most pristine rain forest. Rangeland grasses are unique in the plant world in that their root systems are more extensive than their above ground herbage. In shortgrass rangeland root systems can be five or more feet deep; some tallgrass stands root to a depth of better than 30 feet.

These extensive root systems allow grasses to find and use water and nutrients throughout the soil profile, which helps them survive in dry years and explode with herbage production in wet years. They also anchor soils and provide a rich environment where symbiotic microorganisms thrive and boost soil fertility. Many rangeland grasses reproduce through their root systems as well, pushing rhizomatous stems out beneath the soil from which new plants arise.

Here on the Wyo-Braska High Plains, native and reintroduced rangeland grass species include cool and warm season grasses and grass-like plants (sedges). Native range is shortgrass prairie, and reintroduced grasslands shortgrass species with a scattering of mid-height grasses.

Sedges are usually the first to green up in the spring, followed by cool-season and then warm-season grasses. There is considerable variation between species and even within species according to location, but most grass growth occurs during 30-60 day rapid growth periods corresponding to the onset of particular air temperatures. In general, maximum growth in cool-season grasses occurs when air temperatures are 65 to 75 degrees, while max growth of warm-season grasses occurs with 90-95 degree air temps.

Such growth characteristics allow range grasses to produce the bulk of their above ground herbage during a relatively short period each year. The staggered peak growth periods between types and species generally provide a three to four month annual period of lush, palatable and preferred forage for selective grazers, likely as a result of rangeland ecosystem evolution. Peak growth occurs relatively early in the season, and once past this heavy herbage production period, above ground growth slows markedly, with the plants essentially in maintenance mode until hard freeze.

Herbage production and plant growth during peak growth is highly correlated to soil moisture and air temperature. Both are required. Under severe drought conditions grass may remain essentially dormant. If moisture is available, however, peak growth will occur when air temperatures are appropriate and will be limited by moisture availability. In wet years herbage production will be abundant, in dry years production will be sparse.

Aside from herbage production, which is so essential as forage to livestock producers, root growth and development is at its highest level during peak growth. With root systems making up the bulk of grass plants, root development is obviously vital to the range ecosystem. Carbohydrates derived from photosynthesis provide the plant with the energy needed for both above and below ground growth. When carbohydrate production is reduced by grazing, the plant diverts energy from root development to herbage production in an effort to maintain photosynthetic carbohydrate production. This shift from below to above ground growth has been called root mining. Depending on factors like grazing pressure, soil moisture, and air temperature, root mining can be detrimental to the long and short term health of the plant, and by extension, the range ecosystem. Heavy grazing during drought can debilitate an entire pasture, which may take years to recover. Even modest grazing during peak growth results in some level of root mining. The operator’s challenge is to understand his rangeland and livestock as a discrete system and introduce management practices which enhance both profitability and sustainability.

In general, most recommended range management schemes include dividing range into a number of pastures and rotating grazing dates and periods between them from year to year. In a four-year rotation, a particular pasture might be heavily grazed during peak growth one year, rested the next year, then lightly and moderately grazed in the next two years.

Range management plans will necessarily be different for different operations. No two rangeland parcels are alike, weather varies from year to year, and grazing requirements change according to economic and other variables. Designing and implementing a range management plan can be a complex and daunting task, but armed with knowledge and experience, operators can employ powerful strategies to maximize both profitability and sustainability.

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Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.

Taxpayers may be at odds with 2012 Farm Bill spending

To paraphrase former Vice-President Al Gore, “the budget economics are settled.” And this time they really are.

Last Thursday the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its new ten-year federal budget baseline and the numbers are shockingly bad, showing an unprecedented $1.5 trillion deficit for this fiscal year – an increase of $95 billion over their last estimate – and the third consecutive year of trillion-dollar deficits.

The Heritage Foundation, a not-for-profit, donor-supported, conservative research organization, notes that the reality is likely far worse than the CBO figures indicate. Researcher Brian Riedl finds that the federal government will add $19.1 trillion in new debt between 2009 and 2021, a whopping $140,000 per household over 13 years. Annual budget deficits will never drop below $1 trillion, and the debt is now projected to reach 100 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2020.

Riedl also found that the trillion-dollar deficits are being wholly driven by rising government spending. While tax revenues will return to their historic norm of 18 percent of GDP by 2018, federal spending will jump to 26.4 percent of GDP, nearly seven percent higher than the historic norm, by 2021.

Our federal budget deficit, of course, is the difference between what the government spends (including interest paid on debt) and what it generates in revenues. Those revenues are almost entirely tax revenues.

Though the 111th Congress (2009-2010) never passed a budget, federal spending in 2010 was $6.037 trillion, or 6,037 thousand billion dollars. Federal revenues were $4.537 trillion, or 4,537 thousand billion dollars, leaving a 1.5 trillion dollar deficit. That’s one-and-a-half thousand billion dollars. Keep those numbers in mind and compare them to federal agricultural spending numbers as you read on.

Why should farmers and ranchers be concerned? Leaving aside the reasonable concerns most ag producers share with other business owners regarding the federal government’s unsupportable spending spree, those of us in the ag sector should understand that taxpayer pressure is likely to force changes in federal spending, including the 2012 Farm Bill, which will fund the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

A study conducted jointly by economists from the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank and Oklahoma State University supports the notion that real changes are likely to be made to federal ag spending beginning with the upcoming Farm Bill. A paper prepared for the study will be presented this weekend at the Southern Agricultural Economics Association annual meeting in Corpus Christi, Tex. To read the full text of the paper, visit http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/98597/2/SAEA%20complete%20document.pdf

The study included a survey of 1,200 consumers and taxpayers from across the country, asking what the spending priorities of the 2012 Farm Bill should be. Respondents were asked to prioritize ag spending in six areas: rural development, food safety and inspection, natural resources and environment, food assistance programs, research and education, and farm support programs.

All of these areas receive federal dollars through the so-called Farm Bill, which when it becomes law usually bears a different name. The 2008 Farm Bill, for instance, is called the “Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008.” Despite this, the roughly pentadal, or every-five-years, acts are almost universally referred to as the Farm Bill.

As a refresher, total spending for the 2008 Farm Bill was $57.6 billion annually for a total of $288 billion over five years. The entire $288 billion equals 0.047 percent of all federal spending in the single year 2010, or just under one-half of one percent. For comparison, 32 percent of federal spending went to Social Security and Medicare, 14 percent to defense, and 14 percent to education.

Of the $288 billion in Farm Bill spending, about 20 percent, or $57.6 billion, went to farm support payments, including federal crop insurance. The other 80 percent, roughly $230 billion, supported non-farm programs, including the five mentioned above. The lion’s share, 60 percent or about $138 billion, went to food assistance programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called the food stamp program) and the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program. The remaining $92 billion funded all other USDA activities, including conservation, food and animal inspection, education and research, among others.

The preface of the study paper notes that while 80 percent of those surveyed favor government subsidization of farmers, more than 80 percent of professional economists feel that farm subsidy payments should be eliminated. The preface also notes that President Obama wants to cut direct payments to “mega-farmers” with more than $500,000 annual sales revenue and reduce crop insurance payouts.

So how did the 1,200 U.S. taxpayers surveyed think new Farm Bill dollars should be divided? What do these non-farming/ranching citizens see as priorities when it comes to federal agricultural spending?

Respondents were asked which of the six primary USDA programs was most important. They were also asked to divide an imaginary $100 between the six programs in the spending ratio they believed proper for federal ag spending.

Food safety and inspection has probably been the biggest ag related topic covered by the major media in recent years, and unsurprisingly, 50.7 percent of those surveyed felt that it was the most important USDA program. In the current Farm Bill, food safety and inspection receives just over three percent of USDA dollars, about $90 million, or $3.14 per $100.

Just over 20 percent felt that food assistance programs were the most important. In the present Farm bill these programs receive $60.40 of each $100 in USDA spending.

Farm support programs were felt to be the third most important priority. Such programs currently receive $22.03 of every $100 spent by the USDA. Respondents felt this number was too high, however, and set their dollar figure at $15.82 per $100.

Respondents were found to be in favor of redirecting some farm support dollars into research, which they felt would benefit both farmers and consumers alike.

In summary, the researchers find that in “…looking at an overall distribution of funds, we can see people prefer a more equitable allocation of dollars. On average, respondents would like to see more dollars going to food safety and inspection, natural resources and environment, research and education, and rural development and less dollars going to food assistance and farm support.”

Congress is going to swim through a lot of red ink as they fumble through the budget process. There’s a good chance that whatever the 112th congress does, it will be historic. Possibly historically bad, possibly historically good. As farmers and ranchers, we make up far less than two percent of the population. We’ll be mostly bystanders.

But we don’t have to be completely silent. Use some of these numbers in your morning and afternoon coffee sessions. Send this article on to your congressional representatives. Write a letter to the editor or put something up on a blog. It might not make much difference, but you’ll have solid facts on your side.

Fence Radio, or, usin' whatcha got

As I pull up to the north gate each morning, I turn the heater fan down (in the winter, anyway)  and turn on the radio. Along with 850 KOA’s Colorado Morning News, I also get a status update on my electric fence. Now that’s service! No wonder the AM radio station’s call letters KOA stand for King Of Agriculture.

Of course, April (Zesbaugh) and Steffan (Tubbs) don’t actually use their broadcasted words to tell me how the fence is performing. Rather, the fence tells me, through the signal it broadcasts over the AM band, and which my pickup radio detects.

The unit that powers the north fence, called an “energizer,” or more commonly a “fencer,” is powered by alternating current (AC) electricity. Electricity is supplied to the ranch house through the regional power company from the so-called national electrical grid. Electrons flow from the far away power plant, through hundreds of miles of steel transmission cables, booster stations and transformers, until it finally reaches the ranch at a standard household voltage.

The fencer is plugged into 120 volt household current at the garage, and uses an internal transformer to change the AC into direct current (DC) which it sends in pulses through the roughly five miles of electric fence it energizes.

As the 12,000 – 15,000 volt pulses course through the length of the steel fence wire, they excite electrons in the steel, freeing many of them to fly off of the steel and into the atmosphere, making the fence a radio broadcasting station of sorts.

Though the signal is powered by quite a bit of voltage, the amperage, or “push” of the current is quite low, and so is the range of the fence’s radio broadcasting capability. At 20 feet from the fence, my pickup radio can’t pick up a single “pop,” but at 5 – 10 feet it picks up the signal nice and clear.

As the hosts of the morning show report the news Coloradoans need and want to hear with their morning coffee or on their drive to work, I can hear in the background a soft “pop-pop-pop” as the electric charge travels through the wire, then the air, then to my antenna. Hearing that “pop-pop-pop” is a good thing, and it tells me a lot about how the fence is functioning.

If the popping sound is clear and strong, it means that the fence is working properly. If the sound is softer than usual, it means that the wire is slightly grounded, probably giving up some strength to a wet wooden fence post, or sometimes to overgrown grass or weeds. If the sound is intermittent, the wire has probably come loose from an insulator and is probably grounding as it swings in the breeze and occasionally touches a steel post or even the ground. If there’s no popping sound at all, there’s obviously no current flowing through the wire. The problem could be a continuous ground, a broken wire, or a power outage at the ranch house. The fencer might even be unplugged, as happens occasionally when nieces and nephews visit and “explore.”

If I get a strong popping signal in the morning, I can go about my chores with the knowledge that the fence is working correctly and needs no attention. If the popping is weak, intermittent, or absent, I know I probably have a repair to make. Once a week or so I drive the length of the fence, looking for missing insulators and listening to the steady “pop-pop-popping.” Having the radio detect the condition of the fence makes the job quick and easy. Most of the time.

The electric fence I check each day isn’t really vital to the success of the operation. It’s there only to keep the cattle out of shelterbelts and wildlife plantings which surround the pasture. On the other side of the shelterbelts and wildlife plantings is a sturdy four-wire barbed wire fence. Still, it’s best to keep the cattle where they belong, and my pickup radio helps me with the task.

Is the Renewable Fuels Standard for corn ethanol sustainable?

Like the word “green,” the word “sustainable” has a lot of cachet these days.

Over the last 10 days I asked a selection of people I met what “sustainability” means. The total number of respondents was 27. Twenty-one were from Nebraska, three from Wyoming, two from Colorado, and one from Quebec, Canada.

Five of the 27 were able to rattle off a pretty fair definition of “sustainable,” saying in essence that it involves replacing what is used in a system so that the system can continue to produce indefinitely.

Twenty-two of the respondents, however, (including a pair of college/university professors) could only come up with vague mumblings about “green”, “the planet”, “global warming”, and so forth. The single most repeated definition was, “sustainability is, like, sustainable. You know?”

So to make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s see how Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, defines the word.

sus-tain-able adj (ca. 1727) a: of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged (techniques/agriculture) b: of or relating to a lifestyle involving the use of sustainable methods (societal).

In very simple terms, sustainability in agriculture is the ability to replace what is used during food production so that food can continue to be produced, and to do so without permanently damaging the production system.

In 2005 congress passed the Energy Policy Act. One of the provisions of that act was the mandate to produce ethanol and other biofuels to be blended with the U.S. fuel supply. This provision, called the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS), has the force of federal law behind it, and calls for a tiered increase in the quantity of biofuels – mainly ethanol – produced through 2022. In 2008 the RFS was revised and upgraded, calling for the production of 36 billion gallons of “renewable fuel” annually by 2022.

According to the RFS, 31 billion of the 36 billion gallon annual requirement is to be ethanol. Fifteen billion gallons is required to come from traditionally fermented and distilled corn starch each year. Cellulosic biofuel – ethanol produced with feedstocks other than corn – is required to produce 16 billion gallons each year. The remaining five billion gallons is called “undifferetiated advanced biofuel,” described as “…other than derived from corn starch…(including) “cellulosic biofuels, “biomass-based diesel”, and “co-processed renewable diesel.”

Can this corn help to ease fuel prices and reduce our dependency on foreign oil? Can it do so in a sustainable fashion?

Since corn-based ethanol is the subject, we’ll ignore the other fuel types in the RFS and ask this question. Is the 15 billion gallon annual production of corn ethanol sustainable? We’ll look at four areas. What is the present production level, and how does it compare with the mandate? Is there enough farmland to produce the corn required to meet the mandate? Can the required quantity of corn be sustainably and reliably produced without taking corn from the human food stream? And finally, is the RFS likely to be economically sustainable at the consumer level?

We will not look at tax credits for ethanol producers and blenders, nor will we look at the so-called “corn subsidy.” Those are topics for another article.

Production numbers

According to numbers published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration in March, 2010, for the 2009 production year, 10.7 billion gallons of corn ethanol was produced. The RFS called for 10.5 billion gallons, so the goal was exceeded. Or was it? The same publication cited daily production in barrels as 787,000. At 44 gallons per barrel, production totaled 287.25 million barrels, or just over 6.5 billion gallons. What happened to the other four billion gallons? Is this a simple math or unit conversion error? Thus far the answer remains unclear. Was production in 2009 a 4 billion gallon shortfall or did the industry beat the standard by 200 million gallons? Is it possible that the number reported is different than the actual production number?

The numbers for 2010 aren’t in yet, but industry administrators are claiming a 12-month production run of slightly more than one billion gallons over their production target. What the 2010 “target” was is again unclear, and no credible number has been published. Was their target the RFS mandated 12 billion gallons? Or was it a smaller number?

Farmland

According to the 2007 U.S. Census of Agriculture, U.S. farmland totals 406.5 million acres. In 2007 corn was cultivated on 86.2 million acres and produced 12.7 billion bushels. According to the USDA, 2009 corn production hit 13.2 billion bushels, the highest annual production on record, on 86.5 million acres. Production numbers for 2010 haven’t yet been released, but USDA estimates put the number at 93 million bushels lower than to 2009 number, on roughly the same acreage.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that the 10.7 billion and 13.5 billion gallon ethanol production numbers for 2009 and 2010 are correct. If so, it is just possible, in theory, to eke out enough corn to hit the 15 billion gallon annual RFS mandate, on the same or just slightly more acreage. But is that target reliably sustainable? What happens when the weather doesn’t cooperate? What happens when there is drought, or flooding, or disease or pest problems?

Proponents of the RFS and the mandate to produce 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually opine that the solution is to plant more acres of corn. But is upping U.S. corn acreage sustainable? If you count sorghum, soybean, sugarbeet, and even dry bean acres, you could theoretically add about 70.6 million additional acres of high-yield corn cultivation, for a total of nearly 160 million acres. But that’s really all the suitable high-yield corn land available in the U.S. And if you convert all sorghum, soybean, dry bean and sugarbeet acres to corn, the law of supply and demand will become the driving force. As stocks of the non-planted crops dwindle, their value will increase. Farmers, if they remain at liberty to plant the crops which will bring them their highest economic return, will turn away from corn and begin planting the more valuable crops. Corn production will fall off.

Or will farmers remain at liberty?

If the 2009/2010 corn ethanol production numbers are actually lower than reported, the prospect of complying with the 15 million gallon per year mandate begins to look somewhat bleak. Is the RFS really sustainable?

Food vs fuel

Corn ethanol production in 2009 used more than 38 percent of total U.S. corn production for the year. USDA and the ethanol industry report that somewhat more than 40 percent of 2010 corn production went to ethanol plants. The remaining 60 or so percent is used essentially for human consumption. The largest part is fed to animals, which are in turn fed to people. Humans also consume corn in sweeteners, breads, snacks, and other food items. If corn acres and corn production can’t sustainably be increased, can corn ethanol production be increased by diverting corn from the human food stream? Is this a sustainable scheme?

Presently, animal feed demand for corn is sharply down. This is because the numbers of food animals in the U.S. is at a very low ebb. The cow herd is at it’s smallest since 1963, and hog and poultry numbers are at their lowest point in decades. Yet demand for meat remains high and is increasing as the U.S. and much of the world continue to climb out of the recession.

The reduced number of food animals in the production pipeline began driving prices higher last year and will continue to do so for months and years to come. Food animals, like other agricultural crops, cannot be produced overnight.

This food animal shortfall is contributing to rapidly escalating retail food prices, both in the U.S. and around the world, where food prices are back at the same 2008 levels which were described as a crisis.

U.S. food prices were up about two percent in the fourth quarter of last year. But two percent is a drop in the bucket compared to world food prices, which skyrocketed 32 percent in the last half of 2010, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s Index of World Food Prices.

Is diverting food stream corn to ethanol production a sustainable option in the light of rising food prices? Is it politically sustainable with the grim possibility of food riots and even widespread famine just over the horizon?

The thermodynamics of blending gasoline with ethanol

Don’t let the big science word put you off. Thermodynamics is just the study of heat, and heat is what internal combustion engines produce. The heat is converted to locomotive energy, or more simply, it is used to drive the wheels.

Heat is produced by burning fuel and air in the tightly closed environment of the cylinder(s) of the engine. Traditionally, the fuel burned has been gasoline. Most transport trucks and a very small percentage of automobiles use diesel, but diesel is a tangential subject and not important to our analysis of the sustainability of the RFS corn ethanol mandate.

Gasoline is a very good fuel. It’s a hydrocarbon, and as the name suggests it’s made up of hydrogen and carbon. To provide power, it’s is mixed with air and burned in the engine, producing heat (energy) to drive the engine and chemical combustion products which are released through the exhaust system. The combustion products contain hydrogen, carbon and oxygen, mostly in the form of water (H20), carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO2). Burning gasoline produces a lot of energy, about 115,000 Btu (British thermal units) per gallon, according to data produced by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. ORNL is one of the main research institutions of the Department of Energy.

In general, gasoline is safe, easy to handle and store, and readily available throughout the world at a reasonable cost. In the decades following WWII, however, gasoline gained the reputation of being a heavy polluter. For various reasons, early gasoline formulations and less sophisticated engines emitted lots of lead, nitrogen compounds and soot, in addition to H2O, CO and CO2. Federal emission and efficiency standards enacted in the1960’s and 1970’s led to the development of cleaner, more efficient engines and fuel formulations, and today, modern gasoline is actually a remarkably clean burning fuel.

Gasoline is such a good fuel, however, that enormous quantities are used around the world (390 million gallons per day in the U.S. alone). At this scale of use, a great deal of carbon is released to the atmosphere, and in recent years concerns have grown as to the effect this atmospheric carbon load has on climate change. Carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, tends to retain heat in the atmosphere in what is commonly called the greenhouse effect. Carbon monoxide emissions also became a concern in urban areas with many automobiles and heavy traffic, where smog and high carbon monoxide levels were a health risk

The combination of environmental concerns and a desire to “free” the U.S. from its dependence on foreign oil prompted, in large part, congress to mandate the RFS. The ethanol produced under the RFS is required to be added to, or “blended” with gasoline.

The mandated introduction of ethanol into the gasoline stream means consumers now have a choice between regular gasoline and a blend of 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gasoline, sometimes called E-10. Nearly every gasoline retailer in the country offers both choices. Standard engines can burn up to a 10 percent ethanol blend without modification.

An alternative is E-85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. Engines capable of burning this blend are specially modified and equip vehicles known as flex-fuel models. Of the roughly 250 million passenger vehicles in the U.S, about 6 million are flex fuel powered.

With the stated purpose of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and freeing the U.S. from dependence on foreign oil, we must now ask whether the RFS has been or will be successful in doing so, and if successful, at what cost to U.S. consumers?

Let’s look first at emissions.

Unlike the hydrocarbon gasoline, made up of hydrogen and carbon, ethanol is an alcohol, composed of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen. Because alcohols have higher octane, or anti-knock ratings than gasoline, ethanol was considered as a replacement when lead anti-knock additives were banned from gasoline in the early 1970’s. While lead was eventually replaced by safer compounds, ethanol was shown to reduce carbon monoxide (CO) emissions, and ethanol additives began to be used in urban areas in the late 1970’s.

Ethanol is able to reduce CO emissions because it features oxygen in each molecule, and when combusted, that oxygen combines with carbon monoxide in the exhaust (carbon plus one oxygen, CO) to form carbon dioxide (carbon plus two oxygen, CO2), a less toxic gas, but one that is said to be a greenhouse gas contributing to global warming.

Now let’s look at the economics of blending ethanol with gasoline.

 What’s the real story on fuel prices? It's more than price per gallon.

At most filling stations, regular and 10 percent ethanol blend (often called premium) gasolines are offered side by side, and the per-gallon price of the ethanol blend is usually, but not always, less than the per-gallon price of regular gasoline. Blended gas appears at first glance to be a less expensive alternative. Is this true? Unfortunately, it is almost always not true.

Ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline. Each gallon of gasoline contains 115,000 Btu (British thermal unit) of energy, compared to 75,700 Btu for ethanol. Therefore, ethanol has only 66 percent the energy of gasoline. The ratio of energy input to work output is constant in an engine. You can think of it as 1:1; for each energy unit you put in, you get one work unit out. Put in less energy, you get less work out. If your car goes 10 miles on one quart of gasoline, it’ll only go 6.6 miles on one quart of ethanol.

Blending gasoline with ethanol dilutes the energy content of the fuel. A 10 percent blend has only .966 (96.6 percent) the energy of regular gasoline. Now that’s not a large energy reduction, only 3.4 percent, but it is significant and adds up over time.

Ethanol blend prices typically run 5-10 cents lower than regular gasoline prices. On Monday in Kimball, Neb., for instance, regular gas was $3.11 per gallon, while the ethanol blend was $3.04. To break even, or to pay the same price per unit of energy, the ethanol blend price would have to be $3.00 (.966 x $3.71). The ethanol blend costs more and yields less energy. Less energy means reduced mileage and range.

To break even, or to get the same bang for the buck, the ethanol blend price has to be the same as the energy ratio, .966. To reduce the price at the pump, the ethanol blend price has to be less than .966 of the cost of regular gas. Ethanol blending doesn’t save the consumer money at the pump unless it beats the energy spread.

The environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently approved a 15 percent blending rate, so soon consumers might be getting even less while paying more. A 15 percent blend has only .949 (94.9 percent) the energy of regular gas. To calculate the breakeven price, multiply the regular gas price by .949. Using our previous example, $3.11 times 0.949 equals $2.95. Therefore, a 15 percent ethanol blend should cost $2.95 per gallon, simply to provide the same energy for the same price. We'll have to see how the 15 percent blend is priced, but if history is our guide, the new blend is unlikely to meet or beat breakeven price.

The news is even worse for E-85, which has an energy ratio of .711. E-85 was priced at $2.85 per gallon on Monday, 22 cents above the breakeven price of $2.63.

At today’s prices, corn ethanol costs consumers more, and provides less. Is corn ethanol economically sustainable for consumers? It seems not.

Is the RFS mandate of producing 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol sustainable? You be the judge. It might be. But the prospect is looking rather shaky at the moment.

Dreams

January is a hard time for funerals. As if there’s an easy time.

We buried our Great-Aunt last week. The weather, after four days of sub-zero temperatures, cooperated. The skies were clear and the sun was bright. But a cold January wind swept through the cemetery.

She was 83 years old when she passed, and had been married to my Great-Uncle since 1946. The two had been inseparable since meeting in high school. They had three daughters and many grand- and great-grandchildren.

They grew up during the Great Depression, living a life I can only imagine, never understand.

Consider this – consider hoeing beets every day from planting to harvest, starting in the fields as soon as you were able to pick up a hoe. All day, every day, except when school was in session, when you worked the fields before and after school. And except for a few hours on Sunday when you went to church.

Before heading to the fields in the morning there were chores to do – a cow or two to milk, horses to feed, hogs to slop, chickens to feed and eggs to gather. And the same chores in the evening, after a day in the fields and at school.

Consider living in a one-room shack with your parents and a dozen siblings. A home where German was the tongue, but where the children were expected to master flawless English.

Where there was no indoor plumbing, just a hand well and a privy. A single cast iron stove for warmth. Consider spending the daylight winter hours gathering coal along the railroad tracks, one lump at a time, to burn in that stove, to stave off the killing cold.

Consider the deep terror caused by a winter sniffle when there was no money for a doctor and the doctors had no antibiotics.

Consider living and working in those conditions and being expected to be neat, clean and polite, to show and live your family pride and thrift and honesty and integrity.

No computer. No I-Pod. No television. No Radio. No refrigerator, microwave, toaster (let alone toaster oven!), no range. Just a wood stove. No car. No bus to ride to school.

Yet they were clean and neat and polite and well fed and didn’t see the hardship of walking to school and to the fields.

Consider the courage and the deep and abiding love it took to get married in 1946. Consider the scrimping and saving and the hard physical labor it took to acquire land and machinery and start to farm while raising a family. Consider the delight and the warm glow of success at being able to purchase your very own radio.

Consider building, with the labor of your family alone, a modest but successful farm and ranch. Building your own barn. Your own home. Hiring laborers. Putting in one of the first pivots in the county. Watching your daughters grow and marry and start families of their own.

Consider working hard and building every day throughout the long but oh-so-brief years. Feeding the county, and the state, and the nation, and the world. Building and keeping an honored and honorable name.

By the time I came on the scene killing labor was a thing of the past, the depression only a word. But the reality of those things remained in the weathered skin and strong, ropy muscles of those who had lived it. And in the stories they told of “hard times.” Stories told with honest laughter and verisimilitude only those who’ve lived it can bring.

I am blessed with countless sweet, loving memories of these people and the way they lived their lives, working hard and without complaint. Clean, neat, well dressed, honest, forthright, giving. Loving.

Today when I work hard and the sweat runs heavy and muscles strain and heart pounds and the breath rasps in and out like a steam engine, I am blessed in knowing that I’ve never worked as hard as my grandparents and great uncles and great aunts did. I’m blessed that I never knew the terror of illness or the numbing cold of coal picking. Blessed that I never hoed a row of beets beneath the hammering sun. But blessed most of all that I knew those who did, knew their strength and character and love. And that today I am in some way a small fulfillment of their love and their courage and their dream.

Cold

At 7 a.m. the temperature is zero and heading lower. As I drive through the pasture an inch or so of new snow crunches and squeals beneath the pickup tires. All around me the world is gray and white and just a little bit gloomy looking. The only real color I can see is the dark-green of juniper windbreaks and just a smudge of lightness on the southeast horizon where the sun is scheduled to make its tenth appearance of the new year.
Overhead the sky is fluffed with dirty cotton clouds, a nearly uniform overcast with a few bulging fat cloud bellies here and there on the horizon. I’m snug and dry in the pickup cab with the heater fan providing a welcome rush of warm air and holding the frost at bay as it fights for purchase on the windshield. The pickup thermometer tells me it’s now –2 F.

I pull up to a stock tank, abandon the warmth of the pickup cab and grab my trusty short axe from the back seat. I look at the thick, marbled ice adorning the surface of the tank, where on warmer days cool water would ripple. The ice is puffed up a bit in the center of the tank, like a dome of frosting on a cupcake. It’s slightly translucent, a light milky gray color, and on closer inspection looks to be shot through with millions of tiny bubbles. Nevertheless, it looks hard. A third of the way in from the north rim of the tank the cylindrical aluminum float is frozen fast at a crazy angle, one end up at about 45 degrees, the other frozen solid in the mass of ice.

Free at last, a stock tank float bobs on the ice-choked surface Monday on a ranch south of Kimball.

The tank stands alone on the prairie, at the high point of a 50 acre depression, surrounded by a ring of frozen, dusty dirt where hundreds of sharp cattle hooves tread daily. The ring of dirt is surrounded by a larger ring of snow-covered grass. There’s buffalo grass there, and blue grama, and wheatgrass and needlegrass and even some little bluestem. But the grasses are hidden beneath a thin blanket of fresh, clean snow. Little creature tracks meander across the new snow, vole tracks and mouse tracks and rabbit tracks and even the paw prints of a feral cat.

My immediate chore is to chop drinking holes in the ice so the cattle can water. Even in the depths of winter mature cows need eight or more gallons of water every day. But I pause for a moment to take in the cold but beautiful scene. The air is cold and bites at the exposed skin of my face. There’s only a light breeze from the north, for which I am profoundly grateful. With my back to the touch of breeze a sweatshirt hood provides enough protection to keep my ears from stinging. It’s a nearly silent morning, crisp and fresh and new. The only sounds are the ones I make – the crunch of snow beneath my feet, the ghostly inrush and outrush of air as I breathe, the clink of the axe head as I tap the ice to test its hardness.

I begin by carefully chopping the float free of the ice’s glacier grip. As the axe head opens a first hole, water flows out onto the surface of the ice. The thick layer of ice has gripped the rolled rim of the tank, expanding as it froze, pushing down on the liquid below. For a moment at least, the hole becomes an artesian well as pressure forces water up and out. With the float free, I begin chopping in earnest, opening and widening yesterday’s drinking holes. As I chop, newly freed liquid water splashes back into my face and onto my jacket and jeans, freezing instantly. The splashback is irritating, but only a little, and only part of the job.

As I chop away the ice, my muscles warm up and my heart sends warm blood coursing through veins and arteries, making the cold feel less cold. My breathing rate increases and clouds of vapor puff about my head with each exhalation. The sound of axe on ice carries south on the breeze, and from a half-mile away I can see ears flicker in the lightly bunched cow herd. Within moments a leader strikes off in my direction, suddenly thirsty. The rest of the cows string out behind her, and they soon become a dark line moving across the whitened plain.

Holes opened and chopping done, I take a minute to watch the cows approach. Near the back of the line a pair of bulls start a pushing match, heads low and pressed together, muscles straining, hooves splayed and searching for grip on snowy ground.

The sun finally makes an appearance, spilling over the southeast horizon in a brilliant, golden show of fusing hydrogen. I feel the warmth of the light on my face, marveling, as always, at the enormous power of the sun, able to warm me from 93 million miles on even the coldest morn.

The moment is fleeting, though, and the sun soon disappears behind a steel-gray overcast. The cold returns to my face as the cows near the tank to drink. The lead cow looks at me, pauses, then thrusts her nose into the frigid mixture of water and ice in a drinking hole. Slurping noisily, she drinks deeply, watching me all the while.

Time to go, time to get on with morning chores. Hungry calves and horses await their morning corn and hay, and there’ll be thick ice in their stock tanks as well. As I drive on through the arctic dawn, with heavy work ahead of me, I think about how lucky I am to see and do these things, how fortunate I am to be here, and not trapped in a city or town with only a desk and computer to look forward to.

Time for snow?

Summer faded slowly, oh-so-slowly, into a lingering, mostly pleasant autumn this year. Other than the few skiffs of snow, a handful of nearly cold days, and the brisk hammering of intermittent wind spells, the weather has been pleasant for a long time. These nice conditions made fall chores on the ranch a good bit easier than in many years. We had little trouble finding pleasant days for moving herds, sorting calves and weaning, preg-checking and sorting cows, vaccinating and pouring, and hauling grain and hay.
But as they do every year, the days got shorter and the temperatures fell off. Now that we’ve passed the winter solstice and the days are getting longer, winter – real winter – is just around the corner. And that’s as it should be.

Last year winter came early. Looking back over my weather log I see that first frost came on September 28, the first hard freeze on October 3, the first snow fell on October 8 and snow fell every day for a week. We had a nice warm up for a couple of weeks, and then winter settled in for good on October 27. From then until the spring melt there was snow cover on the ground.

This year was different.

It was frosty cold on Christmas morning but the skies were clear and the dawn came like thunder. A second daybreak with warm, bright sunlight was sweet and welcome after a pair of solstice-dark, glowering mornings.

Wheat fields and clean fallow were crystalline bright with frost; countless pinpricks of sparkling brilliance dazzling eyes and mind and heart in a near-explosion of up-sun splendor. Stubble and prairie were drab in comparison, brown and gray and lumpy, but tinged with their own brand of frost, not as spectacular, perhaps, but lovely in their own right.

 I turned on the tap in the northwest quarter and started filling the tank and watched as the cows trailed in single file, providing most of the ground color against a bright blanket of sparkling white frost. The tall junipers were a glowing green accent around the edge of the pasture. A few handbreadths above the western horizon hung a bright, slivery, waning gibbous moon. As I drove in to feed the calves kicked up their heels, throwing dazzling pinpricks of sparkling frost into the air, then dashed to their places at the feedbunk. If I wasn't in church Christmas morning I don't know where I was.



The air cooled quickly Christmas evening, but the sky was clear and the wind calm. As the sun set in the south-southwest, it produced one of the Great Plains' signature treasures - a gorgeous sunset. I don't think I longed for a white Christmas this year.

Welding gauges glow in sunset light on Christmas Day south of Kimball.

By Monday the weather-guessers were predicting the first real winter storm of the year, due to sweep into the region Wednesday night. Predictions are for arctic temperatures, chilling north winds, and somewhere between four and 10 inches of blowing snow for the lowlands. More snow was predicted, of course, for the high country.

I’ve enjoyed the snow-free days we’ve had this year, even though I know they are a double edged sword. No snow means no precipitation, and each day without precipitation drives us deeper into drought. As I drive around the county I see a lot of wheat stands in very poor condition and know that a thick blanket of insulating and, eventually, water providing, snow may mean the difference between a crop and no crop.

As the sun sets on Christmas Day on a south Panhandle ranch, a hay-feeding truck casts shadow on a light-washed outbuilding.

There’s nothing we can do about the weather, of course. We take what we get. There are upsides and downsides to every weather event, and the trick to survival seems to be to never get too high on the upside or too low on the downside. Easier said than done.

Still, I’ve enjoyed our snow-free days. And I’m ready for the snow-filled days to come.

Now where in the heck...

As I drove into town the other day and stopped at the stoplight (yes, the one and only stoplight in Kimball) my Toyota pickup gave me an unexpected message.

As I flicked on the right turn signal I noticed that the dash indicator was blinking much more rapidly than usual and I could hear the relay clicking like mad. This generally means that the tail light bulb is burned out.

In modern vehicles (mine’s a 2005) this can be quite an irritation. Long gone are the days of simply removing a flat lens cover and popping in a spare 1057 (if I recall the number correctly) bulb. Oh, no. Everything is modular these days.

You can still replace the bulbs, of course, and the chore isn’t really that bad, but you have to remove the entire tail light assembly to get to them. The replacement bulbs can be a bit pricey, too.

So I pulled into the parking lot of the local parts house and hopped out to see if I could remember how to remove the tail light assembly. But I didn’t have to. The whole thing had gone missing. Nothing left but a broken and ratty looking wiring bundle.

A friend of mine who was just leaving the store got quite a kick out of my situation. “Holy cow (or words to that effect) Evertson, how can you lose the whole dang thing?”

“Beats me,” I said. “I wonder how much one of these costs?”

“Don’t even ask ‘em in there,” he said, pointing to the parts store. “You can’t afford it. Buy one on line.”

But I had to ask, of course.

Turns out my friend was right. I couldn’t afford it.

After a surprisingly brief and relatively pain-free internet search, I found a replacement unit at a price I could live with. Three days later it arrived by FedEx. Installation was quick and easy.

With a proud and shiny new tail light assembly installed, I went in search of the old one. I had an idea that I’d lost it while driving over rough (former CRP) pasture ground, looking for the three cows I needed to make my tally come out right. But I’d driven over a lot of ground in two sections so I didn’t have a lot of hope. I’ve lost things on that ground before, lost forever until found accidentally a year or two or three later.

But I searched diligently, and after hours and hours of driving the cob-rough ground, I gave up and turned for home. That’s when I noticed a bright, silvery glint on the ground about a quarter-mile away. I headed for it, lost the glint, found it again, and finally pulled up next to the missing tail light. My tire tracks made it clear that I’d driven right by the darn thing several times. All’s well that ends well though.

Solstice 2010

On Tuesday, December 21, 2010 at 4:38 p.m. the sun will stop moving south and begin moving north. Tuesday will be the shortest day of the year at 9 hours, 21 minutes and 22 seconds. Tuesday night will be the longest night of the year at 14 hours, 38 minutes and 38 seconds.

Wednesday, December 22 will be about two seconds longer than Tuesday, and Wednesday night about three seconds shorter. And so it will go, days getting longer and nights shorter until on June 21, 2011 at 11:16 a.m., the sun will stop moving north and begin moving south. June 21 will be the longest day of the year at 14 hours, 59 minutes and 8 seconds. The night of June 21 will be the shortest of the year at only 9 hours and 52 seconds.

This is the Earth-centric view, of course. Although the day/night duration calculations are correct, and days seem to get shorter in the summer and fall and longer in the winter and spring, that’s just our perspective from the surface of the earth. In reality, so far as our solar system is concerned, the sun is fixed in the center of the system and the planets – including the Earth – orbit around it.

But Earth’s annual trip around the sun – its orbit – doesn’t account for the apparent movement of the sun – south to north in winter and spring and north to south in summer and fall. Were it as simple as that – the Earth orbiting the sun – we’d have a situation similar to that of the Moon. Luna, as the Moon is often called, orbits the Earth and rotates on its axis only once per revolution, keeping one side, the side familiar to us, always facing the Earth. The other side – the so-called dark side – never faces our planet, and only since the advent of space flight and rocket trips to the moon has man ever had a glimpse of the dark side.

But Earth, which is not tide-locked into a single rotation per orbit as the moon is, rotates much more frequently, making 365 and a quarter rotations for each orbit around the sun. Each rotation takes just under 24 hours. From these numbers, 365.25 and 24, we derive the length of our year, measured in days, and the length of our day, measured in hours.

This is all very well, but the fact that the Earth rotates once per day and orbits the sun every 365.25 days doesn’t explain the apparent north-south, south-north movement of the sun when viewed from the surface of Earth.

What causes that apparent movement is the fact that the Earth is tilted about 23.5 degrees in relation to the plane in which it orbits the sun. This plane is called “The Plane of the Ecliptic,” and is the same plane occupied by the other seven planets of our solar system as they orbit the sun. If the Earth stood vertical in the Plane of the Ecliptic, with the north pole straight up and south pole straight down, the sun would never move north or south. It would rise each morning in precisely the same location on the eastern horizon and set each evening in precisely the same location on the western horizon. Each period of day and night would be the same from day to day, and those periods would be very close to 12 hours for most of the planet.

Earth is tilted, however, and presently the axis of rotation – an imaginary line drawn through the center of the earth from the north physical pole to the south physical pole and around which the earth rotates once every 24 hours – is leaned over at 23.5 degrees.

The Earth’s axial tilt of 23.5 degrees is the secret to the seasons, and the secret to December’s Winter Solstice. (Image courtesy NASA/In the public domain)

So why the seasons? Why is there a summer solstice and a winter solstice? The secret is that the axial tilt of 23.5 degrees remains constant (at least in our very short temporal frame of reference) as the Earth orbits the sun. In the summer, the northern hemisphere is leaned over toward the sun, and the sun’s light shines more directly on the north half of the planet. In the winter, the northern hemisphere is leaned away from the sun, and the sun’s light shines less directly on the north half of the planet. If you live below the Equator, in Australia, say, the process is exactly reversed, and your summer begins in late December while your winter begins in late June.

All in all, three things have to work in concert to provide the seasons and the apparent solar movement we see. Earth has to orbit the sun. Earth has to rotate. And – perhaps most importantly – Earth has to be “leaned over” with an axial tilt of 23.5 degrees.

So enjoy next Tuesday, Dec. 21, the shortest day and longest night of the year, with the certain knowledge that as our planet continues to orbit the sun, our trusty axial tilt will mean lengthening days. Before you know it, it will once again be spring, and life will begin anew across the lovely and majestic Great Plains.

Dreams

In honor of the Middies big win today...

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/200325/760975

More than 25 years ago. My how time flies. The A-4F  Super Fox was probably the best aircraft the Blue Angels ever performed in. Some of the footage gives you a real feeling for what "form" is really like.