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please excuse this little rant

15K views 60 replies 22 participants last post by  Haraga 
#1 ·
For anyone reading this, please excuse this little rant I’m about to make. OUR environment is changing. I’m not referring to “climate change” as everyone is so focused on and wasting time and money on. I’m referring to our natural area and environment we currently live in. Things are changing, our environment is in a transformation where every aspect of it through out the growing season is being manipulated to the point where everything natural about it is being lost. It’s the clearing of arable land, and the clearing of non arable land, clearing and drainage of swamps and leveling out of ravines to allow machinery to travel over. Massive water drainage projects where we
run off the surface water as fast as we can, drain the sub surface water year round into ditches and pump deep water reserves to irrigate our crops. It’s the blanket use of insecticides not once but up to five times a season to protect the crop from pests, the use of fungicides to everything that is growing and the use of highly efficient herbicides leaving nothing else growing within the fields but the crop its self. It’s this expansion of our fields and intensively managed mono culture that is in a way creating a living desert in areas which should flourish with life and diversity. We are/have set up an ecosystem that is so fragile that anything natural within it is always on the brink of survival. And when we experience harsh weather as we did this last spring nobody notices the actual devastating effect it had on the living environment around them.

We are managing honeybees to take the place of natural pollinators to pollinate our cropping requirements. Here in again we bring in a manageable solution to solve our manged problems. But things are getting so far out of hand that we infact are even having trouble managing our managed pollinators. Why??? Because everything we do as beekeepers is directly influenced by the environment around us. That environment around us is being destroyed, and because of that my bees are struggling. If we don’t change the way we perceive and respect the natural environment, our managed environment will collapse and with that all of us around it. This focus on climate change has blinded the public to the actual environmental threats at home, tangible actions that we could be focusing our attention on which would actually go a long way in preserving our lands and creating a sustainable working environment for all of us to live in.

We manage land, lots of land, I appreciate everything that is done to make a living off the land and the hardships that are involved in managing the land. I understand the reason why we use production practices to improve our bottom dollar and understand the reason why we must realize short sightedness sometimes is the only managing stratagy which allows us to keep in business. BUT we also appreciate our natural environment and try our best to preserve the land in a sustainable fashion. On our farm we have 500 acres left as natural raven, not pastured or pushed, leveled, drained and cropped! On our farm we have ten quarters of muskeg wet land bush, managed as pasture but grazed in a fashion which does not destroy its wet land ecosystem. On our farm we manage 3000 acres of crop land, on land which will carry equipment and anything else is hayed. We zero till or minimal till the land to protect the soil structure and everything living in it. Wet land “pot holes” are left as they are, hill side springs and field runs are hayed to eliminate erosion and low lands are left as grass, using the available water resource and cut later in the year as hay.

There has to be a place for agriculture on the lands or we will all starve, but agriculture has to manage itself in a diverse fashion using the lands as it presents itself to allow all living things to flourish. I feel very fortunate as a beekeeper to be able to shelter my operation around our farm, as it reinforces diversity and provides that for my bees to live on. EVERYWHERE else on the countryside I am seeing a complete wipe down of anything natural.
 
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#5 ·
speak the truth !!!!!!! it is sad that people don't know or care I guess that almost every action that they take effects the earth in a good way or more often bad we need to start taking more care to try and do anything you can to help the world out DOWN WITH MONSANTO EVERYONE GO NON GMO
 
#7 ·
we use GMO in our cropping operation
going non GMO just means using more of the expensive chemicals and using more tillage on our farm

here in again, if we put all the that time and money spent on fighting GMO into preserving wetland and habitat, keeping tree rows and encouraging diversity, I think we would have a lot more accomplished right now.
 
#9 ·
Without GMO we would need to hurt our environment more than we do now. It would take a lot of extra acres to make up the production we get from GMO crops. We seem hell bent to level, drain, till and crop every acre. What will that mean for future generations? I am with you all the way on this one Ian.
 
#20 ·
well said ian, well said. it seems like a step we could take is to stop giving the farmers so much money. also what if we said for every 100 acres tilled there must be x amount of land sitting natural. seem like that would be a good first step. i know that no one wants to be told what to do with their land, but this farming is outa control.

some one i know was just out in the oil field boom in north dakota. he said boy are they destroying the land up there. nothing was regulated. so much is being destroyed, but he said, if you like paying 3.75 at the pump vs. 10$ a gal. then you cant complain.

i hate that i feel like i know what is wrong with the world but how can we change it.

honestly i know this is horrible but i always think when a natural disaster strikes and lots of people die well thats just mother earths way of cleaning up the bottom board!! :v:
Obviously you are not a farmer or an oilfield worker. I am a farmer and specifically what tell us more about the farmer getting too much money.
Every winter I drive a water truck out of Parshall ND. It has been my experience that the land has not been destroyed. Do you have any first hand experience that makes you eligible to comment on these two subjects?
 
#16 ·
First let me start off by saying that I have 10 years of commercial beekeeping behind me until this spring when I sold out. Secondly let me tell you that I am currently working out in the North Dakota Oil Patch. While I agree with some peoples posts, I find it very offensive that someone who has not been out here can sit at their computer and tell everyone that we are destroying the land over here. I work on the reclamation side of all of this. Oil companies have strict rules and regulations to follow from location sizes to clean up to the TYPE OF GRASS that has to be planted when the actual location pad is sized back down to just a pumping unit and tanks. I deal a lot with the US Gov’t because a lot of the land around me is federal land therefore I can tell you there are many rules and regulations and many people that will check on you and follow up after you have completed the job and if it is not done to their specs guess what you RE-DO IT! Ya the dust from the roads gets on the plants but a lot of money has been spent on dust reduction and reduced speeds on these roads so that has been reduced greatly too. I don’t think there should be any commercial (or hobbiest I have 2 deep supers and 4 mediums currently on my hives) beekeeper around here that doesn’t have a good crop. I am seeing a lot of skyscraper beehives out on the country side. So the next time you decide to go off on how UN environmentally friendly we are out here maybe you should come walk beside me for a few days….Oh wait then you would have to sit through 3 days of classes just so that you could step foot on each of the companies I currently do work for (ahh nevermind that last part of “3 days of class” after all there are no safety regulations or orientations out here right)
 
#21 ·
You saw that as an attack? No. I am serious. If you wish to ease the impact of your life upon the environment how else would you suggest easing that impact? Did you not see my first reply? "You are excused."? You ask and I responded.

I mean you no ill will. I think you should figure out how to remedy the situation. How would you suggest we live differently?
 
#23 ·
Do you have any first hand experience that makes you eligible to comment on these two subjects?[/QUOTE]

actually i do. my girl friends dad is a excavator. he works for a lot of farmers in my area. they are his childhood friends. he was a farmer. he quit right before it turned around. still has the land, rents it. his buddies are all rich farmers now. they hire him to do dumb ass jobs like ian says, level it, fill it in and make it drain. they get govnt money to harm this great state of MN. they are changing it by making spiecies go extinct. and polluting the ground water slowly and many other things. actually i do think we need population control and i am practicing it. im sure i will have one child but not 3 4 or more. why would i want to bring more people into a over crowded earth. the worst part is our goverment is set up so that the stupid people are breeding the most. they get money the more stupid kids they have the more money they get. maybe i am negative or just a mean person but its the way it all seems to me. i do not know how to see it any other way. i may not be that smart, but im not that ignorant.
 
#26 ·
... Tell us about how the farmers are paid too much.
I do not know how much is too much, but agriculture in US is heavily subsidized:
"This week, House Republicans passed a rather unusual farm bill. There was no money for food stamps for the poor, a program that typically makes up the bulk of these bills. But the House did manage to pass billions in subsidies for farmers and agribusinesses."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...ers-so-why-does-congress-love-farm-subsidies/

I do not know how much from this comes in the farmer's pocket. Any idea?
 
#30 ·
Some of them are beekeepers too. I don't consider those subsidies, just low cost Insurance. I wish I could get health insurance that inexpensively. Is Health Insurance deductible? I bet the crop insurance payments are. Is the "income" from a claim taxable?
 
#32 ·
Insurance is insurance correct, so your property is damaged covered by insurance then you put in a claim and get paid by insurance company? Besides farmers that actually borrow money from the FSA division of FDA for their farm growth are required by FDA to retain crop insurance.

Alot of the folks in our area that put in claims for insurance have been due to crops freezing out in spring or the re-occurence of flash floods we have had in the last 3 years.
 
#40 ·
I'm kind of surprised you didn't suggest that the whole Thread be moved to Tailgater. The subject of the Thread certainly isn't what Commercial Beekeeping/Pollination is all about.

I didn't mention the Governments role in population control. Someone else did that by bringing up China.
 
#47 ·
I'm kind of surprised you didn't suggest that the whole Thread be moved to Tailgater. The subject of the Thread certainly isn't what Commercial Beekeeping/Pollination is all about.
It is to my operation. What happens to the landscape directly influences what happens in my beekeeping operation.
 
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