WWTBAM Bored

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-If you have FB you can access the first link-It is his cover photo-Otherwise, the second link shows a small picture of it.

Attending a Soil Health Seminar deal, White shows several photos of "Snirt"=snow and dirt in the ditches, there-caused by Wind erosion and it has been horrible this winter. My wife even stopped and took some pictures this last weekend out on the flats west of us.

As one might expect at a Sustainable Farming meeting , the attendees lean pretty hard to the left. I admit that issues like this year's Snirt do pull me to the left (for lack of a better term), however I don't think they (Sustainable Farming Crowd) are right about enough to pull me totally into their camp.

Also one has to recognize that the farming practices that lead to the "Snirt" are also heavily subsidized by Government-Through crop insurance subsidies/ethanol/direct farm subsidies etc.

So, in my view the out-of-control huge federal government is equally culpable with the private farmers in causing this snirt. I admit we have it on our land too, I have instituted some practices that mitigate it on some of our land-but Dad still has too much control on some of this stuff.

I am kind of an odd duck here. Most of my farming friends and neighbors would not give the Sustainable farming crowd the time of day-

I am kind of at home in both camps-but do not fall fully in to either.

A common assertion by larger conventional farmers that makes me barf is that "We" are doing a good job environmentally. Yeah, drive through the miles and miles and miles of "Snirt" and tell me again how we are doing a good job.

This is worse than the Dust Bowl years, because (while we are not at that magnitude of erosion), we are supposed to know better now.

We get snirt around here too, but not in the same way, and it's very destructive. What sometimes happens is that spring windstorms bring lovely red, pink, whatever color Arizona and Utah dust into the area, including on top of our beautiful pristine snowpacks, which soon become actual mud and dirt as the dark colors absorb that solar radiance instead of reflect it and hasten snowmelt.

We had a pink spring snowstorm about a million years ago when I was in Junior High, then another one a few years ago, and the local pundits went crazy saying it hadn't happened since 1932. But those of us who weren't even thought of in 1932 knew better.

That words looks too much to me like "snert"--probably the kind of person who would come up with bullcrap portmanteaux like "snirt".

Pastor Fireball wrote:That words looks too much to me like "snert"--probably the kind of person who would come up with bullcrap portmanteaux like "snirt".

Not to be confused with Leonard Snart, Captain Cold, one of The Flash's rogues.

earendel wrote:Not to be confused with Leonard Snart, Captain Cold, one of The Flash's rogues.

One of my favorite characters on The Flash. Now he's on Legends of Tomorrow, which I only watch occasionally. But I won't miss tonight's episode, when Snart leads a prison break!

Day 2(Thursday) was a lot better (IMHO)

Day 1 was more the vibe of people who have obviously smoked way too much marijuana getting "back to the land."

Day 2 was more the vibe of commercial-sized producers implementing practical and realistic scenarios.

The chief topics were cover crops and mob grazing. Mob grazing is where you split large pastures into small ones and put a large number of cattle into these small pastures for a short time and then move them on to the next pasture. This mimics the grazing patterns of large wild herbivores (ie Buffalo). Some take this to an extreme level and will move them several times a day. Otherwise, daily/weekly or whatever time frame fits your pasture size.

It also included an extremely emotional moment. One cattle producer has been traveling down the sustainable path for about 17 years. He has been able to expand his herd by a lot since he started this and his pastures are in much better shape.

He is located in the Minnesota River Valley, which is an island of woods/pastures/small fields etc-surrounded by large scale commercial crop agriculture once you pop out of the valley and reach the high ground.

He was showing slides of his operation and then showed a slide of dust storm on his neighbor's land taken last May. This looked like a picture of the 'Dirty 30's." He teared up and he could not go on. People started clapping for him. It was a genuinely emotional moment for everybody.

The real culprit in the soil erosion category up here right now is sugar beets and that was a theme with several professionals that I talked to/overheard yesterday. That land is turned to powder after harvest and there is very little that can be done to mitigate this. The "Dust storm" referenced above was from sugar beet land as were other pics of dust storms throughout the day.

Don't get me wrong, corn/soybean land have erosion as well, but sugar beets are by far the worst.

Not to be confused with Snert, who usually just says "Voof Voof!"

SportsFan68 wrote:We get snirt around here too, but not in the same way, and it's very destructive. What sometimes happens is that spring windstorms bring lovely red, pink, whatever color Arizona and Utah dust into the area, including on top of our beautiful pristine snowpacks, which soon become actual mud and dirt as the dark colors absorb that solar radiance instead of reflect it and hasten snowmelt.

We had a pink spring snowstorm about a million years ago when I was in Junior High, then another one a few years ago, and the local pundits went crazy saying it hadn't happened since 1932. But those of us who weren't even thought of in 1932 knew better.

Was that in 1994 when in Colorado Springs there was a foot of snow each day of the three-day Memorial Day weekend?

Bob Juch wrote:

SportsFan68 wrote:We get snirt around here too, but not in the same way, and it's very destructive. What sometimes happens is that spring windstorms bring lovely red, pink, whatever color Arizona and Utah dust into the area, including on top of our beautiful pristine snowpacks, which soon become actual mud and dirt as the dark colors absorb that solar radiance instead of reflect it and hasten snowmelt.

We had a pink spring snowstorm about a million years ago when I was in Junior High, then another one a few years ago, and the local pundits went crazy saying it hadn't happened since 1932. But those of us who weren't even thought of in 1932 knew better.

Was that in 1994 when in Colorado Springs there was a foot of snow each day of the three-day Memorial Day weekend?

Probably, I don't remember. I do remember a string of really horrible weather on Memorial Day weekends. We had to cut short the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic three years in a row, plus lots of treatment for hypothermia and so on.

Spock wrote:The real culprit in the soil erosion category up here right now is sugar beets and that was a theme with several professionals that I talked to/overheard yesterday. That land is turned to powder after harvest and there is very little that can be done to mitigate this. The "Dust storm" referenced above was from sugar beet land as were other pics of dust storms throughout the day.

Don't get me wrong, corn/soybean land have erosion as well, but sugar beets are by far the worst.

You've explained the bad effects of corn and ethanol subsidies, but sugar's are even worse. Senators who usually oppose government interference in the economy are all for sugar subsidies when their states benefit. They support the Cuba embargo for the same reason.