Threats from All Sides
Human activity and nature conspire to challenge our farmers and ranchers as never before. Will Colorado agriculture survive?
Colorado’s farmers and ranchers form the basis of an economic engine that generates a total of about $41 billion annually in economic activity. It’s a big part of the state’s economy and the chief livelihood of the inhabitants of the great eastern plains. But multiple sources predict a hard year ahead for the agricultural economy. And the policies of our federal government are a big part of the problem. WTF?
Due, your Duty
Farm income was already predicted to fall to a 12-year low before China announced, in retaliation to Trump’s new tariff tweets, that it would impose duties on US exports of beef, pork, corn, wheat, soy, and more. Colorado growers may find themselves with large crop surpluses they can’t move, as countries like Brazil not subject to tariffs out-compete us for China’s trade.
Farm Bill Football
The Farm Bill has been a political bone of contention for many years. The extreme polarization of left and right today and the combination of benefits for the poor and benefits for the ownership class in one bill ensures this. But many of Colorado’s farmers and ranchers are just as dependent on farm subsidies as its poorest farm workers are dependent on SNAP (food stamps).
This year, we need a Farm Bill re-authorization by September because several important conservation and crop insurance programs will expire then. But the Trump budget proposes such draconian cuts to the Farm Bill that, if Congress honors them, it may interfere with our State’s ability to bring in its harvest.
WTF has already reported that between the anti-immigrant hysteria of the Trump administration and its opposition to minimum wage increases at home, seasonal employers find it hard to hire, and are turning to the H2-A and H2-B guest worker programs. But if SNAP benefits are paid only partly in money and partly in cardboard boxes of dried beans and rice, with no choice of what food is provided, if the Federal government keeps stirring up hate and anger against immigrants, who would want to come here? And what farmers, with their overseas markets destroyed by ill-considered tariffs, will pay extra wages to harvest crops that can’t be sold?
Subsidy Salad
The Farm Bill is a cluster of subsidies — with food security provisions on the side — aimed to keep land in the United States under cultivation, but also to preserve forest, meadow, and prairie habitat on privately owned land and ensure that too much land is not cultivated. These wild lands, evolved over thousands of years to withstand fluctuations in our climate, serve as buffers to limit the environmental impact of farming and provide a source of flora and fauna to resettle land that’s left fallow.
The Farm Bill has been tuned and adjusted for fifty years to maintain an economic and natural equilibrium in our nation’s great agricultural lands. Now the Trump proposals, driven by ideology, not science, threaten to destroy that balance. What will be the consequences of that?
Forecast: Warm and Dry
This spring, 2018, with the snow season almost at an end, the Northern Rockies snow packs are at 60–70% of normal, while in the Southern Rockies it’s closer to 50–55%.
The Ogallala Aquifer, the largest underground body of fresh water in the world, is shrinking. Ogallala underlies much of Eastern Colorado, but so many irrigation wells are tapped every year that the surface streams that feed it cannot replenish the aquifer as fast as it’s being drained. Colorado farmers recognize this, and are trying to switch to farming methods that require less irrigation, such as no-till or lo-till. However, this often means a change in crops. Non-GMO Heirloom strains of wheat, corn, and other traditional staple crops are in great demand in the US (and even more so in the EU), but they typically require more water than GMO strains engineered for resiliency. Yet it has been estimated that if all pumping from Ogallala wells stopped immediately, it would take several hundred years to restore the aquifer and associated surface streams to the state they held at the end of World War II. [Not considering future climate change.]
Dust Bowl II?
Here is why the cavalier treatment this administration gives the Farm Bill is so frightening. We have already seen, in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the sudden and devastating consequences of abusing the near-desert ecosystem of the Great Plains.
What if:
- Farmers, deprived of crop insurance and water, are forced by economic failure to abandon land that’s been under irrigated cultivation?
- The erratic and violent weather patterns of the past few years resolve themselves into an extended drought?
- Cuts to conservation subsidies for natural forest and grasslands cause desperate farmers and ranchers to stop preserving on private land?
- Mineral leases on the Pawnee and Comanche Grasslands make vulnerable these natural treasures?
- Weld County, crisscrossed with horizontal, fractured shafts for the extraction of oil and gas and lubricated by deep-injection wells for the disposal of the resulting contaminated water, suffers a literal collapse, Oklahoma-like, with sinkholes and quakes?
We could have another dust-bowl scale disaster, or worse. The harbingers of it are already apparent to long-time Colorado residents.
We Conserve and Protect
Coloradans are realizing the seriousness of the impact our growing population has on our plains resources, and the importance of conserving not only water, but soil, native plant life, and wildlife that is adapted to form a surface ecosystem that holds the soil in place and preserves what moisture there is. Local and State government mostly acknowledge this, though the power struggle between the people and the oil and gas extraction industry continues.
We have a national government that denies the existence of global warming and the need to protect the people and the land from exploitation. Three men now stand between us and the capriciousness of the federal government. They are Senator Michael Bennet, Senator Cory Gardner, and Representative Ken Buck. On the League of Conservation Voters’ National Environmental Scorecard, which is read (2017 score, lifetime score), Bennet scores (84, 88), Gardner scores (0,10), and Buck scores (6,3). In WTF’s opinion, Bennet is overrated: he is complicit in aiding the export of liquid natural gas, which makes him a supporter of fracking and the fossil fuels industry.
This is a battle we must fight with our phone calls, letters, voices at town halls, and with our ballots. The Farm Bill will be a skirmish: Congress may ignore Trump on the Farm Bill as they did on the Budget. We hope so. While it is far from perfect as is, Trump’s cuts will devastate the protections the Farm Bill is designed to enforce. Preserving SNAP, conservation support, and protections against crop failure are critical.
Our Precious Way of Life
That’s what we’re fighting for. Our freedom. The failure of our environment, our resources, our industry, destroys our freedom, no matter what we think freedom is. Freedom to be independent? Sure. Freedom from fear? Absolutely.
Just, please, don’t pretend it isn’t happening. The threats are closing in from all sides now. Push back. On every side you can touch. There’s no more time for delay.
