[Renfield]

I am just as incensed by subsidized heating oil, Amtrack, and other boondoggles as I am by agricultural subsidies. I don't approve of any of them. And as for the hard-working farm families of the Klamath Basin, I feel sorry for them and wish them well. I work with hard-working farm families out here on the other side of the continent. My point is that the government induced their ancestors to settle this land by making a promise to them that it cannot fulfil. The climatic history of the interior west is capricious. Rainfall regimes for Western basins during the Holocene (last 13,000 years or so) have oscillated between "Xeric" (Mediterranean-like, with some rain during the winter) or "Ustic" (enough rainfall for small-grain or grass agriculture, but with dry spells during the growing season), on the one hand, and "Aridic" (desert) on the other. These aridic spells can last for 50 years or more, which dries up the whole watershed. It is quite possible that the current 3-year drought which has hit the interior west might last for a couple of generations. At some point, an extended drought will make watershed-irrigated agriculture in the West impossible, and many people will be displaced.

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

I am just as incensed by subsidized heating oil, Amtrack, and other boondoggles as I am by agricultural subsidies. I don't approve of any of them. And as for the hard-working farm families of the Klamath Basin, I feel sorry for them and wish them well. I work with hard-working farm families out here on the other side of the continent. My point is that the government induced their ancestors to settle this land by making a promise to them that it cannot fulfil. The climatic history of the interior west is capricious. Rainfall regimes for Western basins during the Holocene (last 13,000 years or so) have oscillated between "Xeric" (Mediterranean-like, with some rain during the winter) or "Ustic" (enough rainfall for small-grain or grass agriculture, but with dry spells during the growing season), on the one hand, and "Aridic" (desert) on the other. These aridic spells can last for 50 years or more, which dries up the whole watershed. It is quite possible that the current 3-year drought which has hit the interior west might last for a couple of generations. At some point, an extended drought will make watershed-irrigated agriculture in the West impossible, and many people will be displaced.

Eh?

[Paul Ross]

Hellooooo! Wrong thread. Maybe even wrong SITE!