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"It's not rural people that don't know how. I'd rather have ag extensions educating urban people on how food is produced and should be cooked. I'd like every urban school to have a 4-H program and a land lab (a garden and animal barn for lamb and pig rearing)."

Here, in much of the West (CO here), most rural people are direct or indirect recipients of government incomes or big investment benefits and don't know how to raise or slaughter animals. They assume that cattle only need the plants of semi-arid desert. Beef is, for the most part, stringy and tasteless. What they believe to be tasty, tender, "organic" and only grass fed is actually grown on lush, irrigated land yielding high legume content near a river and very expensive (won't name names there).

Extension services issue quite a bit of information on environmentalism and the like but not much that's useful for high, dry agriculture. 4-H clubs are for women only. Rodeos are for rich animal worshiper "in" crowd--the English saddle kind. Even some of the most remote and sparsely populated counties are regulated to extremes (e.g., permits required for building barns, camping by owners restricted, even on large lots). That's a picture of much of the contemporary West for you. A decade or more for an attentive former Midwesterner on the Rockies can be a surprising education.

I live in the rural west, did 4-H, my children have earned thousands of dollars selling their 4-H market animals. I paid only for the 1st animal/feed, after that they were self financing. 4-H clubs tend to have more male participants in the agricultural clubs, more females in the home-ec clubs.

All of my children regardless of gender can tag, castrate and shear lamb as well as spin and knit. The boys kinda suck at it, but they understand the engineering principles better than the girls.

I have butchered rabbit, deer, elk, lamb, beef and a large variety of fowl, wild and domestic as have most of my rural friends.

My experience is quite different and wonder if you actually live in the urban or suburban west rather than the rural west.

You are right about the government checks though. The government (all levels combined) is the largest employer in the county and outvote the farming community and then wonder why there are no jobs except government jobs and want to know why the food in a food growing region is so expensive.

Guess they couldn’t find directions to the Food Factory Outlet Mall. heh