Free Republic

Forced to reckon with a worsening drought, California’s water regulators are preparing to forbid thousands of farmers from tapping into the state’s major rivers and streams.It’s an extraordinary step — and one that regulators didn’t take during the last drought, which was considered one of the worst on record.The State Water Resources Control Board on Friday released an “emergency curtailment” order that would cut thousands off from rivers and streams in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river watersheds. The five-person board still has to vote on the order Aug. 3, and it would take effect about two weeks later.Eileen Sobeck,...

A Black farmer checks the condition of his soy bean field. Getty© Getty A Black farmer checks the condition of his soy bean field. Getty In a historical step to redress racism, the USDA was poised to issue $4 billion in debt relief to farmers of color. White farmers and banks pushed back, in an attempt to uphold the racist structures they've benefitted from for centuries. Black farmers won't overcome racism until they take the levers of finance into their own hands and forge their own financial institutions. This month, in a historic step to redress racism, the United States...

A massive population of grasshoppers is proliferating in the sweltering American west, where a deep drought has made for ideal conditions for grasshopper eggs to hatch and survive into adulthood. “I can only describe grasshoppers in expletives,” said Richard Nicholson, a cattle rancher in Fort Klamath, a small community in southern Oregon, who once recalled seeing grasshopper bands eat 1,000 acres a day and cover the ground like snow. The insects cause innumerable headaches for farmers and ranchers, competing with cattle for tough-to-find wild forage and costing tens of thousands of dollars in lost crops and associated costs. “They are...

As contractors widen Interstate 66 in Northern Virginia, they produce tons of excess dirt. So do excavators digging basements for homes or leveling land for commercial projects or schools. Some of that dirt – no one knows how much – ends up on Fauquier County properties. Some county officials think it is way too much. “Fauquier County is becoming, if not has already become, the dumping ground for Northern Virginia's fill dirt. And it's obviously a huge problem. And it's affecting people's lives,” county supervisor Rick Gerhardt (Cedar Run District) said at April’s Board of Supervisors meeting, as residents complained...

Farmers in the United States have reached a breaking point. They now say that what the government has done has been so disastrous that they are willing to stand off with the Feds.Farmers in Oregon are protesting because they own the water in the Upper Klamath Lake, farmer Dan Nielsen told RT’s Ruptly video agency. He stood outside an American flag-colored tent that was set up next to the canal headgates, which control the flow of irrigation water from the lake. “It’s ours and the federal government actually just stole it. No due process of law, no compensation,” Nielsen said,...

The Mississippi Department of Agriculture said farmers are experiencing a total loss for some crops after the flooding conditions swept farmlands. This loss will affect the economy but hopefully not Mississippi’s food production. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson said. “It was just torrential. It looked like a tropical storm.” Gipson went to north Mississippi this week to observe the impacted farmlands. “They look like lakes where there was cotton and soybeans. And there are even cornfields that are totally underwater,” he said. Boliver County is one of the hardest-hit areas and those farmers are said...

Readers know by now that the Western US is facing one of the most severe droughts in years. We’ve documented (read here & here) this spring of a “megadrought” sweeping across states like California and Nevada as risks of a second Dust Bowl increase by the day. But in this note, let’s dive deeper into the drought and how it’s impacting farmers and the potential consequences it could have on crops. Meteorologists at BAMWX have published data on surface soil moisture over 20 years. Surface soil moisture is the water that is in the upper 4 inches and available for...

Joe Del Bosque is leaving a third of his 2,000-acre farm near Firebaugh, California, unseeded this year due to extreme drought. Yet, he hopes to access enough water to produce a marketable melon crop. Farmers across California say they expect to receive little water from state and federal agencies that regulate the state's reservoirs and canals, leading many to leave fields barren, plant more drought-tolerant crops or seek new income sources all-together. "We're taking a big risk in planting crops and hoping the water gets here in time," said Del Bosque, 72. Agriculture is an important part of California's economy...

Sioux Falls, South Dakota; : A third-generation farmer filed a lawsuit today against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is unlawfully preventing him from farming one of his fields. In 2011, a division of the Department of Agriculture ruled that a small seasonal mud puddle on Arlen Foster’s farm is protected by federal law as a wetland. Even though the federal government has no authority to regulate such puddles, the department is forcing Foster to choose between productively using his field or participating in federal programs for farmers, like crop insurance. “The government lacks the authority to insist that he...

Biden is seeking higher taxes on real estate transactions with gains of more than $500,000, a target aimed directly at the heart of small real estate investors, family farmers and owner-occupied businesses. In combination with his plans to eliminate step-up basis on the resolution of estates, the Biden tax proposal will greatly increase the cost of farmland and thus food prices, property prices and rental costs in some markets. The strategy on the political chopping block is the so-called like-kind or 1031 exchanges, which allow investors to defer paying taxes on real estate by rolling profits into their next property....

The counter-group to the leftist Lawfare team, organized by Stephen Miller, is called “America First Legal.” Today the Miller group filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration for racial discrimination against farmers and ranchers in the COVID relief bill. WASHINGTON, DC – Today, America First Legal (AFL) filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas to stop the Biden Administration from administering a program created by Congress in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 that discriminates against American citizen farmers and ranchers based upon their race. Specifically, Sections 1005 and 1006 of...

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that only 0.1 percent of coronavirus relief set aside by the Trump administration for American farmers went to Black farmers, according to a Washington Post interview published on Thursday.... “We saw 99 percent of the money going to White farmers and 1 percent going to socially disadvantaged farmers and if you break that down to how much went to Black farmers, it’s 0.1 percent,” Vilsack said. ...The Post notes that only 1.3 percent of American farmers — around 45,000 — are Black...

GOP rallies around meat industry in response to attack by Colorado's Jared Polis... The red meat wars have hit America. Republican governors representing heartland states are uniting in support of the cattle industry in response to calls from Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, to move his state away from eating meat. The herd of Republican governors of Nebraska, Iowa, Wyoming, and Montana has taken issue with Polis's call for Saturday, March 20, to be observed as "MeatOut Day," during which residents are asked to replace meat with a plant-based alternative. All four Republican governors issued proclamations in response,...

This provision Democrats specifically wrote into the American Rescue Plan pushes a blurred vision of ‘social equity’ by providing relief for farmers based on the color of their skin. Last week, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act into law. The bill, comprised of $1.9 trillion in the name of “COVID relief,” received no support from Republicans in the House or Senate, and it’s not hard to see why. The legislation includes carveouts for dozens of leftist priorities, including a bridge in Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s New York and a tunnel in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Silicon...

Most Americans tend to think of private property simply as a home – the place where the family resides, store their belongings and find shelter and safety from the elements. It’s where you live. It’s yours because you pay the mortgage and the taxes. Most people don’t give property ownership much more thought than that. There was a time when property ownership was considered to be much more. Property, and the ability to own and control it, was life itself. The great economist, John Locke, whose writings and ideas had major influence on the nation’s founders, believed that “life and...

CPW is now accepting applications for membership in the Stakeholder Advisory Group for wolf reintroduction and management in Colorado. Stakeholder Advisory Group Application.. Applications for membership in the Stakeholder Advisory Group (SAG) for wolf reintroduction and management in Colorado are being accepted and must be received no later than March 31, 2021. The application link includes instructions for applying as well as the application itself. Download the Stakeholder Advisory Group Application. The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission is charged with restoring and managing gray wolves in Colorado no later than December 31, 2023. Based on public feedback and Colorado Parks...

Joe Biden is now waging war on farmers. Biden killed tens of thousands of jobs his first day in office when he canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and now he’s targeting farmers. The Trump Administration left $30 billion to help farmers suffering from the trade wars but Biden is going to divert the money to climate change pet projects. Biden’s plan is to create a “carbon bank” to pay farmers for using “sustainable farming practices” to “capture carbon in soil.” This is extremely dangerous and will only put smaller, family-owned farms out of business. Politico reported:

The government will help farmers mitigate climate change by paying them to “put their land in conservation” and plant cover crops, said President-elect Biden, providing some details on his campaign call to offset greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. The sector accounts for roughly 10% of emissions nationwide.

EASTERN WISCONSIN — Rural Wisconsin is crossed with state highways, but you might not recognize them. Two-lane country roads dotted with red barns, granaries, and farmhouses, where passing is nearly always permitted if you feel the urge to tear around the loaded semis and tankers that rule these parts. Shiloh Dairy is nowhere near the freeway, but Route 10 will take you within a stone’s throw. Nestled into the rolling countryside of Wisconsin, 25 miles west of Lake Michigan and the same south of Green Bay, Gordon Speirs keeps more than 4,000 head of cattle here.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has appealed directly to investor Warren Buffett to support demolishing four hydroelectric dams on a river along the Oregon-California border ... which would be the largest dam removal in U.S. history. The dams are owned by PacificCorp, an Oregon-based utility that is part of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. conglomerate. The $450 million project would reshape California’s second-largest river and empty giant reservoirs. ... Newsom supports a 2016 agreement under which PacifiCorp would transfer its federal hydroelectric licenses for the dams to a nonprofit coalition, the Klamath River Renewal Corp., that was formed to oversee the demolition. ......