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Here Come the Hawks

By
Steve Gilliland
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I love watching hawks hunt and I love observing how they’ve learned to interact with farm equipment as it rolls across fields and stirs up rodents and small birds that scurry about and often end up as a snack for the hawk. Our raised deer blind overlooks a grass waterway that grows up in giant sunflowers and pigweed by summer’s end, becoming a nice secure travel way for deer, but making them hard to spot during hunting season. I try to mow that area every fall, and every year as I mow the last swath of thick weedy cover, fat field mice scatter everywhere and I think to myself “Man could the hawks be feasting here.” A few years back I happened by a nearby field of soybeans being cut. What caught my eye was the enormous number of hawks all around the field; I counted to thirty-some then lost count. I rolled into the field and talked with one of the combine drivers about the hawks. He said they had suddenly appeared as if from nowhere when they started cutting and had been there since. The soybean plants were extra tall and thick that year, and as they ripened and dropped their foliage, it left several inches of duff covering the ground between the rows; perfect cover for field mice and rats looking for warm concealment. As the combines lumbered through the field, they forced all those rodents from their cozy quarters and the hawks were feasting.

We’re already starting to see an extraordinary number of hawks of all varieties as they migrate south toward warmer climates. The extent of our Kansas winter will largely determine whether they stay here for a spell or move on south, and our milder-than-normal winters of late have been a huge draw to migrating hawks. The hawks I observed hunting the soybean stubble field that year were obviously migrants that were getting a good meal whether they stayed or not. The vast acreages of new wheat fields will be a huge draw too, as mice, voles and insects become vulnerable to the hawk’s keen eyes in the short new wheat. Another plus is the type of air currents and thermals that blow through the plains states. North winds coming down from Canada are utilized by all types of hawks, saving them precious energy by being able to soar. So in summary, the mild winters, the open fields and the beneficial wind currents all make Kansas a popular place to see hawks of many varieties this time of year.

One common hawk we see here every winter is the Northern Harrier. They are large hawks with wide white bands across their broad square tails and are often seen gliding effortlessly mere feet above CRP fields and pastures. We also get an influx of Red Tails from northern states as they come here for our milder winters. Swainson Hawks on their way to Argentina stop in Kansas by the thousands. Rough-Legged Hawks migrate from Canada to the western US, including Kansas. Ferruginous Hawks may be seen here as they travel from Western Kansas to parts of the South Eastern US and to Florida. All these truly make for a kaleidoscope of raptors in our Kansas sky.

This article wouldn’t be complete without emphasizing the important role raptors play in our agricultural environment. Raptors get blamed for everything from low pheasant and quail populations to stealing chickens and everything in between. Yes, we all know that hawks and especially owls will steal a chicken or two given the chance, but in actuality, hawks prey on mice, rats, snakes and possums that eat quail and pheasant eggs and newly hatched young. (FYI, feral and stray cats are the worst predators alive for killing young game birds and song birds.) Owls are huge rat and mice hunters and also eat skunks that

carry rabies. If not for these raptors in our midst, rodent populations would devastate farmer’s crops and our environment as a whole. And for the record, killing a raptor of any kind is illegal in Kansas!

You can’t go afield this time of year without spotting hawks silently hunting low over patches of CRP and milo stalks, waiting patiently atop power poles for prey to reveal themselves or putting on shows of acrobatic excellence as they soar above us on the fall breezes. I once overheard a raptor rehabilitator tell someone “We as humans have encroached on them, so the least we can do is let them live with us.” Continue to Explore Kansas Outdoors!

Steve can be contacted by email at [email protected]

East and West (1)

By
John Marshall
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john marshal

It’s nearly two years since Lawrence became an urban foster child in farm country.

After the 2020 census, the legislature’s dominant Republicans were gripped by reapportionment fever. In February 2022, they carved Lawrence from northern Douglas County and the Second District and squeezed it into the far northeast corner of a rural 59-county congressional district.

Lawrence, a growing university city (pop. 95,000) in the five-county metropolitan northeast (1.16 million) was consigned to a western swath running nearly the width of the state. This arrangement, which has survived court challenges, is an impressive assembly of diversity, a 400-mile spread of politics, culture, lifestyle and landscape.

Lawrence is a nesting place for social progressives, free-thinkers, risk-takers, politics of the left. Republicans hoped to dilute its Democratic vote by sending it to a district that is mostly rural, socially conservative, and now elects the Republicans who give the party its veto-proof majority in Topeka.

The change has provoked uncertainty and agitation in the northeast and, in the west, doubt and dismay. Neither place is wild about it.

The census put new numbers to an old story, of metropolitan gain and rural loss. Lawrence is thriving, energetic. Out west, a sense of distance and isolation, of people who leave, especially the young, with no thought of returning, of people who are not attracted or invited to small places in big spaces.

*

A large part of Kansas has lost energy. School enrollments continue to shrink, hospitals struggle ‒ or close. In many places the basics need fixing – roads, public utilities, telecommunication, health care, for starters. Plans and studies gather dust.

The contrast between Lawrence and the west unfolds along the changing terrain, frame of landscape and frame of mind. Popping Lawrence into farm country may be fine for a political map, but it does nothing for the needs and desires of different worlds in the same state.

This isn’t about trouble where we haven’t looked, but where we have found it, and how those empowered to act have looked away. Lawrence just might find that it shares intentions with its rural cousins.

Among them:

‒ Opportunity zones where enterprising communities qualify for government investment in infrastructure improvements, technology upgrades, housing programs and other aid;

‒ Immigration reform, where migrants are a source for employee hiring rather than alien targeting;

‒ Infrastructure, its opportunity for jobs and development. This includes investment in farm-to-market roads, protecting great heartland rivers, and development of rural (and urban neighborhood) broadband.

‒ Solar and wind power have taken root and widened their appeal. So has a process called “carbon sequestration” to keep carbon out of the atmosphere. Corrective farming, a big deal in Lawrence, includes planting cover crops, leaving organic matter in fields after harvest, rotating in additional kinds of crops and managing grazing.

*

The Lawrence-rural connection holds strong in pitting conservation efforts against glorifying production. Policies that stabilize the farm economy cost pennies per meal. So would compensating farmers for environmental services. This would help all farmers. It would improve air, water and soil quality.

It might meld green Lawrence with its distant rural cousins. Both hold a love of the land, and a notion that current policy seems to favor those who skip conservation and punish those who try to be corrective.

(Next: Political power)

Put-It-Together-Yourself America

By
Milo Yield
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Thayne Cozart
Milo Yield

 

I fondly remember the days of yesteryear when I could go to a store and buy what I wanted from the in-store inventory. Usually, I could pick up the item I bought, put it in my vehicle, and take it directly home. If it wuz a big enuf item, the company would happily deliver the item, most often for free.

Those days are extinct as the passenger pigeon and T-Rex. They’ve been replaced by “Put-It-Together-Yourself America.” Today, if you buy an item more complicated than a marble and with at least two pieces, you’d better be prepared to get out the ol’ tool box and put the item together yourself.

Or, if you find an item you like in a store, chances are good you won’t be able to buy it from the showroom, but will have to wait for it to be ordered and delivered at a later date — and then assembled by you.

I’m learning America’s new economic axiom in spades these days after moving into our new home. And, to make matters worse, I have mentioned before in my columns that I suffer from MDS of the brain. That stands for “Mechanical Deficiency Syndrome.” I can’t pick up a nut or screw without dropping it. I can’t change oil without spilling it. I have to tell myself — “Lefty Loosey, Righty Tighty” whenever it pick up a wrench to use.

We didn’t move our ancient entertainment center to our new home, opting to buy a new one. We couldn’t find one we liked locally, so we found one we liked on the internet and had it delivered. Naturally, it came in pieces and wuz too complicated for me to put together, so our son-in-law and daughter assembled the entertainment center in their workshop and delivered it to us ready to use.

Since moving in, Nevah and I sold our dining room table because it wuz too big and didn’t fit the new decor. We didn’t sell the four dining room chairs as we liked the old ones and they are on rollers. So, after the Facebook buyer left with our old table, we went table shopping.

After visiting the showrooms of two large, local furniture stores, we found one dining room table at each that we liked. But, we didn’t want to buy the chairs that were package-priced with the tables. The cost wuz more than double with the chairs.

So, we offered each store to buy its table without the chairs. Both places refused our offer to buy just the table on the grounds that it was difficult for them to sell dining room chairs separately. But, they offered to order just the table for us and that we could expect delivery sometime in January or later.

That clearly didn’t work for “table-less us,” so Nevah went online and found an identical table in a warehouse somewhere in upstate New York. The price, even with more than 1,000 miles of delivery costs, wuz less than buying locally. The table is to be delivered within a week, but with the alert that “some assembly is required.” What’s new?

So, bottom line is that the local furniture stores missed out on selling us a new dining room table, when they could have sold us the one on the showroom floor and ordered a replacement showroom table from New York for less money and got it in a week. Go figure.

It was the same story for the shelving I bought locally for our garage storage. Nuthin’ from the showroom floor. Nope. Five boxes of shelving that required us to put-it-together.

I guess the good thing about the new economic axiom is that it’s enhancing family togetherness.

***

I’ve been quick to criticize local furniture store business policy, so I am pleased to report that there are exceptions to the new economic rules. Nevah sold our two old recliner chairs, sofa and loveseat over the weekend via a local internet “for sale” service. So, again we went shopping locally for new stuff to replace the old.

We found what we wanted at the Furniture Warehouse in Manhattan and the owner wuz glad to sell out of his current inventory, and deliver and set up the furniture for a very modest fee. The new sofa and loveseat were delivered just yesterday, so we had to “suffer” without recliners for only two evenings.

And, a funny thing happened at the Furniture Warehouse. I wuz wearing a FARM TALK cap and the owner volunteered that years ago he hired an awesome sales gal who eventually went to work for FARM TALK after graduation. The sales gal lived on a farm near Nevada, Mo., but wuz attending Kansas State University. She worked for FARM TALK for 10 years and, I wuz told, still lives in Nevada, but works for an equipment company in Ft. Scott, Kan. It’s a small world indeed.

***

A farmer and his wife got into a raging argument over family finances. The wife declared angrily, “I think I’ll join the women’s lib movement and demand that a husband pay his wife for doing housework.”

Her hubby retorted hotly, “Well, you just do that, gal. Sounds like a bargain to me. I’ll pay you $50 a day, but I only need you to come in and do all the housework on Tuesdays.”

I’d bet he’s doing his own housework these days — for nuthin’.

***

Mother Natures skipped Indian Summer this week and went directly to winter from summer. It wuz 80 one day and 18 degrees a day later. That rapid change sparked my words of wisdom for the week: “Winter is the season when we try to keep the house as hot as it was in the summer, when we complained about the heat.”

Have a good ‘un.

Animal Welfare, Racing Groups Demand President Biden Halt Horse Slaughter

By
Frank Buchman
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Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, along with several leading horse racing organizations, sent a letter to the White House, demanding that President Joe Biden work to halt live exports of thousands of American horses for slaughter for human consumption.

They noted that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for an end to Canada’s role in exporting draft horses to Japan for slaughter and asked that Biden address America’s gruesome trade of equines to Mexico.

The United States also sends a smaller number of horses to Canada, which itself has two remaining horse slaughter plants.

Former Congressman and National Thoroughbred Racing Association president Tom Rooney, Jockey Club President James Gagliano, and New York Racing Association president David O’Rourke aligned with animal protection groups in urging Biden to do something about America’s biggest horse welfare problem.

“As a U.S. Senator and as vice president, you opposed horse slaughter,” the letter reads. “Yet, your administration has been silent on this trade. I do hope that Prime Minister Trudeau’s outspoken work on this matter reminds you that this subject is worthy of the attention of all North American heads of state.”

Bipartisan support is building in Congress for the Save America’s Forgotten Equines (SAFE) Act, H.R. 3475, and S. 2037.

Those measures, led by Reps. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla, and Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and Sens. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., would also permanently codify a domestic ban on horse slaughter that has annually been renewed for the last 15 years.

The SAFE Act would halt live exports of about 20,000 equines for slaughter in Mexico and Canada.

While the last of the U.S.’s slaughter plants were shuttered in 2007, thousands of American equines are funneled to Mexico and Canada where they are killed, butchered, and then shipped to Europe and Asia for consumption.

In 2022, though, there were 20,000 horses shipped to Mexico and Canada for slaughter, down from 140,000 a decade ago.

“Elderly, sick, blind, and lame horses, heavily pregnant mares, small ponies, and aggressive stallions are all crammed onto trailers for a horrific journey to foreign meat plants. Horses and other equines are neglected and abused at every turn of this winding journey,” the letter to the president reads.

 

“If it’s wrong to slaughter American horses on U.S soil, it’s wrong to stain Mexican or Canadian soil with the blood of American horses, too,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of the Center for a Humane Economy.

“Our investigations show that the trafficking of live horses for slaughter for human consumption has been in a steep decline, but 20,000 horses still experience terror and butchery for no good reason.”

“It’s time to make all of North America a Safe Zone for American horses,” added Pacelle.

“The Jockey Club has long sought a ban on the export of horses for slaughter and we urge the Biden administration to take the necessary steps to protect horses from being butchered for very isolated pockets of Old-World consumers interested in horse meat,” declared James Gagliano, president of The Jockey Club, breed registry for Thoroughbreds. “The Thoroughbred industry is united in calling for this reform.”

The SAFE Act amends the 2018 Dog and Cat Meat Trade Prohibition Act, which banned the trade in dog and cat meat for human consumption, by adding the words “or equines,” thus ensuring that the three most treasured animal companion species, dogs, cats, and horses, are protected from foreign interests that regard them as little more than a food commodity, the letter to the president explains.

“This trade in horses for slaughter is perhaps America’s most reviled form of structural cruelty to equines,” added Scott Beckstead, director of campaigns for Animal Wellness Action and an Oregon Racing Commissioner. “The president and USDA have a chance to close out this debate and what is widely considered a morally settled matter.”

Animal Wellness Action is a Washington, D.C.-based 501(c)(4) whose mission is to help animals by promoting laws and regulations at federal, state, and local levels that forbid cruelty to all animals. The group also works to enforce existing anti-cruelty and wildlife protection laws.

The Center for a Humane Economy is a Washington, D.C.-based 501(c)(3) whose mission is to help animals by helping forge a more humane economic order.

Lighter Calves Bring More

By
Frank Buchman
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“They averaged weighing less than a year ago but sold for more per pound.”

So, the amount received for this year’s calf crop set a ranch record high.

Objective is for calves to be heavier than the previous year’s weaning weight.

That was not the case for any certain reason. They received required vaccinations, were healthy, looked fresh, smooth haired, and uniform when sold as a group.

Evidently lower average weaning weight was partially due to inferior grass quality late in the season. Although dry and short, native pasture was considered higher in protein rather than slushy.

Genetics were such the calves should have weighed more than the previous year. However, water supplies were not of the highest quality.

Water was always available, but it was sometimes limited and frequently muddy with cattle forced to consume what there was.

Auction market price per pound was the determining factor of the total calf crop value. It is risky when a whole year’s calf crop is sold all at one time.

There was considerable concern about what the market would be although prices had been going up in recent months. Then fear of a government shutdown lowered prices being paid in days prior to sale time.

Somehow, someway, the market showed remarkable recovery and even increased some for the calves to sell for highest average ever. There have been drastic price fluctuations in the downward trend since sale day and are presently below what was received.

Most business endeavors have a certain level of risk, but cattle are near the top of opportunity to lose money. Regardless of how well an operation is precision managed, many factors influence the level of profitability. Only count the returns when the check is in the bank and all bills are paid in full.

With concerns about having sufficient feed and water for a cowherd, it is tempting to sell the entire calf crop. However, it is essential to save the best heifers as replacements for an operation to continue into the future.

Still heavy culling of old, poorly producing cows is necessary as difficult as that often is. Like many operations, several old cows, some 15-years-old, have been sold in recent months.

Reminded of Deuteronomy 30:9: “Your God, will outdo himself as you get calves, and enjoy a good life.”

+++ALLELUIA+++

XVII–45–11-5-2023

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