Farm Bill

Everybody has their stories of the past. I can remember my father who was born in 1915 talking about when he went to the farm and killed so many ducks that the barrel of his Browning A5 got so hot he would have to let it cool. And the funny part is he said he never heard a shot other than his in the bottom. If there are ducks, shots all around me when I am hunting now. Your best chance to kill a deer is with your car or truck. Never saw an eagle and rarely a hawk when I was a kid and now see hawks all time and ofter a bald eagle. Very few rabbits except on golf courses and people's yards. Qual very few. the cayottes have taken care of that. Come to think of it, I never saw a cayotte when I was young. kill them every chance I get. Wonder when we will have wolves here. No doubt they are coming. Gov. buying up thousands of acres here for habitat, taking the land off the tax rolls. No doubt who will have to pick up the tax deficiency.I wonder how much land is being destroyed by the farmer as opposed to the land taken out by the gov. both fed and state. Oh yess, no hunting or vehicles on it. duck hunting is as good here as it has ever been even though we probably have 50 times as many hunters. No need to mention those hunters who have no respect for either the land or the owner. We all know about them. I do believe they are on the rise though, probably to the increase in those that hunt. Oh I forgot. I never ever saw a turkey in my youth. Now they are eveerywhere. Saw a truck lifted yesterday, covered with mud so much the windows were completely covered except a small part of the windshield. Wonder whose field he had just rutted up.

Plenty of land here of hills and gullies covered with trees and ponds that are worth nothing but hunting. Cost probably about $2000-$3000/acre. Land ideally suited for deer and turkek hunting.

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Originally Posted by Buzz

I recently began to believe that the upland and duck hunting out on the plains will be but a memory in my lifetime. The shelter belts are being torn out and burned. The sloughs are being burned and tiled & drained. The result is a pheasant population that is dropping at an alarming rate. In my area of South Dakota now, if you have a damn nice dog and the energy to walk all day long you might be lucky enough to get a few birds. I recently stepped into a couple of sloughs just before sunset that the birds used to just boil out of by the hundreds. With two good dogs I didn't see a single pheasant flush. Locals who have hunted here for over 40 years tell me that the pheasant population is smaller than they have seen in their lifetimes. Hunters I have talked to have stated that after coming her to hunt for years, they don't plan to come back. Many of my old favorite hunting spots have been pulled from the CRP program and are now used for corn and soybeans. Everywhere I drive, I see huge rolls of black plastic pipe laying about, ready to be dropped into a trench to drain yet another slough. On a recent sunny day, I went out for a drive in the country. In fields where I used to see dozens if not hundreds of birds scratching in the snow for corn, I say perhaps 2 or 3 here, a half dozen there. Here is a NYT story from today's paper.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/us...=0&ref=science

It's really sad. As the hunters disappear, so will our dog games. As the hunters disappear, the only one's interested in gun rights will be those who are scared of the criminals and the government.

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Really? Draining wetlands for crop production is a huge NO NO. I mean a big one. We can't lay a bit of tile around here without filing a 1026A form(yeah thats really the #) at the FSA office. I'm really kind of surprised by this Buzz.

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Originally Posted by Pals

Really? Draining wetlands for crop production is a huge NO NO. I mean a big one. We can't lay a bit of tile around here without filing a 1026A form(yeah thats really the #) at the FSA office. I'm really kind of surprised by this Buzz.

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They are burning ALL the sloughs out around here and tiling them out. I'll take a camera with me next time and get pictures for ya.

Holy crap. What a damn shame.

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Originally Posted by Pals

Really? Draining wetlands for crop production is a huge NO NO. I mean a big one. We can't lay a bit of tile around here without filing a 1026A form(yeah thats really the #) at the FSA office. I'm really kind of surprised by this Buzz.

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Nancy - I'm not in your line of work that you obviously know well but do remember the low spot about 100 yards south of the home place. Nearly 40 acres under water every year until Grandpa bought a place to the East of us 160 acres/2,000 total to run a ditch through. The Potholes Drainage Act of 1935/6 paid for the ditch. There was also a quarter just south of that quarter that was unfarmed that Grandpa could have bought for $800 total, which he thought to be too much. The last land sale I heard was $1700 an acre on a quarter section 2 miles from the home place.

For a long time people planted shelterbelts when they saw the moisture retention qualities. I can remember walking through the corn & how it would get shorter the further you got from the shelterbelt. In the days that I grew up there were no safety nets, if you didn't harvest a crop you were SOL, folks seemed to be better stewards of their land. Of course, they did not have the local governments taxing them out of existence in those days either :(. Some things about the old days are worth going back to :).

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Originally Posted by Buzz

I recently began to believe that the upland and duck hunting out on the plains will be but a memory in my lifetime. The shelter belts are being torn out and burned. The sloughs are being burned and tiled & drained. The result is a pheasant population that is dropping at an alarming rate. In my area of South Dakota now,

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Your area of the state has always been superior farmland - the Sioux river basin - farms selling for 1K per acre in the 40's while the further West you went they would drop to around $100 an acre by Mitchell & much less as you went further west. Your area is also much flatter than much of the rest of the state. I don't get back there often, next time will be for my 65th HS reunion, but will keep an eye out for what you talk about. During the dry years the sloughs were plowed as that was the only place a crop could be raised for livestock feed.

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Originally Posted by Marvin S

Nancy - I'm not in your line of work that you obviously know well but do remember the low spot about 100 yards south of the home place. Nearly 40 acres under water every year until Grandpa bought a place to the East of us 160 acres/2,000 total to run a ditch through. The Potholes Drainage Act of 1935/6 paid for the ditch. There was also a quarter just south of that quarter that was unfarmed that Grandpa could have bought for $800 total, which he thought to be too much. The last land sale I heard was $1700 an acre on a quarter section 2 miles from the home place.

For a long time people planted shelterbelts when they saw the moisture retention qualities. I can remember walking through the corn & how it would get shorter the further you got from the shelterbelt. In the days that I grew up there were no safety nets, if you didn't harvest a crop you were SOL, folks seemed to be better stewards of their land. Of course, they did not have the local governments taxing them out of existence in those days either :(. Some things about the old days are worth going back to :).

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In many ways stewardship was better, rotations consisted of hay/forage, livestock was abundant and Highly erodible poor soils were used for pasture, farms were smaller and more attention was given to the land. The wetlands--well I have mixed feelings about that--as a landowner I don't want anyone telling me what I can do with my land BUT I also see the result of 100 years of plowing and draining everything we possibly could--in many ways we are like locusts. And that saddens me. There is a middle somewhere, I refer to that as "sustainable conservation" where you take the needs of people, the land and wildlife into consideration. The problem with environmentalists is that they forget the "human" part of that equation, which is not realistic. Private land ownership is a true privledge and it isn't cheap. The face of who is buying land is changing, I have a lot more "city" landowners as opposed to the farmer/rural type landowners. Those city landowners are pretty interesting--they start out with great intentions and then usually bail when the reality of maintaining property sets in--some have more money then sense. Where I live is south of the prairie soils and into timber soils, we had a major run on land from the Urban deer hunters a few years ago. Buying land around here isn't easy, many farms are family owned with long histories and they will stay in the family even as the younger generation moves away from farming. Some landowners really are terrible stewards, some are internet genius's with no clue that planting that nice texas bluestem is not going to work here in Illinois and some are really great landowners. Most fall in the middle, wanting the land to at least pay the taxes(who can blame them??) and hopefully turn a small profit to help with the mortgage--sometimes they put time and money back into the land, mostly they are just trying to hold on to it--so the habitat groups and the Cost share programs that help pay for habitat restoration or fix erosion problems really help them. Then there is the rest of the story........lets leave that there as I'm not free to say what I think about abuses of programs and waste I see daily.