AN IRRESPONSIBLE MEDITATION

SOME USEFUL DEFINITIONS FOR IRRESPONSIBLE MEDITATION:

Sacredness is direct unmediated contact with the universe, not by-passing the senses but a chord, a symphony, a melody.  It is felt holistically.

Religion is produced by cultural evolution, beginning with hunting/gathering people.  Religion is an institution that claims the sacred but is NOT sacred.

“Institutions are identified with a social purpose, transcending individuals and intentions by mediating the rules that govern living behavior. The term "institution" commonly applies to a custom or behavior pattern important to a society, and to particular formal organizations of the government and public services.”  (By the secret author at Wikipedia — I always wish I knew who they are so I could read more of their thinking.)

So it begins with a superstition, a lucky hat, a little chant to call the prey but repel the predator.  Connected to the hunting grounds.  Maybe accompanied by a bribe, a sacrifice.

Then comes the beginnings of control: domestication, which means being able to locate and kill animals at will; and gardens or fields.  Swidden agriculture means clearing forest or jungle, growing crops that can’t be stored, like yams, or crops that need extraordinary preparation like sago palm pulp.  But grain agriculture means storage, surplus, value for trade, the necessity of guarding.  Math for defining territories.  The concept of “owning.”  Community/towns.  This is the root of institutional religion.

The social purpose of everything is survival, transcending individuals.  This means that individuals are subsumed, consumed, and even sacrificed physically and horribly for the benefit of the whole.  These are religious institutions, even if today they are thinned and paled, except in some places they are not.  Instead they have reverted to blood sacrifice.

If a religious institution becomes too cruel, too destructive, another institution based on resistance will begin to form.  Now we have “Game of Thrones.”  Except that there is an alternative, which is Asian Evasion. (The art of turning forceful oppression back on the oppressor.)  The appearance of some seemingly un-formed institution that carries the resistance.  (Guerrilla warfare.)  

Saturn eating his children -- Goya

Now we have the arts.  The arts don’t support institutions, but the culture can form institutions that pretend to say that the arts are marked by sacredness and therefore institutions should protect them.  These institutions are only pretending, providing ways to institutionalize free thought.  They are the opposite of sacrifice in their own instititional existence but often sacrifice the artists as a means of control.

Government, like agriculture, is territory-based, in terms of owning which is called “patriotism” which is a form of religion.  It is capable of inventing the equivalent of land, food, shelter, walls and wars and printing it all on paper called money or contracts.  Government is a religious institution.  It is not sacred.

Science is also a religious, community-based, resource-using institution.  Its walls are negotiable, its products are technological, and occasionally it touches the sacred.  Not the sacred as defined by the priests (though scientists can be considered parallel) but as defined by direct contact with the universe.  Awe, wonder, humility, exaltation.

Science tells us that our brains and bodies work according to code that can be perceived and measured as electrochemical pulses and molecular interactions.  They are the sum of evolution that began with eukaryotes, one-celled creatures, who in their hunger and willingness to discard (sacrifice) developed a gastro-intestinal tract capable of passing the environment through them in a self-nurturing way.  Because they were meiotic, that is, capable of code-exchange that produced varied offspring, producing enough variation for winnowing.  They kept morphing over the millennia.  Until now.

Having achieved consciousness and control, humans now institutionalize what is familiar and manageable.  They no longer discard what is not good for them, but try to hoard resources, swelling up their institutions and governments until they are paralyzed.  This will kill them.  Only the few, the nimble, the Asian evasive (turning the force of the oppressors back on them), the autochthonous, the indigenous, the artistic, will survive -- mammals slipping between the toes of the dinosaurs.  Maybe a predator drone has no pilot who is at risk because he or she is far away from deadly fire — but the global corporation fantasists who think they are greater than nations and entitled to all resources are doomed.  They cannot escape their own drones.

I can only wish this were true.  But maybe it is.  I now turn away from institutions except for my small town, which provides the infrastructure of water, fuel, food.  I’m a lousy gardener and don’t want to give up time away from the keyboard, so I need a store.  I’m a gluten glutton, adapted to grain and dairy.  I could easily take to alcohol except that it interferes with my thinking.

When institutions discovered writing, it was as though they had discovered alcohol.  I mean they stopped thinking and started wanting.  They didn’t have to memorize anymore.  (Too bad for Islam schools where the Koran is memorized, now the action is in schools that teach the reading of the Torah.)  Writing is such an aid to preventing change.  Now there can be law books.  But of course a new kind of priest is invented, to interpret what the writing “really” says or decide when it is too old-fashioned to use anymore.  But it’s hard to purge law.  And universities now study advertising.

Imagine an institution without writing.  No by-laws.  No instructions.  No record of boundaries to register down at the court house.  Birth, marriage and death all uncertified.  No diplomas.  No post office.  No texting.  No internet.  No list of in/out or who's in charge.

No treaties, no United Nation accords.  But what does it matter?  Even when they were signed, they were disregarded.  Writing is a tool and it can be a deception.  It’s arbitrary, a matter of social agreement.  Even the alphabet.  It’s a great revelation to some that different languages use different alphabets.  They don’t use different numbers, right?  They DO use different numbers, different bases, different symbols.  Consider zero.  Consider the algorithm.  Think about standard deviations.

To realize that symbols are not realities is to begin to step away from institutions as reality.  They are not sacred.  Even reality is not sacred, no matter how precious the bud, how glorious the sunrise.  Reality is the carrier of the sacred and not all humans can receive it.  

It cannot be defined in writing but only in experience.  It is a “felt” meaning.  Artists work with felt meaning.  A priest is an institutionally identified artist who works in a symbol system that is used by that institution, regardless of the ethics, the social consequences, the attempts to prevent change.  The task is to make people “feel” sacredness in a way that benefits the institution.  

If it crushes the individual, that is called a necessary sacrifice.  They are the animal on the altar with their throats cut before they are burned.  They forget that the sacred moment spared the child.

Abraham's ram

WHAT IS A TOWN?

Mistyne overlooking the rez from Divide

What IS a town?  Mistyne Hall is at UCal Berkeley, working on that question for an independent study course.  She wanted to get a better understanding of her early home town, partly because it is in such a state of crisis and confusion that it has been put into legal receivership.

Court appoints Robert Denning receiver 

for Town of Browning

Posted: Wednesday, March 16, 2016 6:00 am

By JOHN MCGILL Glacier Reporter Editor 

Last week, the Montana First Judicial District Court of Lewis and Clark County issued an order naming Robert K. Denning of Denning, Downey and Associates as receiver for the town of Browning.

According to the Order, “the Receiver shall take immediate possession, custody and control of all assets owned or held by the Town of Browning” and “immediately, and during the pendency of receivership, or until otherwise ordered by the Court, all of the authority of the Mayor and Town Council is temporarily suspended, and the Mayor and the Town Council shall have no authority to act on behalf of the Town.”

“Basically, Bob Denning becomes the town manager, city council and mayor,” said Glacier County Commissioner Michael DesRosier. While DesRosier said he’d not read the entire Order as of last week, he said he’d been assured by Denning that the county’s offices would remain operational and untouched. “Bob’s coming up to secure the office, and he said, ‘You’re going to have everything you’ve got. You’re not going to lose anything,’” DesRosier said.

While he couldn’t say for sure, DesRosier noted the county may be held responsible for part of the cost of the audit mandated by the Court Order.

The Order gives the receiver broad powers, including “the authority to gather, protect and oversee the Town’s assets, and the authority to hold, develop, rent, lease, sell, manage, maintain, operate, and otherwise use or permit the use of the assets under the terms and conditions the Receiver deems to be prudent and reasonable under the circumstances. The Receiver’s authority shall include entering upon and taking possession and control of the Town’s assets; take and maintain possession of the Town’s assets; manage the Town’s assets as an executive officer of the Town…take any and all actions deemed necessary by the Receiver in the Receiver’s sole discretion to the extent necessary to protect the Town’s bona fide assets; comply with the Orders of all Court’s exercising jurisdiction over the Town; determine that the business operations of the Town should be temporarily or permanently terminated; incur expenses that are normal and customary for the operations of the Town…and employ or contract with such consultants, managers, employees, agents, independent contractors, accountants, attorneys or other professionals as may deem appropriate in the Receiver’s discretion to effectuate the rights, duties or responsibilities of the Receiver pursuant to this Order.” And “To undertake, obtain or complete a comprehensive governmental audit of the Town’s assets and liabilities.”

The Order enjoins all people involved with the town to cooperate with the Receiver in discovering the town’s situation and requires him to submit a monthly report to the Court.

Speaking on Monday, March 14, Denning said he was at that moment meeting with his staff to arrive at a strategy to deal with the town’s many issues. He said a plan would be forthcoming this week, but he said the County’s operations at City Hall would continue unimpeded, as will Thunder Radio, KBWG-LP 107.5 FM. “Our intent is to address Browning’s issues and keep everything else.”

Vintage postcard of the Browning tipi

This move raises a lot of questions, one of which is explained in the article below from the PBS Newshour.

Which American municipalities 

have filed for bankruptcy?

Across the country, from Vallejo, Calif. to Detroit, Mich., some cities that cannot repay their debts have taken the extreme step of declaring municipal bankruptcy.

Cities file for bankruptcy under Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code. Yet before a city can declare Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the city must establish it is eligible to do so according to state law.

Chapter 9 bankruptcy is relatively rare. We’ve listed the cities and towns that have filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy since 2008 on the map below.

According to bankruptcy attorney Karol Denniston, when a city owes money to its employees, pensioners, and creditors, these debts constitute a contract — similar to a business taking out a loan. If the debts cannot be repaid, a municipality may consider bankruptcy as a last resort to negotiate reduced financial liabilities.

But unlike individuals and corporations, cities are not always allowed to declare bankruptcy.

Bankruptcy is a federal process. In turn, a state must give its cities, towns, counties, and other municipalities — governmental administrative districts like irrigation authorities or hospital districts — the right to petition the federal government to restructure their debts.

Without permission from the state, the federal government granting a bankruptcy petition for a municipality would violate a state’s authority and therefore, the 10th amendment.

Some states, like Arizona and Washington, expressly grant municipalities the right to file for bankruptcy.

Many other states establish conditions that must be met before a town can declare it is bankrupt. These conditions may involve an evaluation of the city’s finances or may require permission from a state governor.

Illinois, Colorado, and Oregon have particularly restrictive laws that only allow specific types of municipalities or even specific districts to file for Chapter 9. Georgia and Iowa prohibit cities from declaring bankruptcy, though Iowa has an exception to the law for municipalities that become bankrupt for reasons beyond their control.

A number of states haven’t written any specific law that determines whether or not a municipality can declare bankruptcy. Since cities in those states aren’t granted the right to file for Chapter 9, they cannot legally do so.

________________________

Browning during the NAID encampment along the west edge.

The first question has to be the hottest one:  is the Town of Browning under state law or federal law?  Is it continuous reservation or is it an “island of jurisdiction” belonging to the state?  If the Town of Browning is reservation, is it federal or a private tribal corporation?  We were at this point once a half-century ago when a tribal member refused to pay his debt at a large off-rez store on grounds that they could not use the state’s legal machinery to enforce private contracts because the debtor’s residence was on the reservation, not under the jurisdiction of the state.  He lived in Browning.  I can’t remember how it was settled, but the upshot was that no tribal member on the rez could get credit because there was no way non-payment could be prosecuted, so I guess the debtor prevailed, which was not exactly a win for the people.

Lewis and Clark County Courthouse

Who at the federal level gave the state permission to begin bankruptcy in this case?  How does the order come from Lewis and Clark County which is the county where Helena, the state capitol is located?  How does a private accounting firm get given the authority to begin receivership and what is its relationship to Glacier County, which is sometimes at odds with the tribe?  In fact, Denning, Downey and Associates is the business that has tried to sort out the Boggs' treasury mess in the county and is involved in the lawsuit against her. Isn't that a little, um, "incestuous" if not a conflict of interest?  The news stories make it sound as though it is Denning personally who is appointed to do this receivership.

At what point did “Browning” become a proper legal town anyway?  What are the conditions of being a legal town in Montana, let alone on a reservation?  Is there a specific process for towns ON “federal” land?  Surveyed boundaries; service infrastructures like water, sewer, and streets; law enforcement; a written code of ordinances?  (In the Sixties for some years the Browning ordinances were lost — I mean, the only copy was physically missing.  I don’t know whether a new set was composed or a copy was finally located.  It’s online now.)

Anthropologically, there are several “kinds” of towns at different stages of existence, responding to different forces, mostly economic.  In the beginning people lived in small units based on family.  If they were “hunter-gatherers”, which the Blackfeet were until the 19th century, they followed the herds of buffalo and the crops such as berries or camas.  This was not haphazard, but followed a predictable pattern.  In a way, they were a moveable town.  When they were forced by the disappearance of the buffalo and the military presence of US Cavalry, to stop moving, this changed many practices and relationships.

Fishing towns developed in situ where there was food year-round.  In pre-written history “sedentariness”— considered a move towards civilization — happened mostly when shifting to agriculture, the storage of grains in structures which meant that the people must stay close by to defend them.  They built enforcement structures like walls.  The ability to store and accumulate food meant that the population could grow and specialize.  

This idea was dominating the white mind into the twentieth century when they wanted to make hunter-gatherers into farmers.  But this was done in a colonial fashion with white overseers only pretending to consult people.  The overseers used ideas appropriate to conditions back east.  Later the reservation was transferred from the Department of War to the Interior Department, which was a slight improvement, but it still left the colonial pattern of whites from back east imposing their decisions on the indigenous people who lived here.  

Fertile and productive land

The Blackfeet were fortunate in that they could stay where they had been for centuries.  Not as sedentary towns, but circling through an area of operation bigger than today's reservation.  There was no Trail of Tears, but there were massacres.  The “Baker Massacre” happened in part because the people’s pattern in winter was to move to the river bottoms for shelter and wood.  Then they shifted, as bands, from one location to another along the river.  To the white mind, one location equalled one band so they attacked the location, getting the wrong band.

Towns developed without “permission”.  For instance, Robaire was a little town that gathered on the south banks of Birch Creek (the rez boundary, a natural line determined by the creek) because the residents had been thrown off the rez.  Bootleggers and whiskey traders ran a bar next to the little chapel and dwelling of the Catholic priest.  (The agent of the time was Methodist and the federal government had assigned the rez to the Methodists and other tribes to other denominations — all Protestant — who chose the agents for a few years until they turned out to be just as corrupt as everyone else, which is to say, “mixed.”)  This little pop-up town lasted a while and was exploited by entrepreneurs like Joe Kipp.  The big flood of '65 washed away the last traces.

Browning persists in part because of the crossing of highways 2 and 89 along the natural pathways determined by the Old North Trail down the east slope of the Rockies and the entrance to Marias Pass which is used by the railroad High-Line.  By now it has been the location of services and trade for a century, no doubt begun as soon as the agency began issuing commodities there.  Then came the federally authorized Indian traders, their homes, and the beginnings of infrastructure, like Green Grass Bull’s rickety wagon carrying barrels of water from Willow Creek for laundry.  This was all recent enough that my mother-in-law was one of the customers.

Green Grass Bull, taken by Thomas Magee

"IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY" by Richard Manning

“It Runs in the Family” is a memoir by Richard Manning, a hard-hitting, prize-winning, well-married, intelligent, dynamic, handsome man who is hitting middle-age a little later than most.  When I called him on the phone, he was siding an addition to his house in Helena but was expected to start cooking dinner for incoming relatives.  The temps in the desert valley are fierce and I suspect he has a helluva tan since he did the roof last week.

In 1990, just after I abandoned the ministry and returned to the Blackfeet rez hoping to write, there was a workshop in the Bitterroot Valley led by Peter Matthiessen.  It was juried -- one sent in a sample of writing in hopes of qualifying.  I forget what I sent, but it had buffalo in it.  Manning’s sample was full of trees: he was just producing the early drafts of what became “Last Stand,” a Pulitzer prize winning exposé of lumbering practices that used both eye witness photos and deep analysis of statistics.  The crosshairs of these two journalistic methods have been his practice, always informed by close relationships with initiated friends like Rick Bass and Peter Bowen.   His wife, Tracy Stone-Manning, is the head of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.

The second time I ran into Manning was in Waterton International Peace Park where he was a speaker at another writer’s workshop.  Before he could speak he was called away because his mother was dying.  The memory of his face as he turned to go was just under every page of this memoir as I read.  It was neither sad nor happy but a kind of crucifixion at the center point of the axis and a steely determination to deal with events.

Much of the memoir is the struggle to escape from the disastrous punishment of a woman so damaged by early life that her only refuge was a Procrustean understanding of Fundamentalist Christianity.  Manning, in turn, escaped from that to a religion of work: men’s work.  Since he was growing up in Michigan, that meant the gleaming industrialism of machines like cars, which were a doorway to sex.  He obeyed the culture: married a high school sweetheart, had a baby, bounced from job to job, and finally pulled up stakes to light out for the territories.  As usual, that destroyed the marriage: one person changing, the other one not. 

Manning is one of the few kids (besides myself) who loved diagramming sentences, but he was also great at math until he overestimated and got himself to a college level too rarefied for his nerve, then backed off.  (I did the same thing with physics.)  This was not a waste, but a simple change of plan.  The kind of writing he does requires a mind that works in structure, closely related to hands-on building.  (“Measure twice, cut once.”)  He begins his story with a downturn in his fortunes, but the real story extends back through his family, labeled “working class” but in fact “survival class.”  People who turn their skills to what’s at hand because they must -- and that doesn’t always work out very well, esp. when times change fast.

In the end he comes to a strategy of investigation that arises out of the study of trauma survivors.  It’s kind of way of diagramming disfunction that was devised by Robert Anda.  http://robertandamd.com  The “pot-handle” for the inventory he uses is “Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.”  What’s IN the pot, cooking up fate, is what Manning writes about in this memoir: abuse, poverty, over-religiousity, neglect, and so on.  The actual questionnaire is at http://www.acestudy.org/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/ACE_Calculator-English.127143712.pdf  There’s nothing very mysterious about it and it’s not even very long.  (It omits war and ghettoes.) Anda’s insight (actually one of many) is that a high ACE score is the PRODUCT of social forces and also CREATES those same destructive forces and PERPETUATES them through the generations.  Poor people are often abusive and angry people, imposing damage on each other.  That keeps them poor.  Being treated with contempt and neglect by the society in general creates CREATES CREATES the petri dishes where crime, hatred, disease, starvation, addiction and early death flourish and even prevail over the larger society, invade the larger society.

This is not a new idea, but now it is undergirded with research about what a human being is, how brains form, what really constitutes emotional and cognitive impairment, and maybe the beginnings of what to do about it.  How much of the damage done to a pre-schooler can be reversed in adolescence or in that young adult time when most people are having babies, and how much do those individual stories affect the quality of all our lives?  Not just by needing money for treatment or incarceration, but in terms of creativity, safety, and the blossoming of culture.  Manning sent in a cheek swab for a read-out of his genome: no surprises, except that his are sturdy old genes.

It’s possible that we started going wrong ten thousand years ago when we stopped being hunter-gatherers who carried their babies on their backs and were free of the industrial burdens that have distorted modern life by making everything into separations and conveyor belts, conformity and criminalization.  As I understand it, this is what Manning is working on at present, with his background in industrial agriculture.  His eight books include “Food’s Frontier” and “Against The Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization.”

Manning used reporter’s skills, family informants, plus the safe space created by an intelligent healthy wife and increased clarity as time passed, to develop a new view of life.  He and I are both anchored in the grasslands on both sides of the Canadian border, though he’s far more of a mountain worshipper than I am, but I had the benefit of a long family tradition of humanistic progressive thought.  When I left my mother’s sometimes bitter Presbyterian roots, I already had an entwined fast-hold on the prairie through my homesteading father’s side -- the kind of thought that has led both Manning and I to the work of Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and their precursors, Rodale and Schumacher.  Their living and vigorous eloquence are cherished by many.  The mainstream rushes past them, but they go back to the very beginning:  Jacob and Esau.  (I side with the hairy man.)

The benefit of mortal pressure on generations of families is that only the strong survive, though the necessary strength may not be merely physical.  They may have to struggle with guilt because of the friends and relatives who died, but this is best addressed by working constructively, as Manning does.  Drive the roots deeper, read the signs more carefully, keep a notch stick to note numbers.  This is NOT the same as the high theory of universities where people speculate about mythic and mystical things like Gaea or God or souls, all sitting around a table in an air-conditioned room with no windows.  Manning takes a hammer and shovel approach to problems more than I do, and I admire him for it.  

At an age when many are retiring, he still has stamina for hunting and climbing mountains.  I have a feeling this memoir is merely clearing the way for his best work yet.

DUCLAIR, JUDEE & BEARPAW CONFRONT THE WHEAT SAWFLY

When I read animal-related listservs, I get very impatient because the members usually know so little biology.  Their level of understanding in some cases is not much more than “ducks say quack, quack and geese say honk, honk.”  But worse than their grasp of animal biology is their understanding of matters vegetal.  To them grain is like leggos or pop-it beads, small indistinguishable no-harm pellets of food, only suspect when their diet gets too carb-heavy.

HA.

My motivation and knowledge in relation to grains comes from two sources: the obvious one is that I’m living in grain country where the fields come right up to the boundary streets of the village and the historical one is that my father’s roommate at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Rudy Peterson, was part of the Green Revolution that improved grain seed enough to lift countries like India away from mass starvation one more time.  These were grain seeds changed by cross-pollination, not direct genome interference as is so controversial (and rightly so).  They were so proud!  But it entered them into a circle: the more food, the more people: the more people, the more food needed.

This was entirely different from today’s predatory commercial grain seed genomic stock “improvement” (gerry-mandering) which is meant to make the fields “Roundup ready” (meaning Roundup dependent) and non-germinating (meaning that you cannot save part of the crop to plant for the next year but must buy new seed stock).  I find that terrifying and yet I hear very little about it from environmentalists.  Maybe it slips attention because those who resist frankenfoods are mostly concerned about their personal health and not about the economic existence of farmers and ranchers.

So, aside from bigger and more, what do traditional wheat breeders work on?  Basically, from the outside of the practice, I’d say protein content which is something they talk about and test all the time; gluten content both for high-gluten to bake bread and low-gluten because some people have allergies; pest resistance; drought resistance; short growing season; ease of harvesting; storability; proportion of grain to straw (the stems) and other stuff that’s more esoteric.  I suppose rate and vigor of germination and, so some degree, pure aesthetics!  Some growers don’t like wheat with black beards -- it just seems wrong to them.  And I suspect that they love wheat that waves -- wouldn’t like stuff too stiff to dance. 

People have their fav varieties which begin life as formulas like MT0249 and later are given names that honor places or individuals.  “Duclair” is from MT0249 crossed with the pre-existing “Choteau.”  It’s a spring wheat with a solid stem -- you realize, of course, that most wheat stems or straw are hollow which is why we call those tubes for sucking up pop “straws.”  But there’s a little beast called a “sawfly” that gets into that hollow center to lay its eggs and then they go to work like mini-saws and -- timber! -- the wheat is on the ground.  You can’t cut it at harvest time if it’s lying on the ground.  It  can’t ripen if it’s cut while it’s still green.  Once it’s on the ground it begins to rot or sprout or be carried off by other small critters.  

The name “Duclair” comes from an old map that shows a post office by that name in the heart of sawfly country near Turner, Montana.  “Choteau” was also a solid-stem variety so the improvement came from MT0249 which had longer green leaf duration.  Green leaves are what pump energy into the plant (chlorophyll is the photovoltaic mechanism for harvesting the sun) so the more green leaves the better.  The energy goes into the grain and then into your Wheaties and then into you.  Maybe that’s why Duclair is a little taller than Choteau.  Maybe you’re a little taller, too.

MTS07 13 winter wheat is a cross between a “Vanguard” derivative and the semidwarf AgriPro line “NuHorizon.”  The ag team wants to name MTS07 13 for a long-time extension agent named Judee Wargo.  In comparison to Genou, which it is meant to replace, the yield is four bushels per acre higher, has a more solid stem, and is about three inches shorter.  It resists stripe rust, has excellent milling and baking quality, and is as winter hardy as Genou.

The third new wheat is MTSO721, meant to be a potential replacement for “Rampart.”  It’s yield is seven bushels an acre higher, it has a solider stem than “Judee”,  it is as winter hardy and three inches shorter.  But the protein quality and baking quality are not quite so good.  Still, it resists sawfly better than Judee.  They want to call it “Bearpaw.”

Wait until the yuppie foodies get hold of this!  It might become more popular at cocktail parties than wine snobbery!   They’ve already been poking around in potato varieties.  Maybe you thought university people sat around with books in libraries.  These guys are out in the dirt.  

But plants is not all they do.  The entomologists are cooperating to figure out “trap crops” that are planted next to wheat fields, stuff that sawflies can’t resist so that they’ll all rush over there to saw off the stems of some other crop with no food value that can be ground up or burned, sawflies and all.  Those county extension agents are a devious bunch.  Their biggest problem was convincing the suspicious early ranchers and farmers that THEY were not a new form of sawfly.  I think they’ve probably managed to get that job done.

There is a third reason I think about grain quite a bit.  It was grain that began the ten-thousand-year-old development of cities and cultures that could sustain humanities and sciences.  Without grain we could not continue.  Yet we raise our grain in monocrop rows vulnerable to commodification, dependence on chemicals that will run out in the foreseeable future if they don’t cause us all to die of metabolic disorders sooner than that, and erosion of the topsoil of the planet that took millenia to form.  They don’t talk about all this in the small town cafés of grain country.  But they do at universities.  I hope for more cross-pollenization.

EATCHER WEEDS, BUTTERCUP!

Maybe you’ve seen a field where cows have grazed, carefully eating around the Canadian thistles so that they stand out like trees in a meadow. Many a rancher and farmer has wished their cow’s priorities were reversed so the thistles went down the bovine gullets first. Of course, women know a lot about this stuff because they themselves have had to convert their own diets for health or weight loss and because they are usually the ones who must get the kids to eat their spinach. So it’s not surprising that Kathy Voth was the one to figure out how to make cows eat weeds.

Appropriately making her home in Loveland, CO, Voth figured out her techniques while studying animal behavior at the Bureau of Land Management at Utah State University. In fact, she began with goats but moved to cows when working with the Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site in Deer Lodge, MT. This ranch is a “working” ranch, not a Disneyland. The project targeted thistles, knapweeds and mustards.

Observing the rule ignored by many (“first do no damage”) Voth analyzed the weeds to make sure they weren’t toxic. This is not as easy as it sounds since plants might be toxic in the spring but not when fully grown towards fall or vice versa. Surprisingly, thistles have the same nutritional values as alfalfa! And the cows don’t seem to mind the prickles. From a human point of view, cows-as-herbicides leave no toxic chemical residue as spraying would. We are only beginning to realize the damage done by the tweaked chemicals of herbicides, esp. when spread over the huge acreages of Montana wheat farms.

Turns out, as Voss proved in Madison County, Montana, recently, bison can also be taught to eat weeds. So what can she teach people buffaloed by the diets of their own kids? First, a nutrition feedback loop makes a cow’s body want what it needs. (A universal dynamic in humans that gets suppressed because advertising and lack of experience over-rides our subtle impulses.) They lose interest in empty calories and crave whatever is missing. This is why nutrition blocks, maybe with salt, interest cows so much. Humans with deficits, maybe a pregnant woman missing a specific element, have been known to eat dirt that contains the element.

As studies of the hippocampus show in the brains of all mammals -- and the cow is the absolute max in terms of mammals defined by producing milk -- the hippocampus wants to keep things the same. “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” It's safer to eat what we ate last time, since we didn't keel over. But the element of safety is balanced by an interest in new things, a bit of experiment and variety. The old thing might not always be available.

Training begins when Voth sneaks cubed alfalfa, wheat bran and rolled corn into the cow’s usual rations, just like a mom putting bits of broccoli and carrots into the mac and cheese. At first eating new things almost by accident, the cows begin to like it. The calves and younger cows are the first to find the novelty more interesting, but when the other cows see the new food being eaten with a certain amount of relish, they try it, too.

After four days of this, on the fifth day the cows are fed a little late so their appetites are strong and this time there are weeds in the “casserole.” On the third day after this, weeds are the whole meal for the day. Then they go to the field where the weeds are actually growing to tackle the problem of how to eat a tall thistle instead of short grass. Maybe you’ve noticed that cows can wrap their tongues around stuff and yank it out of the ground. Works good on thistles.

What’s interesting is that once one batch of cows has been trained, untrained cows who see what they are eating will imitate them and end up eating weeds just like the trained cows. You can tell your kid to eat raw carrots with no effect but if he sees another kid he likes eating raw carrots, the struggle is over! Peer demonstrations work. (Advertisers know this. But those peers are PAID to pretend that’s what they eat.)

There’s a website for this strategy: www.livestockforlandscapes.com. You can buy a DVD to teach yourself how to teach your cows. It doesn’t work on horses, only on ruminants whose series of stomachs are capable of digesting weeds pretty efficiently.

But goats, clever animals that they are, take right to the project and have been used for a while, especially in places where brush needs to be kept down as a fire preventative. Sometimes on the way to Helena one can see the goat herd on the Sieben Ranch/Baucus Ranch -- once the Malcolm Clarke ranch. There are hundreds of goats, flowing in a carpet over the hillsides. Goats are famous for eating anything, though I doubt any of them ever eat tin cans as they do in cartoons. Too bad.

This strategy of using what is already there by simply doing a bit of introduction and encouragement is increasingly attracting attention and rewarding those who figure it out. This is “organic” (my favorite word since the Fifties when I learned it in high school) as opposed to mechanical, which requires oversight and maintenance, something imposed rather than unfolding. Every time the Bioneers come on Yellowstone Public Radio I have to go do something else for a while because otherwise I get totally distracted away from my own goals. (http://www.bioneers.org/about) It’s all so beautiful and seductive that it’s near-religious. A person can’t do EVERYTHING and the bio-engineers are doing so much that I’ll just stand back and watch from enough of a distance to keep from being sucked in. But I heartily hope they convert the world. Right now the weeds seem to be winning while the people die of cancer. If a cow can turn it around, it wouldn’t surprise a Norseman or a Masai.

FALL IN DRYLAND FARMING COUNTRY

At this latitude the sun moves far to the south by September so my backyard is shadowed by my garage when I get up. The slanted light is already tarnished somehow. Usually this time of year there are forest fires and the sky is pale, but now it is darkly saturated blue. So far the trees are only flagged with yellow, but soon they’ll turn and drop. A couple of days ago someone’s escapee bird dogs, springer spaniels or brittanies, went joyfully shooting through the yards, scattering cats and provoking homeowners behind them, but it’s not bird season yet. Bow season now. The elk are bugling. There is no wilder nor more yearning sound -- at least until the geese begin to fly in V’s. The grain trains are whistling in the night.

The little ag newspaper called “The Prairie Star” has done me two favors. The first is that it was on the strength of working for them that I moved here -- even though the paper was soon sold and moved away, leaving me stranded. But because I worked there, I seem to have a perpetual subscription. Thus, I keep up with the farmers. Right now some of them are planting again and appreciate a spate of rain we had recently. Winter wheat has become rather famous because of the novel by that name by Mildred Walker, but also some are planting winter lentils. I didn’t know there was such a thing. The seed lentils must be cleaned, which means having the weeds blown or screened out, so part of the planting means trucking the lentils somewhere and back.

Another wheat farmer saw the forecast and decided to marathon 740 acres of “poor durum” (that’s wheat) to get it out of the field before rain made it worse. So they parked a camper on the field and went at it as though combining were calving. Two or three hours of sleep, then combining, relaying roles. They began at 9AM one morning and got done at 8PM the next night. On the last field he was getting two bushels an acre. (That’s low.) Every little bit counts. This guy, a handsome young grandpa with a mustache, is working around a trip to Washington DC and his bowling night, catching the political conventions on the fly via the radio. Also his son is moving into a new home and expecting the birth of their first child.

Another one of these politically alert fellows with mustaches is an organic farmer. He says he’s fighting the sawflies by varying the kind of seeds he plants. They get into the grain by infesting the hollow stems, so for winter he grows Genou, a solid-stem variety plus Quantum which makes a lot of stems per stand. He says philosophically, “I will plant a little for us, a little for the sawfly, and a little for the birds -- or cutworms, I guess. There’s a saying in organic lines that says ‘plant a little for everybody , then you’ll make sure and get some for yourself.’ Plus, planting extra helps choke out the weeds.” He’s also headed to Washington DC to confer with the Agriculture Secretary Ed Shafer about the 2008 Farm Bill, climate change, alternative fuels, trade agreements and rural healthcare. It is not an accident that two of Montana’s most effective politicians are farmers: Brian Schwietzer the governor and John Tester our Representative.

Sawfly had a great year for felling wheat, which is called “lodging.” The upshot is the same: fallen-over grain, which can’t be harvested and may begin sprouting on the ground. The perfect combination of events for the sawflies was a cool spring so that everything was slow-growing (harvest was very late this year). Female flies laid eggs over a greater area and had an easier time overwintering in the stubble. (Early heat dries them dead.) With cool weather, even the pith-filled-stem varieties made less pith. Then, contradictorily, the previous few years of the main sawfly parasite, a kind of wasp that normally manages two cycles per summer, the second one perfectly timed to eat sawflies -- got out of sync. Besides that, dry-year wheat tends to have shorter stems, less stubble for the wasps to live in. This year was great for the fewer wasps as well as the sawflies, so next year is likely to be better.

Another sneaky little strategy is to use a “trap crop” off to the side of the better field, so the sawflies will all go over there where they don’t matter so much and then will be disappointed to be blocked by pith. The point is that a farmer must always strategize over every tiny thing, many of them uncontrollable, like weather. Farming is the perfect example of how success (fitness) is half heredity and half environment, because as combines travel through the fields the bushel-weight varies by so many factors: mineral quality of the soil, fertilizer distribution, depth of tillage (less is better), moisture retention, tilt of the ground towards the sun. The more the farmer is able to document and record all this stuff, the better he is able to market. Even after it’s in out of the field, barley is tested for “protein, weight, thins, plumps, and falling numbers” which is a milling quality measurement. All recorded, all subtly changing the strategy for the next year.

Today’s computer-dependent farmer is a far cry from the guy back in Egypt making little marks on a block of clay. Ten thousand years of cultural pressure has changed us all, but maybe we aren’t evolving as fast as would be better. A beer (barley) and bread (wheat) based diet is still pressing those of us whose bodies are attuned to meat and veggies from hunter/gatherer days, especially now that so many rogue molecules hang around in everything we eat, wear and sit on. Another article says that traces of hydrocarbons are showing up in the 250 water wells around the Pinedale Anticline natural gas wells in Wyoming.

Meanwhile, back at the lab, lasers and magnets isolate, analyze, and record the phenotype data. (That is, the physical characteristics of the seed as dictated by the genotype.) The seeds are blister-packed for future growth research. The scientists speak of “millions of phenotypic points of data” collected over 82 years of analysis, indicating molecular markers for disease-resistance.

Of course, then those seeds are sold to a lot of randomly selected variations of genotype called farmers. Just observing from the photos, it looks to me as though a nice mustache is a good phenotype to select for -- as well as an ability to get along without much sleep and a mind that retains minutia. Skip the blister pack.