Traveling

There’s nothing like traveling to a place different from where you normally live to make you aware of issues that confront almost all civilized societies. For example, on a small island in the Pacific Ocean it is unlikely for there to be a problem of too much traffic, unless you consider “traffic jam” to mean a two-second wait at the sole intersection in town while you wait for an islander pushing a cart heavily laden with the day’s catch or a pile of coconuts. I guess my perspective, and that of other longtime residents of the valley, on what constitutes heavy traffic is what we have today. Some days one might have to wait for 10 minutes to venture out onto Highway 154. When I was growing up here, at night it seemed sometimes like we were the only people in the valley until we saw headlights coming down the pass. That was very reassuring — we were not alone.

 

As I write this, I am sitting in the Honolulu International Airport awaiting my flight to Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, where my husband and I are going to the National Reined Cow Horse World Championships and the World’s Greatest Horseman events. I have a horse entered in each contest. The show is held in Stephenville, Texas — what we used to call a “wide spot in the road.” It is not a very big town, but the people are friendly and they have a Wal-Mart that solves most problems. As we approached the airport here, I was reminded that the annual Aloha Run was happening today, so we decided not to try to venture into town for the five-hour layover because traffic in Honolulu is legendary, even without a marathon in town. It kind of makes you think of the Amgen bicycle race held in the valley that brings everything else to a halt. When you watch the news anywhere on the islands, it is broadcast from Honolulu, but the Big Island, even though it is the biggest, is considered somewhat remote and therefore not worthy of it’s own station. Thus, the evening picture is always of the H1 freeway, six lanes in each direction, absolutely packed full, at a standstill. If you have ever experienced that, you don’t feel so bad about the traffic in the valley.

 

But I ask you, how long do we need to wait before we begin some future planning that will accommodate some reasonable growth here. It cannot be avoided entirely, so I would recommend that we start to envision our future now, so we can plan it ahead of time rather than after-the-fact in a panic. Isn’t that what the community plan was supposed to be? It was not supposed to be a blueprint for social reform or compensation to loyal constituents. It also was supposed to contain a bona fide study of the impacts already felt by the valley from the casino, and a reasonable projection of what the future impacts might look like. Instead, we get a study commissioned by a source suspected of strong ties, financial or otherwise, to the casino. How is this going to be impartial? It was also done without community input, which clearly makes it unacceptable to anyone. Furthermore, the very fact that this was done without the community’s knowledge makes the entire study worthless and tainted in our eyes. So where do we go from here? Are we so inundated with corruption that we are no longer able to rely on outside sources for information? Must we wait until we have, hopefully, new representation to begin again to discover how to frame our future? If we cannot get reliable information, how are we to judge?

 

I must say that I am relieved to hear that the Board of Supervisors declined to receive the taxpayers association study, and I also hear that the group responsible for soliciting this report intends to make it public sometime this week. I hope that the community has been sufficiently warned as to what limitations they should be aware of in any possible statements of fact or conclusions reached. I am, however, very disappointed in the fact that our district had no representation in that decision, as our supervisor was required to recuse himself because of a financial conflict of interests. This is a problem if one’s representative has numerous financial interests in the community that could frequently either be overlooked or force recusal, leaving the community with no representation at all.

 

 

Bad beef

I am sure that you have all heard about the huge recall, the largest in U.S. history, of beef from a company which, according to reports, allowed its employees to use the most horrible, inexcusable handling of cows going to slaughter. As a result, I presume because of lack of knowledge of why these cows were unable to move on their own, the beef products produced from them is not useable.

What is really irritating to me as a cattle producer is threefold.

First, any decent cattleperson knows that one does not try to send what is referred to as a “downer” cow to a slaughterhouse. A “downer” cow is one which, for a variety of reasons including old age, no longer can stand up. One also does not send off a cow that has cancer eye or some other problems, which we know we can’t sell. Yes, we lose the money and no one repays us for our loss, but that’s part of the business.

 

The second thing that I find irritating is the irresponsible news reporting of this event, which immediately brought up Mad Cow Disease as a possible reason for this recall, stirring up fears and causing a lot of unnecessary consumer panic. It has never been fully exposed to the public that NEVER has Mad Cow Disease been found in a cow of American origin — NEVER! The cows we have all read about have ultimately been traced back to Canadian origins, which is why American cattlemen and cattlewomen have begged the USDA to not allow any Canadian beef into the U.S. until we are completely sure that there is no possibility of tainted cattle coming here. Our pleas fell on deaf ears, and they have done a pretty poor job of informing the public of what was happening.

As a result, the beef industry in this country is suffering, and if you think that your government is going to keep your food supply safe when they allow the importation of Brazilian canned beef (Brazil has hoof-and-mouth disease in its herds that the U.S. does not have), think again.

The third thing that persuaded me to write on this topic was the news organizations bringing in doctors to talk about Mad Cow Disease when they obviously know nothing about the cattle side of it, only the symptoms of a similar problem in humans, which was totally irrelevant to the issue because we don’t know that this was even part of the reason for the recall.

 

They also brought in anti-meat eating representatives who were only too happy to stir the pot and add their fear-mongering to the discussion. They even went as far as to ask the audience to question whether their children’s schools had any of this beef in their larders. This is the height of irresponsibility, and I am ashamed of some of the fairest news programs participating in this type of behavior out of ignorance. Get wise folks, or you will be led down the path to certain ignorance as well. Do not trust that your elected representatives know anything about agriculture, even though they might pay it lip service.

 

 

Cows vs. tourists

I keep seeing that people who move to the valley love the rural atmosphere, as most of them have moved here from large cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco. The “rural” that they love to look at out of their windows, whether cars or homes, is wide-open stretches of land with animals or nothing but trees and grass. I can’t blame them as I have loved that about our valley for over 50 years and consider myself blessed to have had a grandmother with so much appreciation for natural beauty. If this is actually what we all love about the valley, then why are we trying so hard to become a tourist economy rather than an agricultural one?

I am concerned about this because once we advance to a certain point on this path, we cannot turn back. In our recent discussions about what behaviors are allowed on agriculturally contracted land (Williamson Act contracts), farm stays were added to the mix. There are two sides to this addition, as it is clearly meant to add to the farmer’s or rancher’s income by enabling him to attract tourists to stay at their farm or ranch and learn something about agriculture, although there is no requirement to do so. It’s more, to me, like having a mini-motel on your property, which isn’t exactly agriculture but may be useful to some.

 

I think that what concerns me the most is that the tourist industry has some real drawbacks to it as a sustainable income for our valley. The first time there is some large, either man-made or Mother-Nature-made “event,” the tourist industry will disappear immediately and will remain closed for as long as is necessary, depending on the damage. In addition, even while it is producing income, tourist industry jobs are almost exclusively low-paying, no-advancement types of jobs promoting more low-income people who cannot get a higher paying job because the local economy is not built for it. I don’t see that as a good thing, do you?

As we continue to see problems with our jobs being sent overseas because self-serving unions continue to spend beyond anybody’s means with no thought to the future of their industry, and politicians paying lip service to agriculture while courting products from other countries in the name of free trade, all the while dooming their own home-grown products to a slow death because we can’t compete with labor from other countries and our legislators refuse to provide workable programs for foreign agricultural workers, we struggle. We struggle, many of us, because agriculture is what we love; we consider it a valuable service to humanity. You used to think so, too, until we got a bunch of radical people into positions of power who know nothing about how things work because most of them have never had a real job before or signed the front side of a paycheck.

 

Fair trade is a wonderful thing, but not at the expense of our own economy, which is what, I think, has been going on. It’s time to get realistic and stop listening to the pie-in-the-sky orators who promise the moon and then deliver nothing. It’s time to get practical and save ourselves, since it is really our responsibility anyway. What do you think?