Well, we could cut millions of dollars of subsidy money and put it towards repairing/offsetting the ecological damage farming does.
How about farmers quit mowing ditches and waterways purely for the sake of vanity. Happens all the time around me. At the bottom of my lane is a 1+ acre of old farmstead--no house or buildings--just grassland with a windmill. I asked our neighbor early in the season if he would leave that untouched so we could dog train in it. He said he was happy to do so. It got mowed at least 4x this year by his relative who leases the surrounding cropland, and each time we got an apology from the neighbor, but it never stopped. The worst part is that the guy would mow the mile long ditch on his way to our place and back to the current farmstead. Thankfully there's still a fence for about 1/3 of that, for the moment anyway. So he was forced to leave about 1.5' on either side of the fence, otherwise he mowed right up to the growing corn stalks. How important is that paltry strip he was forced to leave? Let's just say that one of my dogs pointed a hen out of it the other day, when I was running them through the field, off the ATV. We have 6 houses on my road, and 3 of them are ditch mowers.
Being that I have hunting dogs, the neighboring farmers ask me from time to time, how it's going and if I've seen any birds. It always ends in how 20 years ago the area was pheasant rich. Then it comes down to blaming it all on predatory animals. Really? So herbicides that kill every seed bearing weed, pesticides that nuke a field, mowing ditches, burning ditches, farming ditches because one extra row is necessary...even though the taxpayers will be funding the county scooping that same ditch in 10 years has absolutely nothing to do with it? And then there's my absolute favorite, tiling. Tiling allows places that weren't meant to have crops, to be cropped. Tiling can literally change the landscape. The last statistic I saw from 2010, says that 39% of Iowa's 23 million acres of corn and soybean fields have been drained with an estimated 800,000 MILES of tile. Never mind the studies that show nitrates and such leaving from those shiny corrugated tubes.
I'm not anti-farmer, because I realize the food source that is provided, and can see it in my own house--from food on my shelf, to dog food, bird food, etc. but I think there is very little acknowledgment by most that farm, of what it does to the landscape. I give huge kudos to those that no-till, leave buffer strips and erosion waterways, don't feel the need to rip every tree out of a creekline, etc. Those guys are my heros, but unfortunately that's on a voluntary basis.
*sorry for some of my repeatedness Terry, I was composing while you posted.
