Rural Colorado Economic Status - Mid 2009 (Grand Junction, Salida: crime, hotel, unemployed)

[Shuffler]

Originally Posted by Bideshi

Further to that, irrigation is effective for only a short time due to salinization and the production of waste land. Much of our agri-business relies on irrigation. Civilizations have ceased to exist through irrigation. We do have to "re-tool" in fundamental ways. An oft repeated suggestion is to read "Cadillac Desert" for some understanding of what we have done and are doing to ourselves and our nation's future.

No kidding. We could learn something from the Hohokam. There was a great article in High Country News last year about them.

A person with at least some cognitive ability should be able to see the same pattern repeating here, regardless of 'technology' and the wishful thinking that the next great solution to all our problems is right around the corner, and that we can just keep the party going with more housing tracts and golf courses while farms and ranches dry up.

[Josseppie]

Originally Posted by brightdoglover

I am always alarmed when people consider a serious, complex problem and answer it with something like, "Science will find a way," or "something technical will be invented." Maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't head towards a mythical future until that way is found and firm or invented, if in fact it's so reliable and likely to happen?

Not sure why you find that alarming just look at the history of the modern farm and how science has changed it in the past 100 years. For anyone to think that wont happen in the next 100 years is in my opinion not looking at what is currently going on within the science community and the kind of breakthroughs they are close to. I read the Scientific American and the new technologies they are working on are amazing and for the ones that deal with rural farming should help them out to make it even more advanced during our lifetime.

[CosmicWizard]

Josseppie is always the optimist! Never one to let current reality bring him down.

IMO, that's probably a good thing. If we all keep focusing on the way things are, we'll just get more of the way things are. If more of us are willing to focus on the possibilities, we are more likely to bring something different into reality.

I remember reading a book titled Possibility Thinking many years ago. The author, Robert Schuller wrote about how he crossed out the word impossible from all of his dictionaries. He removed it from his vocabulary! We might all benefit by doing the same thing. Just because things look so grim, and so many things seem impossible and unlikely does not mean that they actually are. Even though it seems highly unlikely that the next great solution to all our problems is right around the corner, maybe it is! Maybe we just need to stop harping about everything gone wrong. Maybe Josseppie is on to something that the rest of us negaholics are just too dense to imagine as being possible.

[brightdoglover]

I'm not saying nothing is going to change or improve. I just don't believe in living as if it had already happened when it's not a given and has no arrival date.
I feel that way about a lot of things in life, not just water resources and stuff. Not optimistic or pessimistic, but realistic. I don't want to pretend something is going to happen and act accordingly.

[jazzlover]

Originally Posted by Josseppie

Not sure why you find that alarming just look at the history of the modern farm and how science has changed it in the past 100 years. For anyone to think that wont happen in the next 100 years is in my opinion not looking at what is currently going on within the science community and the kind of breakthroughs they are close to. I read the Scientific American and the new technologies they are working on are amazing and for the ones that deal with rural farming should help them out to make it even more advanced during our lifetime.

While there have been many advancements in agricultural science in the last 100 years--better crop and animal genetics, better techniques of husbandry and management, etc.--the biggest single technological "advancement" was the massive adoption of the use of non-renewable fossil fuels--most notably, petroleum and natural gas--for purposes of increasing agricultural production and processing, storage, and transportation of foodstuffs. The "green revolution" in food production that reached full flower in the 1950's and 1960's was really a "black revolution"--black being the color of oil. As oil becomes more expensive and scarce, food production is going to stagnate and decline, and food transportation is going to become much more difficult and problematic. Take away cheap, abundant oil and natural gas and food production could decline to a point that only 1/2 or less of the current world population may be sustainable. Unfortunately, many chemical processes needed to manufacture fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides, for example, are absolutely dependent on the use of petroleum, natural gas, and petrochemicals--there are no substitutes. There are certain basic chemical processes that "technology" can not replace--no matter how much ignorant fools wish (and delude themselves into believing) that they might.

As to Colorado agriculture in the future, there are some good points made here. First, there are many thousands of acres of Colorado lands, especially on the Eastern Plains, that were "busted" out of native shortgrass prairie into dryland or sprinkler irrigated grain production. Most of that will not be sustainable very far into the future and it will revert to prairie rangeland. We are going to have to restore a lot of that land to grazing cattle, sheep, and probably buffalo. People love to hate beef as being unhealthy--not surprising, since most beef sold these days is grain fed. Cattle also have notoriously poor feed conversion--somewhere around 8 pounds of feed per pound of meet produced. But, the critics ignore one important fact--ruminant animals such as cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, etc. can convert forage humans can not digest--grass--into something that we can--meat and milk. We are going to need to use those animals much more in the future--grazing them on rangeland instead of feeding them grain in feedlots--for a food source. Colorado can play an important part in that--but it will take extensive tracts of land--far more than is being used now--to do it.

It is also true that irrigation can damage land. Areas which can be irrigated with a minimum of damage--because the soil is often the least naturally alkaline and the water the purest--are high-altitude sub-irrigated meadows, many of them at least partially naturally occurring. These can produce large grass and hay crops for cattle and sheep forage. Unfortunately, they have been a prime target for metropolitan water diversion schemes. The poster child of this stupidity is South Park, which went from tens of thousands of acres of subirrigated pastures to a parched high altitude desert when its waters were diverted to irrigate Kentucky Bluegrass in Front Range cities. While agricultural irrigation can cause serious salinity problems, the diversion of the purest water supplies for municipal use actually aggravates the problem. Lower elevation agricultural irrigators are left lower quality, higher salt-contaminated water with which to irrigate. It should be noted that most of the problems associated with irrigation--from groundwater contamination, pesticide pollution, soil destruction, etc.--occur whether an edible crop or worthless lawngrass is being irrigated. We must impose strict measures against municipal water waste while, at the same time, re-invigorate irrigated agriculture wherever it can be done using techniques to minimize soil destruction, water contamination, and other negative impacts. We are going to need the food production.

Americans--and Coloradans--do not understand how close we could be to hunger and famine in this country. Even a moderate disruption in petroleum supplies, a blip in the food transportation and distribution system, or a sustained extensive drought could send the US into near-famine conditions. It is imperative for states and regions to endeavor to reach some level of food self-sufficiency. Colorado (so far) with a relatively small population, and a large base of land that has been (if not today) agriculturally productive when used and managed properly could be one place to approach self-sufficiency. But that possibility grows dimmer with every new person that relocates here and every land and water-devouring subdivision that is developed. Stopping the conversion of prime agricultural land into other uses must be of the highest priority.

Early Colorado history is instructive here. Despite its stunning natural beauty and extensive mineral wealth, what is now Colorado was a largely miserable place to live until it reached agricultural self-sufficiency in the 1880's and 1890's. In the subsequent three-quarter century, some of Colorado's most successful enterprises were not mining companies, but agricultural endeavors. Wealthy Colorado families with names like Boettcher and Monfort made their fortunes in Colorado agricultural production and processing.

I'm a firm believer that all true wealth springs from the land. Any society that despoils it land, squanders its natural resources, and fails to conserve for the future is doomed to failure and extinction. Colorado's and this country's current growth and development policies are heading us straight down that despicable path to destruction. It's time to change course.

[CosmicWizard]

jazzlover wrote:

I'm a firm believer that all true wealth springs from the land. Any society that despoils it land, squanders its natural resources, and fails to conserve for the future is doomed to failure and extinction. Colorado's and this country's current growth and development policies are heading us straight down that despicable path to destruction. It's time to change course.

I believe that too. But we must be missing something. For example, the Native Americans not only held that as a belief...but they LIVED it too, and they still got wiped out. Perhaps we who hold that belief today are re-incarnated Native Americans, and the developers are re-incarnations of those who stole their land. Food for thought. What goes around, comes around.

[BayAreaHillbilly]

Originally Posted by jazzlover

Americans--and Coloradans--do not understand how close we could be to hunger and famine in this country. Even a moderate disruption in petroleum supplies, a blip in the food transportation and distribution system, or a sustained extensive drought could send the US into near-famine conditions.

With over 1/6 of the world experiencing chronic hunger right this instant (and growing by leaps and bounds) I'd say we are very, very close. Add to that the general level of sissification and lack of basic skills for things like growing food, husbandry, self repair, etc that 90 plus % of Americans are characterized by, and there you have it.

[BayAreaHillbilly]

Originally Posted by CosmicWizard

jazzlover wrote:

I'm a firm believer that all true wealth springs from the land. Any society that despoils it land, squanders its natural resources, and fails to conserve for the future is doomed to failure and extinction. Colorado's and this country's current growth and development policies are heading us straight down that despicable path to destruction. It's time to change course.

I believe that too. But we must be missing something. For example, the Native Americans not only held that as a belief...but they LIVED it too, and they still got wiped out. Perhaps we who hold that belief today are re-incarnated Native Americans, and the developers are re-incarnations of those who stole their land. Food for thought. What goes around, comes around.

They flourished during the Medieval Warm Period (which brought good Monsoons to the SW US) and were smacked by the Little Ice Age (which dried up the Monsoons and made the high country much less habitable). No matter what the mass media and group thinkers in parts of the scientific community claim about our ability to continue warming the atmosphere, some things are just too big overcome. Another fall off from warm conditions (which may already have started) and we're in a bad way very quickly.

[sterlinggirl]

Richard Wobbekind of CU’s Leeds School of Business said Thursday that Colorado can expect to lose 60,000 to 65,000 jobs for 2009, up from a forecast in December of 4,000 job losses.

link

[Bideshi]

The entire nation will continue to lose jobs for some time to come. The next stage of the mortagage melt-down will be painful. Recovery, or at least a leveling out looks like around 2011 at the earliest. It's a depression, not a recession, and our nation will come out of it a rather different society. We will have to re-learn some things our grand parents knew and become more self-reliant. At the same time we will have to learn to co-operate with others on many levels. A hard rain's gonna fall, but a new days a-commin'.