Lloydminster Meridian Booster, 11 Jan 2008, Letter to the Editor

To the editor:

Why is it that urban dwelling experts and animal rights advocates feel they have to educate farmers in the economics and practices of farming?

There seems to be an instant assumption by these people that farmers are ignorant, uneducated, callous backwoods dwellers whose only interest is wringing money from their environment. A prime example is Tove Reese, director of Voice for Animals, who calls farmers “ignorant,” and several other unflattering references. I suspect she has never spent any great amount of time in any gopher infested rural area, nor has she listened politely at any length to farmers faced with a gopher infestation that can make a field look like a moonscape. If she had, she would not be so insulting or single-minded in her belief that gophers are not a problem for farmers and ranchers.

With today’s ongoing campaigns by government to protect us from ourselves and from all forms of dangerous chemicals; the use of the very effective strychnine poisons was discontinued until farm pressure allowed the use of a much-diluted and less effective form of the poison. The spectre of other species being decimated by the poisons was raised, as was the assumption of secondary killing of songbirds and predators. My father had a solution for that. As a boy one of my farm duties was gopher poisoning. He gave me very exacting and strict instructions. I was to place one spoonful of the poison grain bait in each hole and flip it down the hole so it was not visible or
reachable by birds, people or other animals. As I wandered around the farm after that, I never saw a dead bird, dead animal or for that matter, a dead gopher. The poison was so strong that they died before they came to the surface. In fact their first instinct as they feel the poison effect is to go further into their holes.

Far from being ignorant and uneducated, today’s farmers are environmentally aware, well-educated and thoroughly informed about all aspects of their profession of sustainable farming. They have huge amounts of capital investment ,and with the narrow margins in farming, don’t survive in the business if they do it wrong.

Reese’s story about gophers making pastures better for grazing and
controlling grasshoppers is very interesting. Our farmers and ranchers must be missing a bet here. If there had only been more gophers during the grasshopper infestation a few years ago we would have had lots of healthy pasture and no grasshopper problem. Yeah … right!

I guess my university degree in agriculture and my many years of farming before we sold out don’t match Reese’s scientific knowledge. These urban guys know much more than a simple farmer or a politician trying to respond to the needs of his constituents.

W. Till,
Lloydminster

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Posted by FFC on July 21st, 2009 :: Filed under Family vs factory farming,Letters to the Editor
Tags :: activists, agriculture, animals, education, Farmers, misconceptions
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