Every five years the US Department of Agriculture publishes the US Census of Agriculture. The most current census is for 2007 and was published in 2009. I have previously written here about one aspect of the census – the first ever survey of native farmers and ranchers. Recently I had occasion to use the Census […]
Energy & Industry
Posted inGoat
Organic farmers prepare to ward off genetic trespassers
In early February, I wrote about the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s decision to fully deregulate the planting of genetically-modified alfalfa, and partially deregulate the planting of genetically-modified beets. These decisions allowed modified alfalfa to be planted anywhere, without restriction, and modified sugar beets to be planted in many locations, with some restrictions — despite a […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
BLM stays course in Wyoming gas patch despite mule deer decline
Mule deer wintering near Pinedale, Wyo., rely on the sagebrush habitat of the Mesa, a 300-square-mile plateau between the Green and New Fork rivers. Part of the Pinedale Anticline natural gas field, where nearly 2,000 wells have been drilled to tap the nation’s third-largest reserve, it once hosted 5,000 to 6,000 wintering deer. As winter […]
Posted inGoat
Strawberry scrutiny
Methyl iodide is a chemical used to create cancer cells in the laboratory. It’s also a substance that California farmers hope to use to grow those big and beautiful supermarket strawberries. By killing most everything in the soil to clear the way for food crops, the pesticide helps fragile strawberries thrive. But methyl iodide’s toxicity […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Rural Oregon timber county seeks economic revival through renewables
Lakeview, Ore., sounds like a sleepy place. When four of five local lumber mills closed in the late ’80s and early ’90s, wiping out more than 800 jobs, it shrank by a fourth, to 2,750 people. Stranded in southern Oregon’s desert, the town lacks traffic lights and fast-food outlets. Western-style storefronts line its narrow main […]
Posted inGoat
Megaload Magnetism
Last spring, when I saw my first megaload, I thought July 4th had come early. Football dads flipped burgers in the lot where the rig had parked. Hundreds of people crowded the ditches and dangled off guardrails to get a look at the machine. Newspapermen snapped cameras from the center of the road, and sheriffs, […]
Posted inGoat
Coal still king
When the BLM schedules the sale of coal leases, which give companies the right to mine federal coal, it rarely does so with great fanfare. But this time was different. This time, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar traveled all the way to a high school in Cheyenne, Wyo., and with Gov. Matt Mead by his side, […]
Posted inBlog
The end of the Mojave coal-fired power plant
The most recent thud Big Coal suffered around the West happened on March 11, when the 500 ft tall coal smokestack at the Mohave Generating Station in Nevada was demolished as part of the decommissioning process for the plant. While this was a historic end for the storied legacy of the Mohave coal-fired power plant, […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Why bother cooking what nature failed to finish?
Tar sands are no longer a what-if. This water-intensive form of mining may be coming to Utah soon, and what it could turn into is a big deal indeed. Unlike gas wells, extracting oil from sand is neither quiet nor unobtrusive. Despite the industry’s admirable efforts to minimize water use and reduce water pollution, the […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Lakeview renewable projects proposed and in progress
Since LCRI put this map together in the summer of 2010, more utility scale solar projects have been proposed in the northern part of the county.
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Cattlemen struggle against giant meatpackers and economic squeezes
‘This situation is what I call economic waterboarding.’
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
The Big Four Meatpackers
Related story: Cattlemen struggle against giant meatpackers and economic squeezes About 35 million cattle are slaughtered in the U.S. annually by 60 major beef-packing operations processing around 26 billion pounds of beef. Four firms control over 80 percent of all the beef slaughtered. [NEWSLETTER] **** Tyson Foods Springdale, Ark. Daily slaughter capacity 28,700 U.S. market […]
Posted inRange
Wyoming uranium has uncertain future
By Julianne Couch, 3-18-2011 On the other side of the Pacific Ocean from our position in the Rocky Mountain West, an earthquake and tsunami have triggered a catastrophe in Japan that officials say is the worst event in that country since World War II. In the last week, it has been impossible to miss seeing […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2011: High Tension
Montana transmission lines draw opposition from all sides
Whitehall, MontanaGeologist Debra Hanneman lives with her husband, geophysicist Chuck Wideman, in a modest, rambling house on the outskirts of town, a mile or so off Interstate 90. On a blustery morning in mid-January, the view through her glassed front door takes in an expanse of private and federal land, with dun-colored foothills rising toward […]
Posted inGoat
Nuclear Disaster Reverberates in the West
When the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded on April 26, 1986 and heaved plumes of radioactive dust across the Soviet Union and Europe, the United States’ domestic uranium market slumped into hibernation for nearly two decades. It should come as no surprise, then, that uranium stocks are falling rapidly as Japan’s own nuclear disaster unfolds. […]
Posted inGoat
Rare earth, indeed
In 2009, Backpacker magazine’s risk meter — rating the status of threatened wild places along a spectrum of “saved” to “doomed” — placed Otero Mesa in southern New Mexico about three-quarters of the way to “doomed.” Nudging it to the edge of the proverbial cliff, according to Backpacker, was a singular threat: oil and gas […]
Posted inRange
Does natural gas drilling make people sick?
By David Frey, 3-08-2011 Residents of Battlement Mesa, a sprawling housing development in western Colorado, are used to seeing the golf course from their windows, not gas rigs. But when an energy company announced plans to start drilling inside the subdivision, residents became concerned not just about the noise and the traffic, but the health […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2011: High Tension
Bigger isn’t always better
The Bureau of Land Management’s Ray Brady says “there is no way a state like California is going to meet its goal of generating 33 percent of its electricity from renewable sources without utility-scale projects (HCN, 2/7/2011).” From my experience, this just isn’t true, and I’m getting tired of seeing it become a mantra. Since […]
