I spend a good bit of my time as a historian of our industry, and I often find it informative to look back to help chart a path forward or at least help explain the path we find ourselves on. It is the job of a historian to sort the noise of history from the clear pitfalls that have been made that can then be avoided in the future. However, the most important job is to look for those times when there is convergence of brilliance that needs to be maintained and built upon. I would like to bring some historic examples of things I see as important right now that have to do with our governmental system, as well as our food and energy policies. The latter two are vitally important because affordable food and energy have long been the bedrock of our country’s success and well-being.
We’ve had moments of brilliance many times. These include ancient Greece with philosophy and democracy, parts of the 15th and 16th centuries in Florence regarding art and architecture, the 18th century in England with agriculture and then the first half of the 19th century in Scotland during the Scottish Enlightenment. Here in the U.S., a group of brilliant people formed a system of government that was truly inspired. They built in checks and balances and a deliberate process. If they came back, I wonder whether they would recognize our bloated government now beyond the names of the branches.
Our government needs to get back to regular order and respect for the balance of powers. The executive branch now just signs agreements without them being ratified as laws or treaties through the legislature, so the next administration reverses all that was done before. Both sides are equally guilty. Who, then, can count on us? Certainly not the Kurds who we left high and dry after they fought so bravely beside us. Or the tribes in Afghanistan who sided with us. And the U.S. and Russia guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders if they gave up their nuclear weapons hasn’t worked out so well for Ukraine.
Our government must return to regular order. We need federal budgets passed, not continuing resolutions. We need treaties that are binding and not taken on a whim. Our word must be our bond. I like small government, but we do need it to protect critical industries such as health care, the electric grid, information technology and food processing and distribution. Our country is in desperate need of more labor, but there has to a better system than a mass undocumented flow of people over our borders. One of the defining features of a country is having sovereign borders.
Next is a water policy, which seesaws back and forth from minimum regulation to micromanagement. We are now swinging back to micromanagement, where a wet patch in a field takes precedence over hungry people. When I study British agriculture, they have been draining ground since Roman times, when they occupied the island for the first four centuries after Christ. There are whole histories that can be written about all the innovative draining systems they employed over 1,500 years. Our reasoning today is the land should be returned to its natural state. What does that mean? Should it be taken back to a bog that it might have been 200 years ago? A bog will release more greenhouse gases than agriculture ever could. There should be a statute of limitations that after land has been managed in a certain way for a number of years, that becomes its natural state.
We have used the natural precipitation and sunlight to produce forages on both private and public lands, and then we converted these feedstuffs that have no nutritive value to humans into nutrient-dense food in the form of beef. If we take this land out of production in the arid and semiarid West, the land will either return to desert, or vegetation on it will serve as fuel for repeated fires, with no food being produced.
Under the last administration, we achieved energy independence, which was a wonderful thing. I have a brother who spent 35 years in the Marine Corps, and during about 30 of those years, he was constantly being deployed and actively fighting in any number of places that were all proxies for protecting our Middle East oil supply. We finally got to where that wasn’t necessary, but inside of a year of the new administration, we have lost this advantage. We owe it to the current generation of our families and friends that serve in the military to not spend another 30 years fighting what appears to be an unwinnable battle.
We must return to a sense of sanity. We must protect and prioritize our ability to produce food and energy safely and stop the endless wars we fight over oil by tapping our own resources. As we move into the coming years, will we see the malaise and tough times of the Carter administration, or will we unleash America’s full potential? It sure looks right now like the former, but let’s hope wiser heads prevail so it is the latter. — Dr. Bob Hough,WLJ correspondent
