Home-schooled on the Prairie
Post by Clemson Montana Summer Program student Noel Slater
If there’s one thing I learned on this trip it’s that Montana’s natural resources do not only benefit Montana, but everyone, which is why it is so important that sustainable practices get incorporated into rangeland management and forestry. There is so much education that needs to happen in order for specific scientific discoveries to become general knowledge. This is why programs like FFA, 4-H and Little North America are so important so that children become exposed to such knowledge before they become adults.
According to Jeff Hermanns, a Montana DNRC forester, many children don’t even know that toilet paper comes from trees. How can we expect future generations to care about the environment or other conservation issues if they don’t even understand the timber harvesting process? The same trees that make their toilet paper can also fuel their schools. Hardly anyone knows how many BTU’s (British Thermal Units) are in a pile of harvested ponderosa pine limbs. The equivalency of a pile of limbs is about 830 gallons of gas or 1500 BTU’s. That’s enough to heat a small elementary school for a few months. If school systems chose to use trees to create steam to fuel their boilers, they could save so much money. A lot of ranchers need to have those trees cut down anyway for a variety of reason,s one of them being that the needles of pine trees contain turpentine which causes abortion of the calf in the third trimester. Another reason the trees (especially the dead dry ones) need to be cut down is because they can be used as fuel in dangerous wildfires. Not only can we save school systems with low budgets a ton of money, we can also utilize resources like excess tree branches which would otherwise be burned.
One would think that everyone would want to invest in one of these boilers which runs on trees, not natural gas, but surprisingly many are obstinate in making the change. "People are afraid of what they don’t know" according to Mr. Hermanns. Another surprising fact I learned is that Montana lacks a fire management plan. As a state where wildfire can make or break a town, one would think that a fire management plan would be first on the priority list. After the Dahl Fire in 2012, people started to take wildlife seriously and take precautions to prevent such a catastrophic event from happening again. Unfortunately, the state and federal government have very different methods and plans of dealing with such events. In my opinion, private agencies have better management plans because they are open to new ideas and let managers try new things in order to keep their business going. Public industries, on the other hand, won’t necessarily try new management practices because they get a salary no matter what happens during the course of their career. It is really fascinating to see how different states approach fire ecology, especially being at a school like Clemson where fire ecology is such a prevalent subject in my studies.
Although I thought I knew quite a bit about rangeland science because of my background in ecology, I was quite mistaken about all that goes into managing cattle. Managing the diets of these cattle while making sure they are up to date on all their vaccines is quite a bit of work. If you don’t plan in advance how you are going to graze your cattle, you can really mess up your land for future usage. Also, diet at such an early age can really affect the health and development of the calf and eventually the quality of the meat. At the finishing feed lot we visited different combinations of food are mixed by the nutritionist like Pepè Paquin, but in the end it’s the feed lot owner who decides what the cattle are fed. The owner said that he can tell based upon how a cow is doing what it needs in terms of supplemental feeding. I think to get that far in your career where you can just look at a cow and know what it needs is amazing. Those are the people who control the quality of the meat we fuel our bodies with. They also are the ones who are most affected by consumer perception in their industry. Some years the number of cows injected with growth hormones is very high, but lately due to controversy, hardly any producers are having their cattle injected despite studies showing the benefit in development with no apparent health problems later on in humans.
It just astonishes me how consumers with no agricultural or rangeland science background can control the industry directly. Consumer perception is everything. It drives the market and determines the sociological view towards the industry as a whole. Producers understand the simple fact that in order to be competitive as well as successful they must cater to the consumers’ desires. If a celebrity that year does an interview about why GMOs are slowly killing us all, people will read it and for some reason believe it. This will eventually start a trend in the community of going GMO free, which leads to nobody wanting to eat anything that has GMO’s in it despite a lack of understanding regarding what a GMO really is. I can’t stress enough how important it is for our generation and future generations to understand the processes behind the agricultural industry and what really happens versus what we hear. If people are not told differently, they are going to grow up thinking that organic food is better for them and that their “cage-free” eggs are coming from a place that treats chickens so much better. Quite frankly, it’s not their fault because you believe what you hear until you are told differently. My hope is that one day with further education, America can be better informed on what really goes on with the food they eat before it reaches their plates.
According to Jeff Hermanns, a Montana DNRC forester, many children don’t even know that toilet paper comes from trees. How can we expect future generations to care about the environment or other conservation issues if they don’t even understand the timber harvesting process? The same trees that make their toilet paper can also fuel their schools. Hardly anyone knows how many BTU’s (British Thermal Units) are in a pile of harvested ponderosa pine limbs. The equivalency of a pile of limbs is about 830 gallons of gas or 1500 BTU’s. That’s enough to heat a small elementary school for a few months. If school systems chose to use trees to create steam to fuel their boilers, they could save so much money. A lot of ranchers need to have those trees cut down anyway for a variety of reason,s one of them being that the needles of pine trees contain turpentine which causes abortion of the calf in the third trimester. Another reason the trees (especially the dead dry ones) need to be cut down is because they can be used as fuel in dangerous wildfires. Not only can we save school systems with low budgets a ton of money, we can also utilize resources like excess tree branches which would otherwise be burned.
Although I thought I knew quite a bit about rangeland science because of my background in ecology, I was quite mistaken about all that goes into managing cattle. Managing the diets of these cattle while making sure they are up to date on all their vaccines is quite a bit of work. If you don’t plan in advance how you are going to graze your cattle, you can really mess up your land for future usage. Also, diet at such an early age can really affect the health and development of the calf and eventually the quality of the meat. At the finishing feed lot we visited different combinations of food are mixed by the nutritionist like Pepè Paquin, but in the end it’s the feed lot owner who decides what the cattle are fed. The owner said that he can tell based upon how a cow is doing what it needs in terms of supplemental feeding. I think to get that far in your career where you can just look at a cow and know what it needs is amazing. Those are the people who control the quality of the meat we fuel our bodies with. They also are the ones who are most affected by consumer perception in their industry. Some years the number of cows injected with growth hormones is very high, but lately due to controversy, hardly any producers are having their cattle injected despite studies showing the benefit in development with no apparent health problems later on in humans.
It just astonishes me how consumers with no agricultural or rangeland science background can control the industry directly. Consumer perception is everything. It drives the market and determines the sociological view towards the industry as a whole. Producers understand the simple fact that in order to be competitive as well as successful they must cater to the consumers’ desires. If a celebrity that year does an interview about why GMOs are slowly killing us all, people will read it and for some reason believe it. This will eventually start a trend in the community of going GMO free, which leads to nobody wanting to eat anything that has GMO’s in it despite a lack of understanding regarding what a GMO really is. I can’t stress enough how important it is for our generation and future generations to understand the processes behind the agricultural industry and what really happens versus what we hear. If people are not told differently, they are going to grow up thinking that organic food is better for them and that their “cage-free” eggs are coming from a place that treats chickens so much better. Quite frankly, it’s not their fault because you believe what you hear until you are told differently. My hope is that one day with further education, America can be better informed on what really goes on with the food they eat before it reaches their plates.
