Global Warming: Positive Proof

It's spring here in the Skagit Valley, and it's snowing. The daffodils are doing their best to look spring-like but are having a hard time competing with the frozen slush that is falling from the sky. What was once a sea of yellow is now a sea. Like low tide, there is standing water, mud and drooping flowers. And they want me to believe in global warming? I think for the sake of getting into the fields to get going on spring work, I'd take a little global warming right now.



Only a fool doesn't believe in global warming. All I have to do is walk into the Cascade Mountains and I will find fossil evidence that this area was once a tropical forest with palm trees. Obviously there was a time it was much warmer, it cooled off, and now the cycle is turning the other direction. Such is the planet on which we live.

As a farmer, I also believe only a fool doesn't take seriously the practice of conservation. Farmers have done it for years, long before there were environmentalists and the giant bureaucracies they create. We learned the hard way. The Dust Bowl, the continual planting of cotton in the Deep South before that, hard lessons learned.

Today, the really good farmers, the really successful farmers are conservationists and environmentalists. We do it not out of a media generated fear, or because a washed up politician has taken on the "cause" to gain notoriety. No, we do it because care for the land is ultimately profitable and that it is the right thing to do.

You see, most of us farmers don't actually consider ourselves environmentalists. Such "buzz words" really carry very little meaning.

We are stewards. We understand we have to put back what we take out. We understand, the land is ours to use but it is also our call to pass it on.