News

On today’s Growing on the High Plains, I’ll introduce you to a pair of donkeys who have captured my heart and brightened my commute along Highway 83 in southwest Kansas. The donkeys share a 15-acre pasture at the intersection of US Route 50, while providing a welcome bright spot where the fabled loneliest road meets the highway to nowhere.

Cattle producers in drought-stricken Kansas counties may now cut hay or graze on land normally set aside for conservation.

Thanks so much to Amy Berry, Tour Leader for the African Children’s Choir, for speaking with High Plains Morning about the upcoming show in Amarillo. This group has been at it since 1984, aiding kids in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and South Africa. Their purpose is to help create new leadership for tomorrow's Africa, with a focus on education for all. The kids have performed for presidents, heads of state, and Queen Elizabeth II for her diamond jubilee; they’ve also played with Paul McCartney, Annie Lennox, Mariah Carey, and more.

TIME TO BEGIN PREPPING FOR BOW SEASON   

It’s amazing just how quickly seasons and, to an old hunter, HUNTING seasons, roll around. Whitetail archery season is less than three months away and now is the time to make sure all your equipment is in top-notch working order and that you can place that arrow where it needs to be when the moment of truth comes and that bruiser buck is within bow range. 

I love the wide-open, top-of-the-world feeling I get whenever I’m on the Great Plains. Last month, I was able to relish that feeling once again. After flying into Bismarck, North Dakota, I drove out to Gabe Brown’s 5,000-acre ranch and farm.

Gabe showed me to a chair on the porch of a one-room cabin he’d built for meetings with visitors. A prominent leader in the Soil Health movement, he told me that a group or an individual comes by almost every day to learn about his regenerative farming and grazing techniques.

“So tell me what you’re interested in,” he said.

I told him that until my family sold our western Kansas irrigated farm in 2006, we had done our part in depleting the Ogallala Aquifer, the largest source of groundwater in this country. That farm and others like it were continuing to drain the aquifer, which seemed wrong to me. For a long time, I’d been looking for some positive news to share about how the aquifer could be saved.

At a Republican governor candidate forum in Garden City, Wednesday, former doctor Jim Barnett said expanding Medicaid would save lives and communities – by keeping rural hospitals running. But he was alone in his support of the state and federal program that defrays medical costs for people with limited income and resources.

Other candidates decried Medicaid's cost and the management of Kansas’s privatized Medicaid delivery system, Kancare. Secretary of State Kris Kobach announced his intention to massively overhaul the system.

Today on Growing on the High Plains, I thought I'd plant a seed of history about a favorite feat of flair from a former First Lady. I'm talking about the Highway Beautification Act, passed in 1965, which was a visionary project of Lady Bird Johnson. 

A new initiative would bar oil and gas extraction on more than 80 percent of non-federal land in Colorado.

As The Denver Post reports, over four out of five acres of non-federal land in Colorado would be off-limits to new oil and gas drilling if voters approve a proposed ballot measure this fall.

Wheat harvest is close to wrapping up in Kansas and overall production is down from last year due to dry weather in some areas and hail damage in others. 

In northwest Kansas, as much as 1 million bushels of wheat were lost to hail.

Eric Sperber, manager of Cornerstone Ag LLC in Colby, told Kansas Wheat that the area was hit with another hailstorm on Saturday.

“We have had five hail events since June 19, and fields that were missed from the previous storms got hit this time. Overall, the crop has good quality; unfortunately, we lost fields due to the hail storms."

Recently, I began to notice that purveyors of print material and packaging designers have started using much smaller fonts than they used to.  This annoyed me, as any consumer study will clearly show that people don’t like to have to squint to make out instructions, recipes, and article content. 

One evening, as I was trying to read a major national newspaper, I made an offhand comment to Joel about this disturbing trend. 

As my fishing buddy Phil Zimmerman and I rounded the point and entered a small secluded cove on Iskwatikan Lake in northern Saskatchewan, Canada, we were both thinking BIG PIKE. Shallow shoreline water with standing vegetation dropping quickly into deeper water; this area had everything a big northern pike could want.

The United States’ trade war with China could have long-lasting effects beyond the current growing season.

Today, China put tariffs on $34 billion worth of American imports in response to American tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says Chinese, Canadian and Mexican tariffs will impact exports in High Plains states to varying degrees.

With wildfires continuing to burn in Colorado, two laws are going into effect aimed at fighting and preventing them in the future. 

As The Denver Post reports, the penalties for leaving a campfire unattended or not fully extinguished in grasslands or a forest just became tougher under a new state law that went into effect Sunday. 

Under that law, violators will be hit with a Class 3 misdemeanor punishable by a maximum fine of $750, six months in jail or both.

I had read something about a Montana farmer who was using sweet clover as a cover crop in his wheat. The details are long lost to me. He may have been inter-seeding the clover with the wheat, or establishing it over a season or two, then turning it under before he planted his cash crop. Whatever his method, the clover, being a legume, fixed nitrogen in the soil.