Officials sending emails during meetings are no laughing matter

For some, it might seem like just a funny story: the Oregonian newspaper used a public records law request to obtain the e-mails that Oregon city council members and city staff text-mailed to other people during a meeting.

While these officials were supposed to be listening to public testimony, they instead were doing what they called “multi-tasking.” As the Oregonian described Commissioner Erik Sten’s busy meeting: “He listens to public testimony with his ears and uses his fingers to snap together a quote for a union press release, celebrate Oregon City’s decision to fight global warming or taking a tip on how he mispronounced a name.”

During the Jan. 18 hearing, Sten “led the council with 15 emails,” pointed out the Oregonian. He wasn’t the only one using a Blackberry or other device to correspond with other people during the meeting.

Should we laugh at this, admire the people who multi-task, or should we call it for what it really is: Ignorant. Disrespectful. Shameful. And yes, a serious problem.

Talking with the executive director of an agricultural commodity organization this past fall, she talked about the “Crackberries” that have become an addiction to politicians and their staff.

She talked about numerous times that she or others in the agricultural community have made serious, well-meaning, important presentations to elected officials in Washington, D.C. or at committee hearings that sometimes travel the country.

She said how frustrating it is to see these officials and their staff pay attention more to their Blackberries or other such devices than to the farmers, ranchers and their representatives that have committed their valuable time and resources to attend these events, whether it’s across the state or on the other side of the country.

Are all these officials doing business that just can’t wait and takes a higher priority than dealing with these people in front of them? Are their staff perhaps recording the points made by the farm speakers, ensuring they captured the message that will influence important legislation later?

One look at the staff yawning and clicking on their devices and it’s clear that most of the time they’re bored, their minds are wandering, and probably what they’re reading or typing has little or nothing to do with the business on hand.

In the same day’s Oregonian, there was another short story about how a University of Florida psychologist believes cell phones are a growing addiction.

The newspaper said people suffer anxiety and it interferes with their lives if they can’t use their cell phone for a couple of hours.

Almost every day there seems to be some new technological gizmo that excites people about how much more connected, entertained and up to date they can be with families, friends and the world.

Ironically, the more communicated they become through the technology, the less in touch they became with the real world and people who may be standing in front of them or living with them.

Why should we care what elected officials and their staff are doing at meetings or hearings?

Often, these are the rare times when they can meet the public directly and interact face-to-face. If they listen carefully, they might learn from each other or have a useful question and answer exchange that avoids further miscommunication and problems down the road.

At the very least, these officials should turn off those cell phone, Blackberries and other technical devices and show the respect and interest that the public deserves.

Otherwise future requests under public records laws may reveal much more embarrassing and awkward moments for those who are elected or hired to serve the public.

Technorati tags: Agriculture
Oregonian
Blackberry
politics

Wisdom extracted from the dentist chair

Sitting tensely in the dentist chair yesterday, while several sharp, spinning, buzzing, grinding, smoking tools aimed at my mouth and my dentist cheerily whistled a tune, I realized these are one of those moments when I probably might want to question the wisdom of my past habits in life.

I never should have used my face to block those soccer ball shots when I was so bravely playing defense. Perhaps developing that chocolate addiction as a kid has come back to haunt me. Chewing on those hard peppermint candies my mother gave us kids to silence us in church probably was a no-no.

And I admit it, I never should have bobbed for beer bottles floating in that barrel of ice cold water when I attended that one pre-wedding party back in my much younger days. For years after that the dentists kept remarking how they couldn’t understand why I had so many chipped teeth.

Funny how we think we’re invincible at that point in our lives. Or at least our teeth are. I recall we actually admired the guys in the community who could get the cap off pop or beer bottles with their teeth because finding a bottle opener would have been too inconvenient. Of course, now that I think about it, the fact that these same guys were down to only two or three teeth should have been a clue that maybe we should have sought more deserving heroes to earn our praise.

So there I was in the dentist chair, trying to figure out how many teeth the dentist wanted to tackle. I was struggling to understand the differences in terminology but dollar signs kept floating through my mind. Maybe it was because of all the talk of silver fillings and gold crowns.

But I knew it needed to be done. It’s been tough to write cheery blogs on our website and make pleasant conversation in the office when all I wanted to do is growl arggggghhhhhh, arggghhhhh and hunt down more painkillers.

Whenever I’m in a dentist chair, I try to think of happy, pleasant, serene thoughts. Like fishing with my family on a warm summer evening on one of our favorite lakes. Casting a line in a lazy loop over the water, listening to it spin out of the reel, and the gentle plunk of the lure hitting the water as a ripple of circles emerges around it.

Thinking of the farm is always a good escape. Yesterday, I thought about some of the things we were taught to chew on at an early age.

A blade of grass, a long hay straw. Wild berries, ranging from bitter to sweet. Crab apples, plums and other fruit off trees in our yard. Petals of wild roses. A handful of soft wheat kernels in mid-summer, followed by hardened kernels during harvest time that we’d chew until it became gum. The first carrots and radishes that emerged in the garden. Sweet sap frozen into icicles dripping from maple trees.

We were fairly self-sufficient on the farm, buying only a few of the necessities we needed for groceries. Shamefully, I realize it was when I moved away from the farm that I probably adopted the bad habits that led me to the dentist. Bobbing for beer was probably the worst.

“See you next week,” the dentist cheerfully said as I left his office, my left cheek puffier than a squirrel after it has packed in a few acorns.

I just nodded, richer in wisdom, if not in the pocket.

Technorati tags: Agriculture

Groundhog Day revolt

The most influential teacher I had when I was a student at Echo High School, Jeanie (Robson) McCoy, used to love Groundhog Day. She used to say it was her favorite holiday.

I don't know if it's still her favorite holiday or not, but I wonder what her reaction would be to a move to rename Groundhog Day in the West to "Prairie Dog Day."

I didn't know there was any big controversy related to Groundhog Day until I got an e-mail from Lauren McCain, deserts and grassland program director for Forest Guardians.

According to the press release McCain sent, Forest Guardians and other conservation organizations have been working for four years to get the prairie dog some props each Feb. 2. The effort is an effort to promote the importance of the prairie dog in the Western ecosystems where it is found.

“Just as the groundhog predicts the duration of winter, the West’s ‘groundhog’ – the prairie dog – foretells the future of a community of wildlife dependent on prairie dogs for food and for the habitat they create,” McCain wrote.

And the effort appears to be gaining some momentum. Forest Guardians report that in 2006 both the Santa Fe, N.M., City Council and mayor of Albuquerque, N.M., officially declared Feb. 2 as Prairie Dog Day.

As a lifelong Westerner, I sort of like the idea of a Western critter getting some recognition, whether on Groundhog Day, or any other day for that matter. I have never seen a groundhog personally, as I suspect many of my neighbors haven't either. But then again, I'm not sure I've ever seen a prairie dog either.

Now, ground squirrels I've seen. I didn't know what a ground squirrel was until one day as a teenager when I was riding dirt bikes with a friend of mine on the farm/ranch he lived on near the Umatilla/Morrow counties line in Eastern Oregon. We were roaring off down some dirt road and came upon this area of rolling hills and grasslands beyond the fringe of the irrigated circles and dryland wheat fields. As I recall it, it was an area used to graze cattle that feature a huge covered concrete water tank (which would later serve as our own private swimming pool out in the middle of nowhere.

As we rode along, there was something odd about the landscape. I couldn't put my finger on it right away, but soon realized we were being watched. As we slowed and eventually stopped I realized that hundreds, no thousands, of little creatures were watching us. Some cautiously poked their heads out of holes in the earth. Others, a bit more distant, stood on all fours near their burrows. And still others, stood up on their hind quarters to eye the pair of noisy interlopers who had invaded their domains. Thousands of ground squirrels dotted the area. As we stopped our motorcycles, and got quiet, the furry little creatures resumed their activities, sprinting about or standing sentry over the rolling hills.

So, after reading about "Prairie Dog Day" I got to thinking, maybe there should be a campaign to have a "Ground Squirrel Day" too. But reflecting on a decade of more than a decade in California, most of that in the deserts there, I realized maybe each region should have it's own burrowing, ground-skittering critter to honor on Feb. 2.

How does "Lizard Day" grab you? Or maybe "Desert Tortoise Day" or "Borrowing Owl Day?"

Move over Punxsutawney Phil and make some room. You've got some competition.

I don't expect a lot of farmers and ranchers will hop on the bandwagon to support recognition or protection of prairie dogs or ground squirrels, animals that can damage crops or compete with livestock for rangeland grasses. What would be next, gophers?

Whether a critter is a loveable icon or a pest is strongly dependent on whether those critters live on your land or some far away place and only make an appearance once a year or so in search of its shadow to give you a prediction on the weather.

iTunes, we have a problem

They say doctor's bury their mistakes. I tend to bury mine online.

Take Friday for example. I was posting a new episode of the Capital Press podcast when I stumbled over one of the digital corpses I've left lingering out there on the World Wide Web.

A few weeks ago, when working on a podcast I noticed that the label at the top of our podcast home page just said "podcasts." I thought that was sort of stupid, and not very descriptive so I changed it to "Farmers CAP Podcast home," which admittedly is not poetry, but at least I thought it would be more descriptive.

I never thought anymore about it until after I posted Friday's 10th episode of our podcast. For some odd reason, I decided to check the way the episode appeared in the iTunes Music Store. When I did, I realized the last couple of episodes weren't showing up, which I thought was odd. When I followed the link to the website from the iTunes store the webpage that came up didn't show the two most recent episodes either.

Well, come to find out, by changing the type at the top of one page (using iWeb) I had created a whole new directory. And since the way we publish our podcasts is by uploading stuff via ftp to our server, the "old" directory wasn't overwritten after I made updates. I haven't figured out exactly home many people are coming to our podcast through iTunes, but they were missing out on the new stuff.

I probably would have caught this on iTunes on my home computer, which I used to download podcasts and music onto my iPod. However, a while back iTunes decided it was going to refuse to launch on my personal computer, leaving me tragically out of date on all the podcasts I monitor (not to mention all the New Music Tuesday releases).

So, without iTunes at home, the error when undetected until Friday.

I won't bore you with all the details about how I had to edit our rss feed and redirect iTunes to the new page and jump through various hoops while spinning bits and bytes on my fingers and toes. But suffice it to say, I "think" I got the problem I didn't even know I created fixed.

But who knows.

The good thing is, the whole podcasting thing is a pretty new venture for us/me, so it's not like we have a ton of subscribers clamoring for new episodes or anything. To my way of thinking, it's better to make mistakes when no one's looking so my image of perfection goes unblemished.

It's certainly been a learning experience. And I've learned a lot through trial and lots of error. But what I still don't know would fill a volume thick enough to make "War and Peace" look like haiku. On good days, it's still challenging and fun. On bad days, that old student's lament I learned back in junior high goes sing-songing through my head.

The more you study, the more you know.
The more you know, the more you forget.
The more you forget, the less you know.
So why study?

Why indeed.

Now, if can just figure out how to fix iTunes on the home computer.

What's the impact from ethanol announcement?

While reaction was generally positive to the president supporting ethanol and reducing America’s dependency on foreign oil supplies, there has been some caution emerging about some of the goals George W. Bush outlined in his State of the Union speech Tuesday night.

Bob Krauter, of Capital Press, reported that Matt Schmitt, a managing partner in Calgren Renewable Fuels, a company that is building a California ethanol plant, welcomed the news but the proposed mandate may be too ambitious for ethanol producers.

Bush’s goals require 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017 — nearly five times the current target.

“I think ethanol has a saturation point of 15 billion gallons,” Schmitt said. “The rest would come from biodiesel, which means 15- to 20-billion gallons of biodiesel, which I think will be a tough call to have as much biodiesel as ethanol.”

According to DesMoines Register in Iowa, another Californian who expressed concern is Tad Patzek, an engineer at the University of California at Berkeley. The newspaper called him a “ leading critic of the ethanol industry” and reporting him saying “ the nation will never produce the amount of fuel Bush wants because of technology issues, land availability and other obstacles.”

The article added that Patzek stressed, “our politicians need to start talking about cutting energy use by a factor of two,” he said.

In several of the states that have seen great growth in their ethanol industries, they welcomed the comments by Bush. Their ethanol leaders also admitted it was ambitious, but appeared confident that production will be expanded and needs will be met.

One of the questions will be what will fuel the country: will corn continue to be the main product used in ethanol? The goal outlined for ethanol by Bush would mean using seven times the amount of ethanol distilled from corn last year, and the agricultural industry has already been buzzing about what ethanol is doing to corn prices.

Corn prices have doubled in the last 13 months, reaching a 10-year high, and farmers who depend on corn for feed for livestock have been worried as their profit margins have shrunk and supplies become harder to find.

It’s not just America that is affected by higher corn prices. Last week, according to Associated Press, Mexico’s president Felipe Calderon “signed an accord with businesses Thursday to curb soaring tortilla prices and protect Mexico's poor from speculative sellers and a surge in the cost of corn driven by the U.S. ethanol industry.”

The story went on to say “The corn tortilla is the basic staple of the Mexican diet and is especially crucial for the poor. The accord limits tortilla prices to 8.50 pesos ($0.78) per kilogram and threatens to use existing laws to achieve prison sentences of up to 10 years for company officials found hoarding corn. Some stores have been selling tortillas for as much as 10 pesos ($0.91) per kilogram.”

While corn prices rose here in the U.S., it was tortilla prices that soared in Mexico.

“Tortilla prices rose by 14 percent in 2006, more than three times the inflation rate, and they have continued to surge in the first weeks of 2007. The rise is partly due to U.S. ethanol plants gobbling corn supplies and pushing prices as high as $3.40 a bushel, the highest in more than a decade.”

The U.S. ethanol industry cannot accept all the blame for what is happening with Mexico’s tortilla prices and how it affects the poor families there, since corrupt Mexicans appear to be taking advantage of those who can least afford large increases in the price of their staple food.

But the U.S. should be aware that the world continues to watch closely what direction the president wants the ethanol industry to grow here, what impact will it have on agriculture directly and indirectly, and if the country can even meet the ambitious goals he has set.


Technorati tags:
Agriculture
ethanol
corn prices
State of the Union speech

Western farmers will watch if Bush follows through on promises

It was a more reserved, less smug president that addressed the Republicans and Democrats Tuesday night in Washington, D.C. during his State of the Union address.

George W. Bush pleaded for support of his plan to add additional troops in Iraq, and emphasized the role that America needs to serve in international affairs while still protecting itself at home against terrorism.

The tone was different than speeches made by the president during the last few years: there wasn’t the air of defiance against critics, the bragging of success, the vows to defeat the axis of evil or unflinching cheerleading by his fellow Republicans.

While there were plenty of standing ovations and considerable applause, the support didn’t break down along the tradition lines of the president’s own party supporting all he said. This was especially clear on issues such as when he stressed the need for a temporary workers program, when he noted that there’s a serious problem of global climate change, and when he discussed the plan to send more troops to Iraq.

While there was the expected harsh words from Democrats later criticizing Bush’s foreign policy and failed objectives on the domestic agenda from his years thus far as president, there still appeared to be some acknowledgement that there needs to be change and cooperation to get things done — and cautious commitment made to work with the president if he indeed is serious on dealing with health, education, immigration and energy issues in the next two years.

Bush sadly ignored the Farm Bill, international trade and those areas impacted by weather disasters as priorities in his speech at a time when they deserved attention.

What can the West’s farmers and ranchers expect for help from Bush’s speech and the direction he wants to influence the House and Senate?

There is hope that something will be done about immigration issues and the challenge to have the workforce that segments of the agricultural community need so much.

Bush brought up that border patrols will not do enough to secure America’s border, but that a temporary worker program is needed. “We should establish a legal and orderly path for foreign workers to enter our country to work on a temporary basis. As a result, they won’t have to try to sneak in — and that will leave border agents free to chase down drug smugglers, and criminals, and terrorists.

“We will enforce our immigration laws at the worksite, and give employers the tools to verify the legal status of their workers — so there is no excuse left for violating the law,” Bush said. And then he touched on what many wanted to hear.

“And we need to resolve the status of the illegal immigrants who are already in our country — without animosity and without amnesty.”

It was obvious not everyone in his own party or in the Democratic party supported him as he announced this. The media dutifully recorded politicians that did not applaud or stand up in support. Bush expected and acknowledged this in his speech.

“Convictions run deep in this Capitol when it comes to immigration. Let us have a serious, civil, and conclusive debate — so that you can pass, and I can sign, comprehensive immigration reform into law.”

Westerners will applaud Washington’s politicians finally confronting the immigration issue head on, resolving the problems that exist: there is a need for a legal work force, but most importantly, there needs to be a labor force in place when and where it’s needed. Too many commodities were hurt this year when there was a worker shortage at crucial harvest times. Fruit and vegetable growers were particularly vulnerable and frustrated.

An area where Bush did find more support on from the politicians he courted during his speech was when he urged his country to be less dependent on foreign oil supplies.

This is not a new direction, but it renewed hope that perhaps something will finally be done about it, and there was hope that agriculture can provide the alternative energy sources needed.

“It is in our vital interest to diversify America’s energy supply — and the way forward is through technology. We must continue changing the way America generates electric power — by even greater use of clean coal technology ... solar and wind energy ... and clean, safe nuclear power. We need to press on with battery research for plug-in and hybrid vehicles, and expand the use of clean diesel vehicles and biodiesel fuel. We must continue investing in new methods of producing ethanol — using everything from wood chips, to grasses, to agricultural wastes,” Bush said.

More specifically, Bush challenged everyone: “Let us build on the work we have done and reduce gasoline usage in the United States by 20 percent in the next 10 years — thereby cutting our total imports by the equivalent of three-quarters of all the oil we now import from the Middle East.

“To reach this goal, we must increase the supply of alternative fuels, by setting a mandatory Fuels Standard to require 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017 — this is nearly five times the current target. At the same time, we need to reform and modernize fuel economy standards for cars the way we did for light trucks — and conserve up to eight and a half billion more gallons of gasoline by 2017.”

Education, healthcare and the economy were other domestic issues on Bush’s agenda that deserved and received attention in his speech.

But for agricultural community in the West, if the farmers can’t find the workers when they need them, or afford their fuel for their machinery, the transportation costs to get to market, and the heat for their business operations or even their homes, it’s tough to think about some of the other domestic issues.


Technorati tags:
Agriculture
State of the Union Speech
George W Bush
immigration
energy