Endless American Wars

Afghanistan: "Our legacy there will be suffering, death and destruction."

A Peace Democrat speaks out.

Americans have been doing something necessary and unpopular. Some of us have been reminding our fellow Americans that our country's full and complex history includes relentless examples of racial prejudice. It is a critique that makes people uncomfortable. We want to think we are better than that.

Herb Rothschild

Racial justice has moved foreign policy off center stage in our political discourse, but Herb Rothschild has been an anti-war activist for decades and foreign policy is still top of mind for him. His critique is another one that makes people uncomfortable. We want to perceive America as the selfless peacemaker and guardian of the world. Our full and complex history is more than that. Rothschild observes that the U.S. has an empire, achieved and maintained the way empires have existed throughout history--by war, and more war.

Herb Rothschild is a retired English professor. He was an active participant in the Civil Rights movement, and for many years an activist on behalf of the environment, justice, and peace. He lives in Talent, Oregon.

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild

After the 9/11 attacks, war was inevitable. War is what the United States does. In Houston where I was then living, little American flags were whipping from the windows of pickup trucks, which sported red, white and blue bumper stickers that proclaimed, “These colors don’t run.” A handful of us stood on a downtown corner by the Federal Building holding signs that said, “Justice, not war.” “Tell it to the Taliban,” young men roared from their passing vehicles.

Operation Enduring Freedom was launched on October 7. The Bush presidents gave that kind of name to their wars of choice—the 1989 invasion of Panama was called Operation Just Cause, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq was called Operation Iraqi Freedom. Operation Enduring Freedom will end next month. After twenty years Afghanistan will return to the status quo ante. Freedom will not endure. Our legacy there will be suffering, death and destruction. 

Suffering, death and destruction have been our enduring legacy in Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Iraq, Libya and Syria as well. Perhaps we should regard ourselves as modern day Huns—modern because our Attilas devise ideological cover for our depredations. They have to, because they know we must be reassured of our goodness and also because they ask us to foot the bills.

In the last few days we learned that Donald Trump wanted to use military force against domestic dissenters. That’s not who our military exists to crush, so its leaders refused. But Trump wasn’t interested in crushing anyone our military does exist to crush. Despite his blustery threat against North Korea, he launched no Operation Urgent Fury, the name Reagan gave to his 1983 invasion of Grenada. It made no sense to Trump that people would risk their lives in war. There was nothing in it for them.

Perhaps narcissism is underrated, at least as a stance from which to evaluate launching wars of choice. I would prefer a more high-minded approach to our international conduct, but what parades as high-mindedness in this country leads to Operation Just Causes and Operation Iraqi Freedoms. The peoples of the world, including us, would be better off if each of us imitated Trump and asked ourselves, next time, how will I personally benefit if we invade Venezuela?

Climate Science, not Science Religion

Hot!

116 degrees in the shade at my farm yesterday, and there is no shade.

Climate science gets its credibility from facts, not faith.

Extraordinary temperatures are measurable, objective data. So is the rising level of CO2 in the air. Humans are burning fossils that have long been buried in the ground, so it is a good guess that all the extra CO2 is because of humans. Moreover, we are confident we understand CO2's greenhouse effect. We observe and measure glaciers shrinking, Antarctic ice melting, and bug species moving north, all of which suggest we are, in fact, experiencing global warming.

Human-caused climate change, and climate change itself, is a conclusion. 

Here is the landing page for Scientific American magazine yesterday:

That is a strong headline.  Driven by denotes caused. 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unprecedented-heat-wave-in-pacific-northwest-driven-by-climate-change/

The article does not do what the headline promises. The article is a series of anecdotes--a record in Salem, Oregon, another on an ocean beach, more in Portland and Seattle. The lead paragraph uses the words "climate change." 

A blistering heat wave obliterated high temperature records in Oregon and Washington over the weekend, ratcheting up risks for deaths and fires, and underscoring the dangers of climate change.

Deeper into the article, the writer summarizes the observations of the state climatologist:

The high temperatures came as the result of a high-pressure system over Oregon and Washington. Climate change played a role in that system, said O’Neill, Oregon’s state climatologist.

One of the mechanisms for the formation of a high-pressure system is tropical cyclone activity in the western Pacific Ocean, he said. Those are the West Coast equivalent of hurricanes. And like hurricanes, they are strengthened by warmer ocean temperatures.

High-pressure systems like the one driving the Pacific Northwest heat wave is “something like three times more likely to occur when we have a tropical cyclone out in the Pacific,” he said. “So climate change is impacting tropical cyclone activity through modulation of sea surface temperatures, and also things like wind shear.

Notice the sleight-of-hand here. "Climate change" is a presumed precondition, not a conclusion based on evidence of the high temperatures in the Northwest. The headline and article takes the leap as fact.

This is a mistake both in reporting and as a strategy in climate activism and persuasion.  Careful readers will notice that the evidence of climate change promised in the headline never came. Critics argue that climate activists jump to conclusions and argue from faith, not evidence. This is an iteration of that.

Let me make my own views clear. It is forbidden--sacrilege--for a Democrat to suggest there could be explanations for weather phenomena other than human-caused CO2 emissions, or that we don't understand the interplay of the earth's orbit, the sun's output, feedback loops of water vapor and temperatures, ocean currents and the hundred other things that affect climate generally and the temperature of any one place on any day. Democrats will tolerate religious atheists and agnostics, but it is perilous to urge climate activists and scientists to argue carefully from evidence, not presumption. 

Partisan tribalism is in play. Democrats believe in "climate change" as a matter of faith, mostly unexamined, relying on their team's assurance that "99% of scientists agree." Because it is partisan and tribal, most Republicans now take the position that climate change is questionable, not very important even if it exists, and certainly not worth paying a nickel a gallon more for gasoline to reduce carbon. It is a litmus test. 

I personally think it is well documented that humans have raised CO2 levels dramatically. We are likely screwing up the earth's weather, just as we are screwing up the ocean by putting plastic in it, and just as we are draining down the Oglala aquifer. It is common in nature for animals to ruin their own habitat. Animals overgraze. People overfish and destroy a fishery. People wear out soil. Humans trap the beavers to make fur hats, and then the creeks all go dry in the summer. Oops. Humans have stumbled onto the honeypot of cheap, concentrated energy in the form of fossil fuels and we are going to use it as fast as we can until something cheaper and easier comes along. It is what humans do. 

I think we are messing with Mother Nature. I consider rising CO2 levels a form of "litter." We shouldn't do it. Since the consequences of getting this wrong are disastrous, we had better err on the side of caution.

The political reality is that we are still a republic and a great many people will vote to keep on doing exactly what we are doing to the air, at risk to our climate, because humans will deny unwelcome actions until circumstances demand otherwise. In a battle of religious faiths, people can stick to their positions forever, even if traveling merrily, merrily, merrily down the stream takes the boat over a waterfall. To avoid that, people concerned about climate--Democrats and scientists both--need to preserve whatever credibility they have. 

It means not pretending an assertion is evidence.

Understand the real enemy.

Defending America requires understanding our true interests.

General Milley is right.

General Mark Milley:
     "Be open-minded and widely read. I want to understand White rage. And I'm white."

YouTube comment in opposition:
     "The military's job is to win battles."

Tucker Carlson:
     "He's not just a pig. He's stupid."

General Mark Milley testified in Congress and defended teaching Critical Race Theory along with other topics relating to human relations in an elective course titled Politics of Race, Gender, and Sexuality. He said,

So what is wrong with understanding … the country which we are here to defend? What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.

His comments drew criticism on Fox, by Trump at a rally, by GOP officeholders, and by Americans who presume that wars are won primarily by winning battles. Critics of Milley are outraged--the go-to emotion of American politics. The American military should be learning how to fight wars, not learning what critics of American culture and politics think.

I write this blog post as a veteran and casualty of a different war, "the war against the war in Vietnam," a semi-successful effort during the time of my young adulthood to end America's self-destructive war in Vietnam. I was one of the legion of people who opposed that war. That war against the war was waged foolishly and perhaps self-destructively. My generation of college students protected by draft deferments probably prolonged the war by creating a backlash. Nixon soldiered on to prove us wrong.

The irony was complete because the war we opposed was self-destructive in itself. General Westmoreland, who led the strategy in Vietnam, thought we could win by out-killing Asians, so there was a nightly body-count scorecard. The war required we win hearts and minds and you don't do it by killing more of them than they killed of us. America fought because we thought we needed prove we were the world's irresistible and unchallengeable power. In losing, we proved we were not. Then, as luck would have it, by losing and leaving we allowed a proud, independent, and unified Vietnam to form, which then created what America wanted all along, a motivated self-reliant buffer against Chinese expansion. We won by losing. 

The generals apparently learned something someAmericans have not. The war in Vietnam was not a failure of military hardware or the morale of soldiers on the ground. It was a failure of strategy and generalship. We had a fundamental misunderstanding of what war we were fighting.

General Milley is on the right track. 

I write this blog post in the morning, with the lights back on but all the clocks in the house blinking 12:00. The power was off last night. Amid 112 degree weather, the electrical grid failed--in peacetime, all by itself. If the climate scientists are anywhere near right, it will get worse in coming decades. Our infrastructure is vulnerable. The ransomware attacks on a pipeline and the condition of our bridges are as visible and tangible as were the warning creaks and shudders last week prior to the collapse of the Surfside condo. American democracy is only capable of a half-hearted response to our infrastructure problems. That worked in Surfside, until it didn't.

I write this post in the final week of COVID lockdown in Oregon. Over 600,000 Americans have died. There was continual controversy over efforts to slow the disease so that hospitals wouldn't be overwhelmed and to give drug companies more time to create a vaccine. Approximately half of residents in my county refuse vaccination.

I write this post in the aftermath of President Joe Biden's European trip, where he announced the Atlantic Charter was intact and renewed, that NATO was united, and that Russia was still a great superpower threatening Europe but that we would continue to stand in its way. I consider this an effort to reclaim the past that existed in 1960, the American colossus, the indispensable country. "America is Back" reflects an effort to be what we have lost. We aren't the shining beacon of strength and democracy, lighting the world. This isn't the future for America. It isn't even the present. 

Meanwhile, China is investing in Africa and South America and the Near East. We consider it a threat because they are doing what we should be doing. Working with foreign countries to develop their ports and to create trade relationships isn't warfare with guns, but it is advancing a country's interests. We are losing that war because we aren't doing it.

America's great challenges in the 21st century will not be won by students at our military academies who learn to calculate artillery altitudes and strength requirements for portable bridges to carry tanks across the Rhine River. The greatest threats to American security come from behaviors that America does to itself.

A great many people think America's government and economy don't work, so they have lost respect for democratic rules and norms. Currently the anti-democratic force is from Trump and nativist ethno-nationalism, but Pandora's box has been opened. Left authoritarianism is as common as right authoritarianism, and only a minority of young people in their 20s tell Gallup they respect capitalism. They would prefer socialism. They feel left out and blocked by a system that enriches the already-rich, at their expense.

The threats to America are from within because we have problems we are not facing. We need generals who understand that and say it aloud. 

Democrats are worried about the wrong thing

 Voter suppression isn't the Democratic problem. 

Gerrymandering and vote nullification are the problems.

Democrats lost their credibility as advocates for fair elections when they opposed voter ID rules. 

It is the 21st century. People are accustomed to showing their IDs to get onto an airplane or into a big city office building or to cash a check. Eighty percent of Americans support requiring voter IDs. Click: Monmouth poll   Democrats fuel Republican suspicion about the 2020 election when they speak out against voter ID rules. It gives a basis for the Trump-Fox-GOP worry Democrats want "caravans" of people of uncertain identity to vote Democratic.  

The 2020 victory for Biden came because more young people and suburban people with education and jobs voted Democratic. Republicans are becoming the down-scale party of nativist populism. Under the new party alignments, voter ID rules may help Democrats, not hurt them. They should give this up.

CNN

Republicans are making their own errors. Restricting voting by mail would have weighed against Democrats in 2020, but traditionally it had been Republicans who used absentee voting to get out their vote. Republicans are re-fighting the last war. Old voters tend to vote Republican. The people who will most need absentee voting are seniors.

Republican messaging backfires. They have positioned themselves as the party skeptical of the votes of the "wrong sort" of people: Blacks who live in urban areas and Hispanics everywhere except Florida. Trump and GOP vote-skeptics point to Wayne County, Michigan, i.e. Detroit. They assert fraud in "Democrat cities" with suitcases of ballots brought in--allegations found untrue, but which continue to circulate. In fact, as Attorney General Bill Barr noted to a skeptical President Trump, Trump was not the victim of a vote-dump in Detroit. Barr told Trump he got more votes in Detroit in 2020 than he did when running against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Trump was getting stronger with Black voters. The GOP is also discovering that they have policies that appeal to Hispanic voters, and would do better with them if they would stop openly insulting them as drug-using rapists and thieves. The GOP gives Democrats an easy-to-understand message for Black and Hispanic voters: The GOP is trying to take your vote away. Don't let them. 

Still, none of this may matter. The elections of 2022 could be a giant win for the GOP. Indeed I expect it.  

Democrats blew the crime issue. They turned a moment of national consciousness about racially biased policing into a message that Democrats were so completely captured by the anarchist-left voices in their party that they tolerated and justified street violence. Events in Seattle and Portland created a big swing toward the GOP in every race except Trump's presidential race, where Trump's own personal negatives were too much to overcome. 

The Trump "stolen election" meme gives enlarged GOP legislative majorities political space to do unapologetic partisan map-drawing. GOP voters will expect it. The map of Ohio congressional districts show how easy it is for legislatures to draw maps that take a Democratic majority of votes, yet create a 75-25 split for Republicans. 

In 2020, election officials felt duty-bound to administer an election like an honest referee on a ball field. They caught hell for doing so. Mike Pence gets boos. Georgia and Arizona officials got censured. They face the wrath of partisan activists and are greeted by silence from GOP officeholders, even ones who don't for a moment think there was a stolen election. GOP leaders don't want to stand in the way of partisan energy, and can justify keeping quiet. Although there is no evidence the 2020 election was stolen, lack of evidence is not proof something is utterly impossible. Who can really know anything with absolute certainty?  

Click: Legislatures did not dare in 2020

In 2022 and beyond, legislatures have license to interpret the real intention and will of the people by selecting the electors. Legislators were under heavy pressure to do exactly that in 2020, but old norms were in place. 

Over-rule the voters? We can't do that. 

Now they can. Trump sold the idea that Democrats stole the election of 2020 and therefore it is honorable to seize it back. The Stop the Steal insurrection was done sloppily. In 2022 and beyond it will be done right. Plan A is gerrymandering, which will probably be more than sufficient. Plan B is vote nullification by election officials locally and at the legislatures. The Constitution allows it and elections cannot be trusted, so it's OK.

Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. They had months to get the urban crime issue right, and they failed and kept failing. Black voters are not the Democrats' problem. People who live in tough neighborhoods don't like crime. The problem is that Democrats are afraid of their own anarchist left. The professors and graduate students in English and Gender Studies departments do not speak for a majority of Americans. Until Democrats figure that out they will lose elections they should be able to win with ease.

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Melons are fun.

I grow melons because they make people happy.

     "Drop the melon. Let's hear it crunch. Really. Go ahead.  It's OK. Drop it now."

        My instructions to farm visitors

Melon tourism is a thing.  

People have inquired about the hail damage on my melon crop. Three days after the storm it looks like a few melon plants will survive. Most won't, but I planted 400 hills, enough for 2000 melons. If I get 10% survival, I will have enough to let visitors to the farm have some fun.

Most people like melons. Watermelons are a bright happy color of red. Americans associate melons with dessert and outdoor picnics and summer birthday parties. 

Food starts at a farm, not a store. City people are so removed physically and psychologically from the source of their food that for most people, most of the time, going to a farm is an event, like going to a zoo. I try to make my farm a fun outing.

August and September are my favorite months to have visitors. Melons are ripe then. People enjoy letting their children climb onto my small John Deere tractor. Children can sit in the tractor seat and move the front-end loader up and down and rotate the bucket by pushing a lever in different directions. It is noisy, but not too noisy. It is safe; the tractor can't move. I wash the tractor before I know there will be guests. 

The second thing I do is show people how to pick a ripe cantaloupe. In about five minutes visitors learn to distinguish the color of a ripe one from a similarly sized unripe one. Ripe cantaloupes "slip," which is the word for melons sliding easily off the stem. Un-ripe ones stay stuck to the vine. At first people are amazed that I can tell at a glance which ones will slip and which will not. Ripe ones are beige-ish green and unripe ones are greenish beige. When visitors figure it out they feel a sense of accomplishment.

Then the finale. Picking a ripe watermelon, dropping it, and eating it. This starts with going around the field thumping melons and listening to the sound. Unripe melons sound hollow. Remember this: "Sounds like a drum, the melon is bum."  A ripe watermelon sounds "full." It goes "thud" in a dead sound. I help the visitor pick out a ripe watermelon, then we carry it to the side of the field. I ask them to drop it. Dropping a watermelon at my farm is likely the first time a person of any age has ever intentionally dropped a watermelon. It feels naughty somehow, but they do it. 

Dropped from three feet in height, a watermelon breaks open but doesn't get mushed up. The flesh inside is exposed. Using a clean pocketknife I cut the heart into chunks and people eat it standing up, spitting out seeds in the field. One melon is usually enough but I urge people to eat all they want. I point to all the other melons. Part of the fun is the excess.Then they take one or two home.

That's it. People seem to like it. Parents and grandparents take pictures of their kids.

My father, Robert Sage, grew up at the farm that I now own and care for. He realized that his young sons needed a crop to grow that they would find exciting. So, at my age of eleven and my brother's age of eight, my father had us help him plant and care for a small melon patch. We sold the melons to a fellow operating a roadside produce stand on a then-vacant lot the corner of Jackson Street and 4th Street in Medford. We got to keep the money we earned, which meant we got to deposit it into our college fund bank accounts. It was fun to have money, and Jackson County Federal Savings and Loan paid us 4% interest. We got money just from having money!  It seemed like such a sweet deal.

That was the start.

Farming mishaps

     "Hail the size of quarters."

My melons may be a total loss.

This week I am up closer to agriculture than to politics. There was a sharp reversal of fortune on Tuesday evening in the course of one hour. 

We had a thunderstorm, lightning, wind, and hail. By "we" I mean the area of my farm between the two Table Rocks in Southern Oregon. There was no wind, rain, or thunder at my primary home in Medford nine miles away as the crow flies.

The hail mashed my melons, both cantaloupes and watermelon. Melons are delicate. They rarely bounce back from leaves and stems being damaged. 

By chance I photographed my melon field shortly prior to the thunderstorm, at a time of blissful ignorance of what was in store. I had just weeded the crop, so I felt good about how the plants were doing and how the field looked.  I took the photo to show off.

The hemp being grown on my farm--by a licensed hemp grower, not by me--looked like this just prior to the wind and hail. I took this photo for the purpose of showing agricultural employees, not to show the state of the field's moisture. My timing is just dumb luck. It is another iteration of the value of being there--the theme of my up close observations of presidential campaigns. You are there to see one thing, but it turns out the important thing is something else. 

The same field, after a half hour of torrential rain:

I had observed and noted Hillary Clinton's stamina while I was at events intending to pay attention to her policy speech. I observed and noted Chris Christie's sense of personal space while intending to get a selfie. I observed that Trump's events were organized as grand spectacles. In the photo below Trump's helicopter is circling overhead as the announcer booms out that Donald Trump is arriving! The theme music to the movie The American President accompanies the announcer. Policy-oriented people under-estimate the power of Trump's show-business orientation. Trump rallies are events. 

You have to be there to understand it. Trump is a rock star.

Farmers experience good luck and bad luck. I commented two days ago that Klamath-area alfalfa got the worst of the drought, so it was our advantage this year in growing profitable alfalfa. Then, I got a freak storm. The alfalfa wasn't hurt one bit by the hail and rain. It liked the moisture. Cannabis, to my observation, got damaged, but will come right out of it. Some leaves were torn, but branches and limbs are intact. The crops were stabilized inside wire cages and plastic netting, so the wind didn't destroy them. The wind that accompanied the hail was fierce, and from an unusual direction. Two mature trees on my farm were destroyed by it. The dumb luck of having cannabis supports put up early, bamboo and trellises placed in anticipation of supporting branches laden with heavy buds in October, served the second purpose of protecting them from the June storm that knocked over this tree.

W

The weather event that was so dramatic eight miles from the office of the local newspaper in downtown Medford didn't get a mention in the newspaper. It was an isolated event. My wife, at home in Medford, was surprised to learn anything at all had  happened.

Yesterday I mentioned "mishaps" that might take place while a near-finished product--dried but untrimmed cannabis flower--awaited trimming. What bad things could happen to a crop harvested, dried, and safely indoors? Theft. The product is valuable, portable, and untraceable. If it gets stolen, it is gone.

This vehicle was left behind at the scene of a theft last October at the cannabis field of a legal, registered, taxed cannabis grow-site near my farm.  A group of people in trucks came onto a property after midnight and stole a portion of a cannabis crop. Fortunately for the victim, one of the thieves' trucks, probably driving without headlights, drove off the farm road and got stuck in an irrigation ditch. They had to abandon the vehicle. 

What wonderful evidence of the identity of one of the thieves. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure this one out. 

The police came, observed the ravaged crop and missing plants, saw the stuck vehicle that suddenly appeared the night of the theft, ran the plates, and said the car's owner lived six miles away. Then--and this is the unfortunate part for the victim--they said they would not bother driving to the owner's residence, nor in investigating where the stolen cannabis went. We don't investigate cannabis crimes, the deputies said. You are on your own, sorry. They said as far as they were concerned, this wasn't a robbery. It was an abandoned vehicle  problem, and they don't bother with those. Oh.

A cannabis crop is closely regulated. It is licensed, measured, reported, and taxed. But one of the farmers' risks is sudden loss. There is no more recourse against thieves than there is against weather. Or bugs.

A crop can be stolen by bugs as surely as by thieves. So far, my melon plants had not attracted cucumber beetles, nor had the cannabis grown on my farm attracted russet mites. This is a close-up photo of a cannabis leaf from last year. The yellow banana-shaped things are squirming and voraciously eating the leaves and buds of a cannabis plant. In organic farming, the remedies are slow and inadequate, but one does what one can. The best defense for an organic cannabis grow is not to get the bugs in the first place. So far, good luck--no aphids, spider mites, or russet mites. The season is early, though.

This is farming. A million things go wrong. I realize I am unusual here, but when I visit the produce section of a grocery store, my attitude is one of dismay that all the beautiful food is so beautiful and so very inexpensive. 

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Help wanted: Cannabis.

'How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree'?"

Pay them well.

Cannabis gives employees a Plan B. Having another good option is empowering.

Farm work is hard work. Most of it is done outdoors in the weather--hot, cold, wet, windy, dusty. Most of it is tedious. Workers get dirty. Often it is done stooped over. Sometimes it involves moving heavy things. It isn't high status work.

Cannabis farming has its own special problems. As cannabis plants grow they become sticky with resin, which doesn't come off easily. You can wash your clothes and wash yourself, but you and everything about you has a scent. You may well get paid in ten dollar bills. The laws keep changing, so a job and skill-set and career that exists one year might disappear the next.

This economy has low-paid jobs in food service, in caregiving, in retail, and those jobs still exist. The Albertsons grocery store in my neighborhood has a big display at the entrance inviting people to apply "for a great career." The McDonalds and Burger King stores in Medford have big signs saying they pay $14 and $15 an hour to start. There are people who want those jobs. They can envision themselves ringing up sales or working in fast food but not doing hard physical labor. They have driven by farm fields and seen agricultural workers and don't want to be one of them. Seeing people standing on a ladder picking pears, or on their knees inserting hemp plants, looks like hard, boring work.

People unwilling to do farm work form the bulk of the entry-level labor market, but at the margin, something changed in Southern Oregon. This is ground zero for excellent quality outdoor cannabis. It is an industry that employs thousands of people entering and exiting the unskilled labor market. People who quit jobs in retail and hospitality to take jobs in the cannabis industry are sending price signals to employers--and to their former co-workers. There is something better out there.

Market participants tell me that for several years entry-level wages in cannabis had been $15/hour--a couple of dollars per hour more than the prevailing local wage. The price of labor has gone up, and is now nearer $20 an hour. People with experience and a good work ethic who can work independently make more--sometimes much more. Bonuses are a common feature for long-term employees, particularly when they can be paid "at the back end," after the product is sold.

The outdoor cannabis season has jobs over most of the year. It includes preparing clones from a "mother plant" in the spring, planting in May and June, caring for the plants through the summer, an early harvest in August, another harvest in October, and drying and trimming the product through the fall and into January and later. There are multiple time-critical periods. Cannabis plants can grow from a few inches in size to twelve feet tall in the course of a season and that kind of growth requires special feeding, irrigating, trellising and branch supports, pest management, and as harvest time nears, security. There are narrow windows when tasks must get done. Employees need not have a union to have bargaining power. Time-critical work--and the reality that most native-born Americans don't want to do it--gives it to them.

Cannabis growers are in the same bind as airlines. They are capital intensive industries with up-front sunk costs, with a perishable product. An empty airline seat is revenue lost forever. When the plants need to go in the ground, or when a hemp field needs a re-check for males or hermaphrodites, or when the trichomes on buds have turned from milky white to amber, certain things must be done, right then. The cannabis grower will pay what he needs to pay. An entire crop can be devalued because a single male plant escaped notice and "seeded" a garden, or russet mites were noticed too late, or a mature plant wasn't harvested before a rainstorm. If a pilot doesn't show up, a plane doesn't fly. If the window for a critical task in the cannabis cycle is missed, a crop may be unsellable.

There are sedentary jobs, too, for people who couldn't handle outdoor farm labor. One of the tasks in the industry is "trimming" and it is done indoors at a trimming table, after the harvest. It is typically paid as piecework. The end-consumer of cannabis seeks nice clean stem-free buds. The photos of cannabis buds that greet travelers at the Medford Airport have been "finished" by a trimmer using tiny scissors. In 2021 cannabis needs to "look good" in the package to sell. Trimmers had traditionally earned $100/pound to turn dried buds with bits of stems and leaves into a finished product. Diligent employees might do three pounds per day: $300, or about $40/hour. Some are faster. I have observed people working in a production line with division of tasks where the group of four people trimmed a pound per hour per person in a ten hour day. Each person made $1,000 a day.

Small, untrimmed buds

Growers have adjusted by doing mechanical trimming for a rough-draft trim, leaving less work for the hand finish and therefore paying them less per pound, but trimmers bring value to the growers' product. Mechanical trimmers knock off and waste some of the buds, meaning there is less of the $1,000/pound finished bud product and more trim waste, which is sellable, but for far less. A hand trimmer brings net value, and both the trimmer and grower know it. Theoretically, trimming is not time sensitive, but in practice the grower has a lot of time and money in the product at the point that it is trimmed. It is valuable and vulnerable to mishap, so the grower is motivated to get that last task completed.

I have heard employers in the hospitality industry complain about the competition for employees and the difficulty caused by employees quitting on them to work in cannabis. They complain that employees game the system by working "off the books"--an unfair advantage. The cannabis industry still cannot use banks, so employees are frequently paid in cash, which may not be fully reported and taxed. An employee working two thousand hours paid at $20/hour, with a back-end bonus of another $10,000, untaxed, gets twice the net pay than she would earn working 2,000 hours in retail at $14/hour, taxed. It is a problem for restaurants, but a net positive for the local economy.

The cannabis industry brings money into the area. Long-established local businesses are servicing that industry with equipment, supplies, materials. What is tough on restaurants is good for hardware stores, irrigation companies, sellers of fertilizers and soil amendments--and employees. Young workers earning $20/hour can afford to pay off student loans. They can buy things. They can rent an apartment without roommates. They don't live in poverty.

Equipment bought locally

Farming during a drought

The spring rains didn't come. The fields were bone dry and dusty in April.

Cannabis is a particularly good crop in a drought year. 

The Western U.S. is experiencing a drought, and my area of SW Oregon is included.

Medford is in the west edge of the bright red area just north of the California border. The river marked in blue that crosses the Oregon-California border is the Klamath River, going west and south from the darkest beet-red drought area to the Pacific Ocean. That Klamath area is about 80 to 120 miles to the east of Medford and it normally enjoys ample irrigation for vast fields of alfalfa, which is primarily used as cattle feed. 

I am not happy they are suffering, but I don't  feel sorry for Klamath farmers. They are competitors. Normally they have an advantage selling alfalfa here, which makes my alfalfa worth less. They have an advantage most years. This year may be our turn to make some money. Our drought is bad, but less bad than theirs. And we have alternative crops.

Here is what my alfalfa looks like, about two weeks after the first "haircut." Alfalfa grows vigorously and we give it about four cuttings a year. It is cut near the ground, allowed to dry, then put into rows to dry some more, and then picked up and concentrated into bales. Dry bales store well. This field is growing back after its first cutting. This field is not irrigated. We have the water to irrigate it but the water table is high here and alfalfa has deep roots. 

Below is my small cantaloupe field. In my youth I grew cantaloupes with my younger brother David on a field typically one acre in size. We would grow about 14,000 pounds of melons on an acre, and sell them for about 18 cents a pound to local fresh produce stands and locally-owned high-volume supermarkets. At that price we would gross about $2,500, minus expenses of $300, for a net of $2,200, which we split evenly to be banked in our college funds. Harvard tuition was $1,800 my freshman year, growing to $2,000 my senior year. My $1,000+ from the crop, plus another $1,000 from fighting forest fires, netted me over $2,000 for the summer, more than a year's tuition. Tuition now is $50,000, an amount far out of reach for an 18-year-old to earn and save in a summer. Melon prices to the farmer are still what they were 50 years ago, about 18 cents a pound. 

My melons are irrigated with overhead "Rainbird" type sprinklers, the ones that go "chi-chi-chi-chi-chi" as the brass hammer hits a large stream of water going out one port, with a smaller tail of water going out the back. Melons have shallow roots and need irrigation. Foods that readers would consider "healthy"--fresh fruits and vegetables--take a lot of water.

Melon farming is labor intensive. Melons need to be kept free of weeds, since they are poor competitors, and the spread-out vines mean they cannot be weeded mechanically past their first weeks. There is hand hoeing. Vine ripe melons are picked by hand, with the entire field picked daily, harvesting the ones that came ripe over the prior 24 hours. Any one melon is worth about 60 cents to the farmer at the loading dock of a market. The problem is that in practice one picks up one, then another, then another and puts them into bins one carries to the edge of the field to load in the back of a truck to be hauled to a wash-stand. Then more handling. This means one is dealing with weights growing to 30, 40, 50 pounds multiple times during the hour it takes to pick a field. At age 70 I decided the backaches simply were not worth it to try to sell for money. The melons shipped in from factory farms in Mexico, Arizona, and California are not terrible. They are "good enough." They look good on the grocery shelves. Shoppers don't know any better than to eat bland melons, so factory-farm melons set the market price. 

Cannabis still has value and can be farmed profitably, both as a medical marijuana garden and as open-field-grown "hemp," i.e. cannabis for CBD. Both crops are legal and highly regulated in Oregon. Cannabis is grown with drip lines, not overhead or flood irrigation, and therefore it uses a fraction of the water that would be used by melons, alfalfa, or the pear orchards that are up-ditch from me.  The water that feeds the ditches I use for irrigation is the run-off water from upstream pear orchard irrigators. That runoff isn't "wasted." It is what I use. After I use it, it goes into the water table and becomes, once again, part of the Rogue River.

People who object to cannabis being grown near them often cite water scarcity as a reason to object. Every farm location and water situation is different, but my own observation is that the various cannabis crops are the lowest water users of any crop that might be grown because cannabis growers want to keep the flowers and buds dry. They irrigate directly onto the roots with drip lines.

Below is a photograph of the diminished ditch the cannabis growers on my farm use, and photos of their "Lay Flat" irrigation lines and drip tape feeders. The large white cube tanks are where organic fertilizers are mixed with water to go into those feed lines.

Cannabis requires hand labor. The plants are numbered to stay in line with regulatory limits, and therefore each plant is coddled, with wire supports for the branches, with amended and deeply tilled soil, with careful weeding by hand to avoid disturbing the shallow roots. 

Open field cultivation of hemp for CBD is with drip lines under black plastic.

Last night we had lightning, hail, and a torrential downpour, which battered my melon plants and the cannabis plants, but they will survive. Thunder squalls are hit and miss. My home in Medford, ten miles from the farm, had no rain. The farm got well-needed water, but it came so fast it was standing in the field.

Using water to irrigate crops is a good thing to do, even in a drought. Vine ripe melons are healthy and delicious, and cannabis brings money into the area. The alternative to profitable farming is neglect, and land that is now farmland would return to star thistle, blackberries, or the scrub oak savannah that is the natural vegetation in this Mediterranean climate zone. Using water in southern Oregon to grow cannabis is an efficient use of water compared with alternative crops. It keeps farmland in production and it brings money into the area.

Tomorrow, a look at cannabis and its effect on the labor market.

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