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Author Archives: brent.auvermann
Feedback and Unintended Policy Consequences
Today has been a day to reflect on the way things actually work and the perverse outcomes that sometimes obtain when we do what seems logical…meaning, of course, that unintended consequences are everywhere. —– Over the past 20 years or so, perhaps more, environmental advocacy groups (Environmental Defense, Sierra Club, etc.) have trained their guns on industrial agriculture, especially industrial ANIMAL agriculture, arguing that the larger our “animal factories” (their term, not mine!) become, the greater risk they pose to the environment. The logical conclusion they reach is… Read More →
Sustainability Conversation?
In my work as an environmental researcher and Extension specialist, I spend a lot of time with people who work on “sustainability issues.” I suppose my work is “sustainability related,” too. And hardly a week goes by in the popular media without someone making a bold claim that this enterprise or that enterprise is “unsustainable.” (Usually, it’s meat consumption in some form or other; more often than not, beef consumption is the bête noir.) But I don’t have a good fix on what I mean when I use the… Read More →
La Niña Watch
That sound you hear is the death rattle of El Niño, but he’s not going down without a fight. Welcome rains across the state of Texas – and some rains not so welcome, now that many of the reservoirs are full – suggest that El Niño, the oceanic phenomenon that seems to drive a lot of North America’s weather patterns, is not done with us yet. Still, the climatologists at NOAA are fairly certain we’ll transition to a full-blown La Niña by fall 2016. What that portends is just… Read More →
NCBA Environmental Stewardship Award Program
Do you raise cattle as your life’s vocation? Are you a dedicated steward of your land, cattle, air, water, and community? Are you a dedicated servant-leader of your fellow cattle producers (and agricultural producers generally)? If the answer to all three of those questions is “yes,” then maybe it’s time you thought about applying to the prestigious National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s Environmental Stewardship Award Program! Here is the NCBA-ESAP Application 2016. The 2016 Regional winners have already been selected, but it’s never too early to start thinking about a 2017 application. In… Read More →
Stormzilla and the Value of Panhandle Groundwater
The Weather Channel is estimating that the storm that caused last week’s epic flooding in southeast Texas generated 6.5 TRILLION gallons of water. Most of that water ended up in the Gulf of Mexico, where it’s probably doing some good. So that water wasn’t entirely wasted. But what if? What if we had a reservoir and pipeline system that allowed us to pump that water up the hill to the Texas Panhandle, where we could inject it into the Ogallala Aquifer as artificial recharge? How much Panhandle crop production would that… Read More →
In Defense of Skeptics
With the relentless media-academia assault on so-called “climate-change deniers” – a defamatory, misleading term if ever there was one – I am always and ever reflecting on why I continue to cast my lot with the skeptics. And I nearly always end up back here, pondering the graph below. I’ve been preparing to teach an ultra-short course on Stella [TM] modeling at a conference in North Carolina next month. (Stella is a simulation platform for complex systems, a simple way to simulate a system’s evolution over time.) In… Read More →
Dairies and Air Pollution
Last week, at the invitation of Dr. Ellen Jordan (Extension Dairy Specialist, Dallas), I made a short presentation at the annual Dairy Outreach Program Area (DOPA) workshop in Stephenville. Dairy producers in the Central Texas (Erath, Comanche, Johnson, Bosque, and Hamilton Counties) and East Texas (Hopkins, Rains, and Wood Counties) DOPAs are required under their state water-quality permits to obtain a certain number of continuing-education units each year. Because these CEU programs are a regulatory requirement, they’re usually well attended, and this year’s was no exception: somewhere around 45… Read More →
Clean Water Act and Livestock Producers
Short post today. Over at the Texas Agriculture Law Blog last week, Tiffany Dowell-Lashmet posted a couple of articles that will be of interest to livestock producers in the southern High Plains. In this post, the question is whether or not winter grazing of cropland residues is an activity that requires a federal NPDES permit under the federal Clean Water Act. In this weekly roundup, the second summary asks whether or not land-applied livestock manure may be considered a “hazardous waste” under the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act… Read More →
What is a “Nuisance?”
CAVEAT: This post is intended to be informative, but it in no way represents legal opinions or legal advice. If either of those is what you’re after, seek the counsel of a competent attorney. The term, “nuisance,” has a long and distinguished history in common law. Generally speaking, an activity creates a nuisance when it substantially and unreasonably interferes with the right of another party to enjoy his or her property. Normally, a nuisance activity does not involve physically trespassing on another’s property, but attributes or results of the… Read More →
Extending the Life of the Ogallala Aquifer
We are pleased to announce a new, USDA-funded project devoted to extending the life of the Ogallala Aquifer in the southern High Plains. This project, led by Colorado State University and involving scientists and engineers from Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, centers on improving irrigation technology and management to reduce agriculture’s water consumption, thereby extending the aquifer’s useful life. Unlike the northern half, the southern half of the Ogallala Aquifer receives hardly any recharge from rainfall or surface water, so the only currently practical way of extending… Read More →