Sunday, November 30, 2014

This Drought's Over - Right?!

As I write this post on November 30, 2014, I'm looking out the window at cloudy skies and wet ground.  Since Thanksgiving (three days ago), we've measured more than an inch of rain.  For the month of November, we've received just over 4.4 inches - compared to 3.43 inches in September-November 2013.  Thanks to well-spaced rain and continued warm temperatures, our grass has started to grow - also a departure from last year.  So the drought's over, right?!  Based on some of the posts I've seen on Facebook in the last 24 hours, you'd think a month of average precipitation had solved all of our problems.  Unfortunately, we're not out of the woods yet - not even close!

On the day after Thanksgiving, the girls and I drove to Tuolumne County from our home near Auburn.  Our route took us over the Parrots Ferry Bridge over New Melones Reservoir on the Stanislaus River.  New Melones is part of the the federal Central Valley Project - it stores irrigation and drinking water for customers in the San Joaquin Valley and beyond.  And it's incredibly low.  Parrots Ferry is the easternmost crossing over the lake, and we were startled to see the tops of dead trees in the middle of the channel - in other words, this stretch of the lake seems to be less than 100 feet above the elevation of the former river channel.  And just as discouraging - there seemed to be new vegetation growing on the shoreline (indicating multiple years of low levels).

This afternoon, I went to the the California Department of Water Resources website (http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action) to look at current reservoir levels - which confirmed my feeling that we still had a long way to go to get back to normal moisture.  According to DWR, Lake Shasta is currently at 23% of capacity and 39% of it's historic level for this time of year.  Lake Orovile is at 26% and 42%, respectively.  Folsom is sitting at 28% and 59%, while New Melones is at 21% and 38%.  In other words, without significantly above average rainfall (and more importantly, snowfall) in our Sierra Nevada and Northern California watersheds, we're facing the prospect of another summer without enough irrigation water for farmers and ranchers.  My friend Tom Orvis, who works for the Stanislaus County Farm Bureau and who comes from an Oakdale ranching family, says this: "The Oakdale Irrigation District says the Stanislaus River watershed (New Melones) needs 125%-135% of "normal" to saturate the watershed enough to actually yield an "average year."  In other words, the soil was so dry coming into this winter that we'll need above average rainfall just to achieve normal runoff - scary!

We saw other signs of continued drought on our trip.  As my brother-in-law and I drove from his house in Columbia to my parents' place east of Sonora, I remarked about a large patch of dead live oaks on the hillside.  "Was there a fire up there?" I asked.  He told me that there hadn't been a fire, but that there were patches of dead and dying trees in various parts of the county.  While I can't be certain, dead trees sure seem to be drought-related in my mind.  On the rangelands where we graze our sheep, we've yet to see the creeks start running or the stockponds filling - a sure sign that the soil is not yet saturated enough to produce run-off.  This afternoon, I met with a friend who has a ranch in Orland (north of Sacramento).  Most of these recent storms have missed them entirely, he said - the creek that runs through their place is still dry.  All of these signs indicate, at least to my untrained eye, that we haven't started refilling the over-taxed groundwater supplies that many folks relied on to keep crops alive last year.

Even in semi-rural communities like the one I live in, it seems that most people are disconnected from the natural resources that sustain us.  Rain is an inconvenience - it ruins our leisure time, impacts our morning commute, and makes our trip to the mall (or at least the walk from the parking lot to the store) unpleasant.  If we see puddles and green grass in November, everything must be fine. But everything is not fine - we're still in the midst of the most severe drought of our generation.  I hope the rains keep coming - and I hope the snow starts to fall in the high country.  Otherwise, 2015 will be even more challenging than the year that's coming to a close.

Friday, November 21, 2014

Strange Weather

I've always been fascinated by weather - even when I was a kid.  I grew up in a home without cable television - the only station that consistently came in clearly was KCRA Channel 3.  I couldn't tell you who the news anchor people were when I was 9 years old, but I can still remember the weatherman - Harry Guise (I think that's how his name was spelled!).  Winter has always been my favorite season, in part because the weather is so much more interesting (at least in northern California) during the winter.  Now that I earn part of my living from harvesting grass with sheep, my fascination with weather has turned into an obsession - especially during the ongoing drought.

Unlike other weather phenomena, drought can sneak up on us.  We don't realize that we're in a drought until well after it's started.  And we can't look at a radar map to know with any certainty when a drought will end.  And while we've had some rainfall this autumn, we clearly remain in the midst of the most severe drought conditions in a generation.  The year-to-date Palmer Drought Severity Index, which measures long term meteorological drought, is the lowest ever measured for California.
The Palmer Drought Severity Index for California.
Note the comparison with 1977!

As an admitted weather geek, I find myself devouring information about weather.  I enjoy reading a blog called the California Weather Blog, written by Daniel Swain, a PhD student at Stanford.  I frequently check the U.S. drought monitor website hosted by the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, which comes out with an updated drought map each Thursday.  I've contributed information to the drought impact reporter, a site which allows public input to the drought monitor maps.  And I've recently joined the Community Collaborative Rain Hail and Snow Network, a website that allows people to report on precipitation on a daily basis.
All of California continues to experience drought conditions - and our region
continues to experience the most severe drought conditions (despite the recent rainfall).

Beyond this high-tech interest in weather, I've kept a weather diary since 2001.  I try to record the minimum and maximum temperature each day, along with the precipitation we've received during the previous 24 hours.  I also try to track key climate related happenings - things like the first killing frost of the fall, the first time we build a fire in our wood stove, the first time I hear the sandhill cranes flying over in the spring and fall, when we first hear the tree frogs singing in the late winter, etc.  I enjoy looking back and comparing the weather from one year to the next.

Increasingly, our weather in northern California seems erratic.  During this drought, rainfall amounts have been strangely all over the board.  Yesterday, for example, areas in the Sacramento Valley recorded more than a half-inch of precipitation, while we measured just 0.05 inches at home (typically, the foothills receive more rain than the valley floor due to orographic lifting (that is, as storms pass over higher elevations, more rainfall is "squeezed" out).  Watching the Doppler radar yesterday, it looked like a band of heavy rain was moving into the foothills.  Somehow it missed Auburn!

In "normal" years (whatever that means), we usually have a killing frost no later than the first week of November.  For us, a killing frost means it gets cold enough (and stays cold enough) to kill the squash and tomato plants in our garden and knock the rest of the leaves off of our mulberry trees.  Today is November 21, and we've yet to have a killing frost.  If the weather forecast I just looked at is accurate, we won't have a killing frost for at least 7-10 more days.  Very strange.

As I mentioned, I also record observations about wildlife in my weather diary.  One of the most consistent wildlife mileposts in our area has always been the sandhill crane migration.  Since 2001, I've heard cranes within a 3-4 day window in late September every autumn - the cranes seem to have calendars that tell them when to fly south.  I might here and see the cranes going over for 10-14 days.  This year's migration started at least 10 days later than normal (according to my notes) - and I heard them flying over up until last week. Also very strange.

From a ranching perspective, this autumn is shaping up to be better than last year.  The springs, creeks and ponds that dried up last year are still dry, but at least we've had enough rainfall to germinate our grass and keep it growing.  In this respect, the lack of a killing frost has been helpful - warmer air temperatures mean warmer soil temperatures.  Hopefully we'll continue to grow grass until the shortening day lengths put our grasses into dormancy in early to mid December.  Despite these improved forage conditions, however, we're still facing an increasingly serious crisis.  After a year with very little snow pack in the Sierra Nevada, I'd hoped to see some snow during a day trip to Reno yesterday.  There was very little snow on our way over in the morning, and while we did get some snow on the return trip, it didn't amount to much.  This morning I heard that the upper reaches of Sugar Bowl Ski Resort received 3-4 inches from yesterday's storm.  Earlier this week, the websites I look to for weather forecasts predicted that we'd receive as much as 1.5 inches of rain from the storm that's supposed to come in tonight.  As of this afternoon, theses same sites are predicting less than a half an inch.

Increasingly, "normal" and "average" don't seem like useful terms for describing our weather - we seem to be entering a period where these terms apply to the midpoint between bouts of extreme weather rather than something we actually experience.  For an obsessed weather geek and rancher like me, these extremes are fascinating to watch but troubling to live through.
Hopefully we'll see more days like this in the near future - wet!

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Enjoying the Fog - Another Sign of Drought?!

Normally, I hate driving in the fog.  I learned to drive in the upper foothills, which meant I had more experience driving in snow than fog - and I learned to prefer the snow!  The joke in our family was always, "At least I can usually see what I'm going to run into in the snow!"

In normal years, Auburn is sometimes exactly at the fog line.  We'll get a stretch of weather, usually after a good rainstorm, where the fog will roll in during the late afternoon and roll out sometime the next morning.  On some days, we'll have fog all day.  But with the drought, we seem to have had far fewer foggy days.

Last Saturday, I hauled some cull ewes and the last of our lambs to the Stockton Livestock Auction in French Camp, California.  While it was sunny when I left my corrals at 7 a.m., I hit fog coming down the hill into Sacramento - and I was in fog for the remainder of my trip.  Between Lodi and Stockton (on Interstate 5), the fog was soupy enough that I slowed down (as did some - not all - of my fellow drivers).

Last weekend's foggy weather meant that we had the right combination of moisture (from a rainstorm on Thursday) and atmospheric conditions.  And after the dry year we've had, I must admit - for the first time in my life, I enjoyed driving in it!

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Goodbye, Uncle Buck

Today, my family and I said goodbye to our oldest livestock guardian dog, Buck (affectionately known as Uncle Buck).  Buck was a Great Pyrenees cross that we "rescued" from a pet situation - he was too much dog for his former owner.  We got him shortly after we started running sheep commercially 8 years ago.  Up until about a year ago, Buck was our most reliable dog.  We'll miss him.

The first lambing season with Buck was amazing.  We had another dog at that time - Scarlet - whose maternal instincts were so strong that she would steal lambs from their mothers.  Buck, who had never been through a lambing when we got him (he was 4 years old, we think), straightened Scarlet out immediately.  That spring, we had several snow storms during lambing.  When it would snow, we'd bring the sheep up close to a barn where they'd have cover.  Great horned owls would come into the trees in the pasture by the barn - and Buck would sit at the trunk of the tree and bark until the owls left.  And Buck loved the snow - he'd slide down hills like an otter!

As Buck grew older, he taught other dogs how to be lambing dogs.  Our current pair of dogs, Rosie and Reno, learned from him.  Somewhere, I have a photo of Uncle Buck with lambs climbing on him.  In many ways, he was a gentle soul.

But not in every way.  Buck could sense when people were not dog-lovers.  One of our landlords was terrified of large dogs, which Buck knew (and exploited).  When the girls were with me and someone Buck didn't know was around, Buck made sure he was always standing between the girls and the stranger.  And Buck NEVER allowed a coyote, another dog or a mountain lion to take a sheep - a pretty good legacy for a livestock guardian dog, I think!

About two years ago, we started noticing some behavioral changes in Buck.  We had him at the house protecting a small group of sheep - and one morning he was gone!  I drove the neighborhood, looking for him without success.  On the way to work, I got a call from a friend who has sheep about a mile away.  Buck had shown up at their place and jumped in with their sheep.  Their dog, knowing she had the night off, had slept on the porch.  Buck wouldn't let them feed the sheep!




Shortly after that incident, Buck started jumping the electric fence and wandering.  He'd always been able to jump the fence, but he usually stayed close to his flock.  Increasingly, he'd forget where his sheep were - and we'd get a call about a large white dog laying on someone's porch.  We decided to bring him home for good.  For the first several months, he was great about staying home - but then he discovered ways to get out of our home pastures.  His favorite past-time became chasing cyclists and laying under the neighbor's tree - humorous, but not good for our liability insurance!  One morning last summer, Buck jumped in the back of my truck as I was leaving to check sheep at another property.  When I arrived at the pasture, Reno (Buck's protege) jumped in the truck too.  I snapped a photo - it's one of my favorite pictures of my dogs!

In the last month, Buck's health began to fail.  He started losing weight and losing hair.  At 12, he'd lived longer than most big dogs.  Last week, we decided that he was in too much pain and that we needed to put him to sleep.  This afternoon, we took him to one of the ranches we lease (and where we currently have sheep).  With his sheep all around him, Sami put him down.  Our landlords graciously allowed us to bury Uncle Buck on top of a hill under an old pear tree - where he'll always be able to watch over our flock.

One of the bargains we strike when we own animals is that we are responsible for their well-being - and for not letting them suffer.  All of us shed tears today - saying goodbye to a four-legged member of the family is never easy.  I'm grateful that Buck was part of our family for so long - and for the incredible service he provided.  Thank you, Uncle Buck.


Wednesday, November 12, 2014

The Confusing Geography of Western Placer County

The red polygon shows where the sheep were, and the yellow polygon shows where they ended up.  The green line
represents the driving route between the two locations; the orange line represents our walk back!

The geography of western Placer County -  at least that portion between rural Lincoln and rural Auburn - is a confusing jumble of winding historic roads, creeks (known as "ravines" locally), small farms and rural ranchette properties.  Many of the back roads between Auburn and Lincoln reflect the agricultural and gold mining heritage of the region - roads were built on property lines rather than on the most direct line between points A and B (or at least that's my assumption).  I didn't truly have appreciation for this confusing geography, however, until my sheep got out on Monday evening.

We are currently grazing sheep on what was once called the Heredia Ranch (and what is now known as the Blue Oak Ranch subdivision) - it's adjacent to the Mears Lane entrance to Hidden Falls Regional Park west of Auburn.  The area is drained by several seasonal creeks and crisscrossed by Nevada Irrigation District canals (many of which precede the establishment of the District itself).  A side note: I find these canals fascinating - they were designed and constructed in the days before computer-aided drafting and motorized heavy equipment, and yet they continue to work perfectly!

I left work on Monday at 5 p.m. and headed home for a quick snack before my Placer County Agricultural Commission meeting at 7 p.m.  I'd only been home for about 30 minutes when my cell phone rang.  The pleasant woman on the other end said, "I think we have your sheep."  I asked where she was, and she told me she lived at the end of Pleasant Hill Road (off Mt. Pleasant Road on the way to Lincoln).  Since Mt. Pleasant Road comes into Mt. Vernon Road 4-5 miles west of where I turn to get to the sheep, I was certain they weren't ours.  Then she described my guard dogs!  I said, "Wow - they've traveled quite a distance - they're supposed to be up near Hidden Falls Park!"  "We back up to the park," she said, but I was incredulous.

After checking in to say I'd probably be late getting to the Ag Commission meeting, I grabbed a border collie and headed out to check the sheep.  Sure enough, most of the sheep were gone - 2 rams and 8 ewes had stayed behind, but there was no sign of the 130 or so additional sheep that should have been in the paddock.  I found where they'd run through the fence, and found another spot where something may have come into the paddock to chase them (perhaps a coyote or a stray dog).  Climbing back into my truck, I drove the 6+ miles to the address the woman had given me - and found the rest of my sheep.  By now, it was well after dark.  The woman's husband greeted me at the door - laughing that his wife had accused him of buying sheep!  Once he described the lay of the land - and the route of the irrigation canal, we figured that the sheep had probably walked down the canal - and that they were less than a half mile from my paddock.  They graciously allowed me to leave the sheep overnight so that I wouldn't have to navigate my way (along with guard dogs and sheep) cross-country through unfamiliar territory in the dark.

Upon returning home from my meeting (I was late, but made it in time to vote on the one action item on our agenda), I checked Google Earth.  Sure enough, my paddock was just around a bend in the canal from the property where the sheep had ended up - amazing!

Yesterday morning, I arrived at the paddock at 6:30 and walked the canal to the other property.  With Mo's help, all of the sheep - and the guard dogs - were back where they were supposed to be before 7 a.m.  Moving the sheep cross-country felt like a step back in time - I could imagine sheepherders and cowboys moving animals on the same route a hundred years ago.  And I realized how motorized travel has confused my conception of my native geography.  I found being on foot following my sheep to be a much more pleasant trip than being behind the steering wheel the night before!
On our way back...

Monday, November 10, 2014

Small Farm Evolution in 5 "Easy" Steps

Note: this post originally appeared on the Farming in the Foothills blog (http://ucanr.edu/sites/placernevadasmallfarms/blog/)

Introduction
Like any small business, small farms undergo a series of transformations during the course of their lives - from youthful exuberance to middle-age crisis to confident maturity (hopefully).  Looking at the history of my own farming endeavors, I see that we've traversed at least four evolutionary stages – and we're hopefully headed for a fifth!

The Romance Phase
In the mid-1990s, we raised a handful of cows and feeder lambs.  I read many of the key books in the small farm movement (from authors like Joel Salatin, Elliot Coleman and Gene Logsdon).  We sold calves when we weaned them in the springtime, and we raised enough feeder lambs for friends and family that we could put a lamb (or two) in our freezer each fall at no cost to us.  I served on the board of a relatively new local food organization (PlacerGROWN), and we started raising laying hens and growing vegetables.  With a growing family and a dream of creating our own small farm, we purchased 3 acres with 2 barns and a home in Auburn.  In the autumn of 2002, I took our first crop (pumpkins and popcorn) to the Auburn Farmers' Market.  We also purchased 10 meat goats and more feeder lambs to manage the blackberries and weeds in our pasture.  We were on our way!
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Looking back, I realize that I didn't know enough to realize that the books I was reading were long on production systems and short on business reality.  In many ways, I drank the cool-aid, as my friend and fellow farmer Jim Muck says.  Micro farms, like the one I'd just started, were going to save the world from industrial food production.  I had no concept about the importance of scale to the future viability of my business.

Experimentation
I'm not sure there's a clear delineation for most small farms between the romance and experimentation phases.  For Flying Mule Farm, part of the romance and excitement about starting our farm was the opportunity to experiment with new crops and new livestock.  Part of our experimentation was driven by the mistaken belief that we needed to grow everything our customers wanted to buy (and everything we wanted to eat).  Specialization and focus was the downfall of industrial agriculture, in my perspective.  Diversity was the key – every successful small farm needed multiple crops and several species of livestock.  During this phase, we grew spring, summer and fall vegetables (at the peak of our vegetable experiment, we grew on about a quarter acre at home and on another acre of rented land nearby).  We started experimenting with greater numbers of sheep, buying 12 Barbados lambs to graze on brush on a friend's timberland.  We added meat birds to our chicken flock (our oldest daughter, Lara, reminds us that we butchered chickens – with her help! – on her first day of kindergarten).  We sold most of our own brush goats but eventually bought breeding ewes.  We leased (and lost – and regained) pasture land in Grass Valley, Lincoln and Auburn during this stage.  We tried cutting firewood and milling lumber commercially.  And we experimented with the use of draft animals as an alternative to tractors.
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In many ways, I loved the experimental phase of our business – especially the outdoor work and our time at the farmers' market.  Since we were only at the market seasonally, I still had some Saturdays off.  And since our oldest child wasn't yet playing sports on Saturdays, I wasn't conflicted about missing family activities - more on this later!

Wow – this is costing us a fortune! Maybe we need to treat it as a business!
As our knowledge and skill levels improved, we began to see that we needed to treat our farm as a business.  We couldn't simply keep growing and raising things without understanding what each crop or type of livestock meant to our economic and financial well-being.  The books I'd read didn't seem to emphasize this aspect of farming.  And in the back of my head, I began to realize that there were biological limits to the amount of income an acre of vegetables or 100 acres of unirrigated pasture would produce.  I started to suspect that we needed to get bigger.
During this stage in our evolution, I participated in the first Farm Business Planning Short Course offered by our local extension office (I've since helped teach this class – now in its eighth year).  While I examined all of our enterprises (looking at my economic analysis spreadsheets from that time, I see that we had vegetable, sheep, custom grazing, goats, firewood and other forest products, laying hens and meat chickens).  While I was still working part-time, I started thinking seriously about the hourly return to my labor from each of these enterprises.  I realized I didn't care for raising meat chickens in large numbers (we raised 500 birds one summer).  I also realized that a quarter acre of mixed vegetables (as many as 20 different “crops”) was a large garden rather than an economically viable farm.   And I realized that I most enjoyed working with sheep.  With this new sense of focus, I decided to quit my “day” job and try to raise sheep as a full time occupation.  In addition to leasing pasture around Auburn, we expanded our targeted grazing service (where we'd provide vegetation management services for other landowners).  At our peak, we attended 4-5 farmers markets each week – selling grassfed lamb, goat and beef, as well as wool products and firewood on occasion.
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As my daughters grew older and wanted to play sports (as I had as a kid), I found it more and more difficult to be at the farmers market on Saturday mornings.  On the other hand, we often worked together as a family, which brought tremendous nonfinancial rewards.  And we ate well – we traded meat for fruits and vegetables at farmers markets, produced eggs from our own laying hens, raised our own meat birds.  But the economics were challenging to say the least.

Why am I still farming? Can I continue?
For me, these questions define the evolutionary stage in which I find Flying Mule Farm today.  Several years ago, we came to the conclusion that the farm was taking full-time work on my part, but was paying less than a part-time wage.  We exhausted our ability to expand (which had mostly to do with lack of capital and lack of land).  I went back to work, and we downsized our sheep operation to fit the time I had available.  We started selling whole and half lambs rather than individual cuts – and eventually phased out of the farmers market altogether.  I gradually noticed that my motivation for farming was derived not from a desire to feed my community but from my love for working outdoors with livestock.  My skills and knowledge base improved to the point where I was confident I could manage the 600-800 ewes necessary to make the ranch a full-time job at full-time pay – but my bank account didn't keep pace.  And so today I find myself at a critical juncture – can (and should) I continue farming?  I'm struggling with how to answer this question.

Economic Viability = Sustainability
A sustainable farm must be environmentally, socially and economically sustainable.  As Flying Mule Farm has evolved, I've begun to think that economic sustainability is the key to the other two elements – a farm that can't stay in business can't provide environmental or social benefits.  Based on my experience over the last 20 years, I think that economic viability depends on focused production, appropriate scale, and efficient marketing.  I'm still working to get there – on a part-time basis at the moment.

Our farm has been in the midst of its mid-life crisis for several years.  I still appreciate the numerous non-monetary rewards of farming – from the gift of new life during lambing season to the opportunity to work side-by-side with my wife and girls.  I love the work like nothing else I've ever done.  As we enter this new phase in the evolution of Flying Mule Farm, I'll be aiming towards greater profitability.  While profit is not the purpose of our farm, it is, after all, necessary for its continued existence.  Stay tuned….

Sunday, November 9, 2014

Politically Homeless

I've heard that you shouldn't talk about politics or religion in polite company - but here I go....

One of my favorite classes in high school was government, taught by Jerry Gritz at Sonora High School.  The highlight of the class, at least for me, was a 2-week period during which we interviewed community members about their political perspectives.  By asking a series of questions about fiscal matters, social issues, tax policy, foreign policy and other philosophical issues, we were able to discern our own political perspectives.  I found that I was very liberal when it came to social issues, moderate when it came to taxation and fiscal issues, and anti-interventionist when it came to foreign policy.  Like my folks, I found that I agreed most with the platform of the Democratic party.  I've voted in every election since I registered to vote at the age of 18, and while I've voted mostly for Democratic candidates, I've become increasingly disenchanted with my party.  I've also remained disenchanted with the Republican party.  As a rancher and a rural Californian, I found that I didn't care for any of the electoral choices we had in our most recent election.  Nobody, it seems, represents my rural-centric, socially liberal and fiscally moderate viewpoint. I have no home politically.

I've heard that Winston Churchill once said that a young man who is conservative has no heart, while an old man who is liberal has no brain.  I've certainly found that my political perspective has evolved as I've aged.  Issues that were black-and-white when I was a young man are much more gray for me today.  Life is complicated, and yet our politics don't seem to permit nuance or thoughtful consideration.  Indeed, I probably share the burden of thoughtful people in any modern democracy - complex issues don't lend themselves to sound-bite solutions.

I live in a fairly rural area and make my living in agriculture.  By nature, I'm pretty conservative when it comes to spending money, especially if it's not mine.  I own and use guns - both in my work and in my recreation.  That said, I've never had a need for a fully automatic assault weapon, and I'm not convinced that anyone has a "right" to such a weapon for personal use.  I bristle at the idea of one-size-fits-all regulations that impair my own ability to manage the natural resources I depend upon for my livelihood, and yet I value the opportunities I have to recreate (camp, hunt and fish) on public lands.  I have dear friends whose sexual orientation is different than my own, and whose desire to marry their partner presents no threat to my own marriage.  Similarly, I have friends who have had to make hard, personal choices in private that I cannot fathom having to make - I can't imagine forcing my own perspective onto them.  As someone who works outside nearly everyday, I can't escape the conclusion that our climate is changing - and that my own reliance on fossil fuels has something to do with this change.  While I don't like the idea of war, I think there are some things worth fighting for - human rights and human dignity come to mind.

One paragraph, obviously, is too small a space to describe one's philosophy - my own views are complicated and ever-evolving.  Unfortunately, our political system doesn't seem to comprehend complexity.  From my perspective, too much of the Democratic party seems to represent an urban liberal viewpoint far removed from the realities of my rural livelihood.  At the same time, much of the Republican party seems to be dominated by culturally conservative, angry politicians who refuse to acknowledge scientific research.  Libertarians seem like kooks in many ways - any idea, even the idea of personal liberty, can be taken to the extreme.  And I have to say that the Tea Party seems like a thinly veiled effort to make racism seem appropriate.  In other words, I can't get excited to vote for any candidate - major party or otherwise.

I don't know what the answer is.  I think that many of us appreciate the complexity of modern society - issues are rarely as simple as our leaders would have us believe.  I guess we get the politics we deserve - we probably long for things to be simple and gravitate towards those leaders who tell us that there are simple solutions to our problems.  In the meantime, I guess I'll keep holding my nose while I vote.

I hope this hasn't offended anyone - it's meant to describe my own distaste for modern politics at the moment.  Other perspectives on these issues are important - as is the ability to learn from other people and to change our own perspectives.  I hope others will share theirs!