Dear Editor:

I grew up on an Iowa farm that had refuge for wild animals in every grove of trees, hedge or fence.  Farmers there work hard to keep their water clean, to grow certain areas as wetlands, others as aerable or plowable fields, others to grow hay.  Farmers understand diversification so that if one thing fails another can pull you through.  We learned to save seed from the biggest best ears of corn and apples to replant and thus increase our harvests.  

Your Sonny Perdue and his [cousin] David are well respected all over the nation. Farmers understand rotation of crops i.e., after a field has produced corn for a year or two it is depleted, so you plant it in clover or soybeans to replace the last nutrients.  I ran and cleaned the cream separator for milk and cream that we produced too.  Farmers understand spreading lime or other nutrients on fields when needed.  We all carried a hoe wherever we walked in order to eradicate [weed] and thistles, kill snakes, and ward off the bull. We fished in our own ponds, ate our own beef and pork and planted a garden of 60-plus feet by 40-plus feet, canned about 1,200 jars of fruits and vegetables against winter, and ate our own berries and peaches. Here in Georgia it is blueberry bogs, pecan groves, cotton fields not to mention all the excellent deer/beef/pork processing lockers, chicken farms for eggs and meat, and the dairies here.  We ought to be sounding the alarm where Georgia no longer has any huge old trees.  

So I’m not too impressed by what New Yorkers know about environment and saving the planet. When government interfered and started requiring quotas of so much land for raising beef and so much for crops, they messed with our production, our seeds, our animals, etc.  It is really true that the less regulation you have, the better people do on farms. Four years ago I went to walk the fields with the Iowa State extension people and learned that the government sends planes over to photograph our farms and they prosecute farmers whose land doesn’t have enough wetlands (unmowed areas). Since the 1970’s it has gotten worse.  The sheriff cannot keep up with the cattle rustlers, the conservationists brought back the cougar cat and diamondback rattle snake to reintroduce them to Iowa farms, streams and rivers because they had become extinct, poor things,  So now a full grown cat like that nabs the cats and dogs, piglets and calves or chases down your best milk cow, runs her ‘til she falls over from exhaustion and rips out her heart.  

We can no longer hunt deer for meat on our own land without a license, because that deer runs across many farms and belongs to the state not to us.  A good secretary of agriculture unties the hands of those who produce our food and seed and gets out of the way

Lynn Vogel Flessas

President, 

Newton County Republican Women