By Regan Beck

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed a district court decision on July 30 and ruled in favor of the State of Texas in a lawsuit concerning the whooping crane.

It was the classic example of water for people weighed against an environmental group suing under the Federal Endangered Species Act. The Fifth Circuit concluded the environmental group, The Aransas Project (TAP), failed to prove the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) management of water permits resulted in the deaths of whooping cranes.

By Kenneth Dierschke
TFB President

I read recently that climatologists are predicting a 70 percent chance for El Niño to develop this year in the Pacific Ocean. I hope they are wrong. What we need is a 100 percent chance.

El Niño is the warming of the central and eastern Pacific Oceans. It alters the jet stream flow across the United States and helps bring wetter-than-normal weather to Texas.

By Gene Hall

I own your house. In fact, I have always owned it. It does not matter that you have a deed or stacks of property tax receipts. It is not relevant whether or not you paid for this house.

I also own most of the houses on your street. Your neighbors, too, might have paid mortgages and taxes, but that does not matter. Rest assured, though, I am not “expanding my holdings” on your street, but only because I have always owned it. My name is Federal Bureau of Land Management.

By Mike Barnett

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) attempt to clarify the Clean Water Act (CWA) is muddying the water for farmers and ranchers in Texas and across the U.S.

That’s not much of a surprise knowing EPA’s history, but their new proposed rule could be bad news for your land use decisions and farming practices.

The CWA was established to give EPA and the Corps the authority to regulate navigable waters, such as interstate rivers.  The law calls these “waters of the U.S.” State and local governments have jurisdiction over smaller, more remote waters, such as ponds and isolated wetlands, because state and local governments are more accountable to their citizens.

By Layne and Jamie Chapman

Feral chickens, hand-pulled kale and a steer fed to perfection that is marketed in its home state. What do they all have in common? Capitalism.

These products were introduced into a functioning market to better a company’s financial standing and to capitalize on a situation. They are also part of modern agriculture. Grocery stores of all kinds have found different routes of product differentiation and market themselves according to what they think the consumer needs. The new consumer is targeted well after the raw products have left the hands of a farmer or rancher, who are commonly so removed from the consumer that they are often misrepresented by the advertising of the product. The ones determining how the end product is situated in the market are no more connected to the product than the chicken that came in the bag.

By Gene Hall

Does it bother anyone but me that a major restaurant chain is using made-up themes, complete with scripts, to attack agriculture? Such is the case with Chipotle, a company that has made attacking farmers and ranchers a part of their marketing strategy.

Cartoon scarecrows and exploding cows abound in their online fantasy land. This somehow proves that modern agriculture is a “bad thing?” I guess it’s funny in a mean-spirited kind of way. That’s the thing about a script. It can turn out however you like.

Reality has no script. Serious people deal with reality. Unserious people write a script they like better.