By Richard Oswald

Letter From Langdon: Vilsack as Ag Secretary? So Be It

editor — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:34:04 -0800

Tom Vilsack, former Iowa governor and likely Ag Secretary in the Obama Administration
Photo: Vilsack Campaign

Most years — even an election year — nothing much that’s newsworthy ever happens around Langdon. Most of the presidential candidates (actually all the presidential candidates) did a pretty good job of ignoring Langdon throughout the primaries into the general election.

But we did have some opportunities if we were willing to drive an hour or so.

For instance, about a month before the election, we were told over the phone that a highly placed member of the Obama campaign was coming to St Joseph. The caller said that if the turnout was good, an even more important member of the campaign would make a follow-up visit within a few days.

When we got to Democratic Headquarters located in St Joe, home of the Pony Express , the highly placed member of the Obama campaign turned out to be former two-term Iowa governor Tom Vilsack. Linda and I had a chance to talk to him, and later on the drive home I told her we had probably just met the new Secretary of Agriculture.

He seems like the natural first choice.

Letter From Langdon: Vote!

editor — Mon, 3 Nov 2008 12:46:44 -0800

Voting old school in Peru, Maine.
Photo: Just Us 3

Today is Election Day, and over the years after all the challenges to our Constitutional rights, after all the gerrymandering, corruption, and influence pedaling, the hard work of our Founding Fathers continues to yield positive results.

Today we still have the right to vote.

Not everyone in the world has that right. It is a right won with blood of patriots and one that is defended only by those who care enough to renew that honorable stain.

Our rights are challenged now every bit as much as at any other time in history. As long as greed and hate exist in the world, our way of life will be at risk. Our values will be questioned, and our attempt at democracy will be at odds with the wants and desires of a wealthy few.

But money won’t always decide political races. The selection ultimately rests not with dollars, but in the hands of the people.

We are confronted with unexpected and unwanted challenges: Exported jobs, contaminated imports, and a scandalous financial situation, all of which might have been prevented. They threaten our nation and our world. The ballots we mark today will doubtless decide our fate for years to come, perhaps the futures of our children as well.

Letter From Langdon: Low-Hanging Fruit And Yellow Dogs

editor — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:15:02 -0700

"The Power of 'O'" signs cost 20 bucks each. I bought 40 of them.

For some Missouri politicians, campaign contributions are nothing more than low hanging fruit.

That’s because in May of this year, the Republican-dominated Missouri state legislature removed all limits on campaign contributions. Since then I’ve seen contributions to a single candidate go as high as $50,000. That’s a lot of juice.

Given the fruit of their labor, most Missouri Republicans have already picked a sizeable crop. I figure that, true to conservative standards, they’ll be putting up preserves and making apple sauce for a rainy day. For them, that rainy day may come on November 4th.

But instead of picking low hanging fruit for my own campaign fund, I find myself waiting under the tree hoping for changing winds to blow something loose.

I lost my first political contest in 2006. Asking for contributions was the worst part of a mostly good experience. Even though political winds are shifting my way this time, thanks to the current financial crisis, the money thing is hard as ever for a farm boy like me.

Just the other day a farmer buddy and candidate in his own right called me on the phone with some advice.

Only the Shutter Can Stop a Farmer

editor — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:37:03 -0700

book review

American Farmer
Pictures by Paul Mobley
Text by Katrina Fried
Welcome Books, October 2008

A farmer wrote our Declaration of Independence, and farmers fought for that independence. It was even a farmer (George Washington) who became Revolutionary General and then first president, to be followed in the presidency by yet another accomplished and learned farmer, John Adams.

Farmers are just as important to America now as they were in 1776.

When Paul Mobley set out to photograph the farmers who are the heart and soul of our nation he eventually covered thirty states. The result was a 275 page book with more than 150 full color and black and white photographs.

Being a farmer myself, I can read between the lines of each picture. I can smell the burlap and feel the humid summer heat. I feel the tickle in my nose from hay dust, and I know about the burn one gets from the hot vinyl seat cover in the cab of an ancient pickup truck. I understand the threadbare clothes and labor stained ball caps, shy smiles, sweaty t-shirts, and the bent brim of a straw hat. Those of us who live and work on the farm know that style consciousness is not at the fore of farm work. Some of us dress better than others. But we spend our days with nature, and nature doesn’t care if we have a hole in our overalls or a spot on our shirt.

Letter From Langdon: It Was Mine

editor — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 06:31:53 -0700

It used to be that competition made it hard for one seed company to dominate. No longer. Here are old seed sacks collected at the Minnesota state fair.

Photo: Ardent Eye

When I was a boy growing up here outside of Langdon, everything on the farm belonged to my family.

At about the age of ten, Dad taught me how to raise hogs. The sows we grew from Hampshire gilts were ours. So was the alfalfa field where we grew hay and hog pasture. Planted to Vernal (a public variety), it was where piglets played and slept in the warm summer sun. The wheat field we harvested later that summer was planted to Gage, another public variety. We harvested that wheat in July, then sold some for seed and some for grain. Dad saved seed for next years crop, and Mother cooked a little into breakfast cereal and even ground some flour. After the wheat harvest we mowed the stubble and baled the straw. The same pigs that grazed the alfalfa were farrowed and later bedded in our wheat straw as the days grew cooler, and Dad fed the shoats our own corn.

When we fed the hogs Dad told me about how he used to go to the corn crib and select ears of open pollinated seed corn from the thousands he had there. He told me how he’d sort through them and choose only the very best of what he’d grown. And then he told me about how single cross seed corn had replaced open pollinated varieties that he had planted since he was a boy on his father’s farm, where everything they grew belonged to them.

The open pollinated ears of corn from Dad 's crib were never worth more than about a penny apiece.

The cloth sacks that held the first single cross seeds he planted still rest in the attic of my home. Most of the seed company imprints on the sacks would be unrecognizable to young farmers today, but they tell a story that is very up to date. It is a story of progress, a story of consolidation, and a story of control.