After Independence Day, one would have to wonder about government dependency and its impact on freedom. We have no farther to look than in South Dakota. The Aberdeen News has a report on landowners who have chosen to take money from the government in exchange for their property rights:
Area cattle producers suffering from drought, mainly west of Aberdeen, are frustrated that the government won't let them make hay now on land enrolled in the federal Conservation Reserve Program.
"Believe you me, that is all we hear from morning to night," said Gloria Huber, a program technician at the federal Farm Service Agency's Campbell County office in Mound City. "They are desperate to cut that CRP hay now."
Many area herds have already been sold because of a lack of food and water.
Because of the drought, the feds have granted grazing on some of the land that's put in reserve in exchange for cash from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The problem, Huber said, is that many producers would have to put up miles of fences to graze it.
Wetland CRP has not been approved for grazing, even though that land, too, is dry as bones this year, Huber said. Producers would have to fence off wetland CRP to graze regular CRP.
"If they can't graze the whole thing, they'd have to be fencing forever and a day," she said.
The government says haying can begin in early August. A main reason for delaying haying for a month is to protect baby pheasants that hatched earlier this summer from mowers' sickle blades and balers.
But cattle need feed now, and the forage that grew on CRP land is deteriorating fast, Huber said.
"If we have to wait until August, there won't be anything left, with all the heat and no rain."
This is the danger of those who buy into the Tony Dean philosophy of government intrusion into our lives. Landowners need to take a second look at the Federal farm programs. Some have \looked at it as free money, but it is not free. The cost is your property rights and freedom.
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