لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
The next morning we continued west, passing small towns and empty homesteads and fields of unassembled turbines. Finally, about noon, we arrived at the headquarters of the Mariah Project, a ramshackle old brick building in the heart of Bovina, Texas.
The local organizer of the wind farm was Jim Bob Swafford, a plump fellow with buzzed white hair and a bunchy green sweater. In a large room with plaster flaking off the walls, we sat down at a table with Swafford and one of his Norwegian partners, Harald Dirdal, who happened to be in town for a few days.
Swafford was a longtime Bovina resident who tended to sit quietly with his hands in his lap, peering through a pair of enormous glasses. Dirdal was lean, fast-talking, and outlandishly handsome, dressed for the imaginary West in a fitted shirt, silver belt buckle, and black cowboy boots. For years, his company, Havgul, had also been working on a wind project in Lake Michigan, much to the disgruntlement of local residents, who agonized over the ruination of their sunset. In Bovina, he had no such problem. He and Swafford had already acquired about two thirds of the county’s wind rights, without a single negotiation with an individual landowner. They simply offered the same deal to everyone, which everyone either accepted or declined — or, Dirdal said with a smile, declined for a while, and then accepted.
As we flipped through various plans for the project, Dirdal explained why his company was interested in developing the Panhandle. “In a wind farm, the wind is free, so the costs are maintenance and capital,” he said. “And they’re exactly the same whether you’re here or in California. But in Texas, you don’t have regulatory issues! I mean, in California, to develop a wind farm is a nightmare. Here, you can do whatever you want.”
As Dirdal laid out his plans, the front door of the building swung open, and a burly farmer named Floyd Reeve strode in to deliver some paperwork. Reeve had the look of a man who brooked no distraction, and when I invited him to sit with us, he made a big show of studying his watch, then shrugged: “I guess I’ve got about thirty minutes.”
I asked Reeve what his reaction had been at the first news of a giant wind farm in Bovina. “Well,” he said, glancing at Dirdal and Swafford, “we’ve been about something to do with the wind forever here. Electricity didn’t come until about 1940, so many folks had these eight-volt wind chargers to run a radio with, or maybe even a milking machine. So wind chargers, they’re way old.” He added, “But not near the technology that’s jumped on it now.”
“How much ground do you expect each turbine to use?” I asked.
“Maybe 100 square feet.”
“Will it make any difference to your farming?”
“No, that’s the beautiful part,” he said. “The interruption to daily life is minuscule.”
After a while, Reeve had to move on, but Wilkinson and I stayed the afternoon, meeting with other farmers who stopped by, and I began to see the wind the way these men saw it: not as a solution, but as a stopgap to compensate for the disappearing aquifer. If they had to live under industrial installations that blotted out the sun every third second, well, at least it was better than being shunted off to some urban nightmare. I also noticed that Wilkinson had become uncharacteristically quiet. The evening before, when we’d stopped for dinner with a priest and nun near the town of Nazareth, he’d been voluble and lively, but something in Bovina troubled him. Later that afternoon, as we headed south toward Muleshoe, Wilkinson tapped his fingers on the wheel, and eventually spoke up.
“You know,” he said, “a lot of these farmers say they’re going to keep farming after they get wind. Some of them say they’ll quit row-cropping and keep cattle. My fear is, they won’t do either. When you visit actual wind farms down south, most of them used to keep cattle, and most of them don’t keep cattle anymore. Now the only thing they farm is wind.”
Back in Kansas, Donn Teske wouldn’t hear it. Sure, if you asked him point blank, he’d allow that wind was coming, and that after the family farms gave out and the aquifer ran dry and the megafarms vanished, the only thing left might be windmills. That’s why his son was at college studying turbine technology. But Teske wasn’t giving up. He was still looking for an agricultural future.
After a few days together on his farm, we had developed an easy rapport. We sorted calves and hauled them to the stockyards, a rambling compound of kicked-up dust and cattlemen stretched on wooden bleachers under a droning auctioneer’s call, which yanked me back to childhood memories of the Virginia yards, with my grandfather buying and selling and hustling and bullshitting the same twenty men he’d known all his life. Teske was a perfect guide to this world, pattering under his breath about friends and neighbors and newfangled ideas with the cool detachment of an immersion sociologist. When it finally came time for me to pack up and continue west, he mumbled that I would need an interpreter, and began throwing shirts in a bag.
But the trip initially disappointed him. The farmers we stopped to talk with seemed to break his heart more each day. On a 12,000-acre plantation near Weskan, Kansas, we stood inside a cavernous warehouse of gleaming tractors and combines while the owner chattered and Teske interjected questions about loan terms and well output. He nodded gravely at the answers and chomped on the stub of his cigar until, as we headed down the driveway, his face collapsed and he moaned, “That poor bastard can’t even see the cliff he’s going off.”
Now we were on our way to see a rancher I’d been hearing about for several weeks, mostly in angry whispers. At seventy-four, Larry Haverfield was the scourge of every neighbor within fifty miles because he refused to exterminate prairie dogs. Instead, he allowed them to burrow into some 6,000 acres of a 10,000-acre ranch, which to most farmers is like giving 60 percent of your kitchen to rats. Terrified that the dogs would spread to their own property, Haverfield’s neighbors had issued threats and lawsuits, while he amassed support from such groups as Audubon of Kansas and the Nature Conservancy — which only added to the widespread suspicion that Haverfield was some kind of subversive out to wreck farming.
Haverfield’s ranch was beyond remote: it was alien, hermitic, godforsaken — a pile of nailed-up wooden planks adrift on a sea of soil. We drove for hours just to reach the nearest town, Russell Springs, population twenty-four, and then we continued past fields of mangy cattle teetering on a desiccated horizon before finally pulling up to the farmhouse, where we parked beside a 1974 pickup with a white grain box strapped on top like a saddle.
Haverfield met us at the door with a glare, a short, brittle creature in coveralls, with a stubbly white beard and hands so weathered that most of his nails were broken off entirely. I had called that morning to see if it was okay to visit, and he sounded welcoming on the phone, but the sight of Teske seemed to put him on edge. He motioned for us to take a seat at the Formica island between his kitchen and living room, and looked us over, wondering aloud, “Who’s taking care of who here?”
“I’m his chauffeur and interpreter,” Teske grunted.
Haverfield scowled and walked into the kitchen. A sticker on the refrigerator said stop g.o.p. lies. He put a kettle of water on for tea. “Well, what it is here,” he said, “is we’re mimicking the way it was when the buffalo were here.”
Teske nodded. “I’m on the Kansas Graziers Association board,” he said.
Haverfield’s scowl deepened. “Them guys,” he said. “I don’t see much good coming out of them.”
“You’re thinking of somebody else,” Teske said quickly.
“I’m thinking of anything I see.”
“Well, we’re not with K State or anything.”
“Oh,” Haverfield said. “That helps.”
Teske opened a copy of Audubon magazine on the table, then closed it. “I’ve had the opportunity to go down to Allan Savory’s school,” he offered.
“You’ve been there?” Haverfield said.
“Mm-hmm.”
“On a full-week deal?”
“Mm-hmm.” Teske smiled. “I’m a little strange nut, too.”
Now Haverfield was grinning. “You are!” he cried, hurrying back to the table. “I’m feeling more comfortable all the time!”
We poured tea, and Haverfield began to explain his thinking about the prairie dogs. The short answer was that he, like Teske, was a student of Allan Savory. As an officer in the Northern Rhodesian Game Department during the 1960s, Savory had set out to redesign the basic tenets of livestock husbandry. Eventually, he developed a series of methods known as “holistic management.” At their core, these involve a simple insight: landscapes like the Great Plains have evolved to support native species, like buffalo, and so the best way to preserve those landscapes is to behave like the native species did.
This, of course, is easier to preach than to practice. For ranchers on the plains, it means encouraging large herds of cattle to behave like buffalo, a task made no easier by the fact that cattle and buffalo act nothing alike. Buffalo tend to roam widely, eating most vegetation and stopping only periodically at waterways, while cattle are finicky and easily habituated, lingering near water sources and grazing the same patch of ground repeatedly.
To bridge the gap between cattle and buffalo, Savory proposed a number of methods, but the most dramatic was a change in fencing. Instead of allowing cattle to run free within the perimeter of the property, ranchers could install a series of smaller paddocks, through which the herd could be shuffled every few days. This would force them to pick each paddock clean before they moved on, and then allow each paddock time to recover. The cost of the additional fencing and herding, Savory argued, would return to the rancher in efficiency and sustainability, as the fields produced more grass and the cattle ate more of it.
By the time Haverfield heard about Savory, he was in his forties, married, and had children who were already branching off to run cattle of their own. But after three decades of working his land, Haverfield was convinced that “we were doing a poor job.” In 1986, he went off to a management school run by one of Savory’s associates, and when he returned he was committed to rotation grazing. Gradually, he began to pay more attention to Savory’s holistic philosophy. What his neighbors would come to regard as a “prairie-dog problem” was to Haverfield just one detail of a much larger awakening. And now he asked: “Did you see any prairie dogs coming in?”
I realized that, in the course of the seemingly endless drive, I hadn’t.
Haverfield nodded. “We might not see a prairie dog all day,” he said. “I’m seeing more hawks than I am prairie dogs.”
But this, he added, was just the point. Centuries ago, dog towns on the plains were kept in check by a host of predators, including hawks, eagles, and ferrets. But the systematic extermination of dog towns had gradually wiped out the predators as well. For most of his life, Haverfield said, “I’d never seen an eagle here, and I didn’t know what a ferruginous hawk was.”
Now these predators were back. “About three weeks ago, we saw forty ferruginous in two hours,” he said. “Yesterday, I saw a golden eagle on a highline pole.” To Haverfield, this made the talk of a “prairie-dog problem” shortsighted at best. The problem had never really been the dogs. It was the lack of predators, and the two canceled each other out.
Haverfield gulped the last of his tea and invited us to have a look, so we crammed three wide into his pickup and rattled out across the open fields. Here and there, we did see dogs pop up to sniff the wind, but Haverfield was right: the more dazzling spectacle was overhead, as hawks and eagles spiraled in such numbers that Teske, a lifelong Kansan, kept shaking his head in disbelief and saying things like, “Them get big!”
After a few minutes, Haverfield pointed to a small butte on the horizon with a thin crust of rock at the top. “That,” he said, “is the Ogallala.”
Teske laughed. “You’re underneath it!” he said. In this area, the layer of rock at the bottom of the aquifer had never been covered with sediment. In fact, that layer itself had eroded, dropping the surface of the landscape until the only place the aquifer basin remained was on the tops of the hills that hadn’t washed away. All of which made Haverfield’s ranch an accidental model for the post-Ogallala future: there was not a quadrillion-gallon jackpot below. Yet somehow, with Savory’s guidance, Haverfield got by. Even without the Ogallala, he said, there was a shallow aquifer a few feet down that produced a thin stream of water — not enough to row-crop corn, or any of the other madness on the plains, but enough, it turned out, to survive. “We could do everything we need with two ten-gallon wells,” he said.
This turned out to be Haverfield’s mantra. Nothing about the ranch was ideal, but at each turn, he had chosen wisdom over comfort. The well might be shallow, the fencing system complex, the fields shot through with dog towns and burrows — but in the end, the place offered a vision of livestock on the plains that could last without destroying the land.
As we neared the edge of a rotation paddock, we could see the strands of an electric fence drawing close, but Haverfield kept speeding forward with no sign of slowing down. He flashed a rascally smile and said, “You want to see how I cross?” Before we could answer, he’d thrown the truck into low gear, opened the door, and jumped out, leaving Teske and me in the driverless pickup still lurching toward the electric wires, until here came Haverfield sprinting ahead, kicking up a seventy-four-year-old leg to stomp down on all the wires at once, just in time for the truck to rumble across, while Teske and I glanced at each other in disbelief. The driver’s door began to rattle again, and Haverfield leapt back into the cab. Teske chewed on his cigar. “Well,” he said slowly. “Damn.”
