Panic reigned: What to do about the hay?

This thing that’s paralyzing our big banks and gutting the stock market used to be called a “panic.” Today, it’s a meltdown, or a mess or an “unscheduled event.”

Panic is the best description. I’ve been in a few. Fear pounds your flight button. Everyone starts moving away from the threat. Faster. Then wildly, desperately faster. Someone goes down; then others. Screams.

In battle, it’s called a rout. In cattle, it’s a stampede.

Fear starts it, fear feeds it. The fear is rational: Stay where you are, and you’ll get hurt. But fear smothers the part of your brain that might save you, the part where you keep your wits.

One person at a time, panic stops. Fear is not mastered, but it is compartmentalized. Reasoning returns. It suggests that a better alternative might be to turn and face the threat, accepting the possibility of bad consequences. Those who turn into the threat bring others with them. The pell-mell slows and eventually stops. Read more »

Grazing beef cattle: Happy tails to you

No buffalo roamed on Hawthorne Street in Pittsburgh where I grew up. Punching a time clock was more in my future than punching a cow.

Chuck Wagon was the name we called a too-big kid over on the next block. Today, we might call him Salad Bar, but that really doesn’t convey the intended schoolyard meanness of the original.

I was not, like President Bush, born with a silver burr under my saddle.

Nonetheless, for the majority of my adult life, I’ve grazed beef cattle — about 1,500 altogether — on a Virginia mountain farm.

So how did that happen?

Twenty-five years ago I bought a country place that had fenced pasture. I was pretty sure that something in addition to mortgage debt went in there. 

Almost half of America’s two million farms run cattle, about 100 million head in recent years. It is America’s largest agricultural sector and provides us with about 28 billion pounds of meat at an average of $4.16 per pound in 2007. Read more »