General Discussion

Come here to Lake County and walk with me through the acreage of a dairy farm.

Plenty of bushes and trees, meadows, ponds and other niceties.

Much off the land is a bit hard scrabble, so it is not like it will be used for vineyards - yet!

Why is this significant? A dairy farm provides oodles of space and habitat for a great deal more than cows. You get your possums, skinks, snakes, beavers, buzzards, eagles, hawks, crows, cougars, skunks, foxes, rabbits, deer etc.

For some reason, wine-swilling environmental diletantes complain about cows, but they don't understand anything about the type of earth-raping situation that occurs when plots of forest are bulldozed down, then burned, and then planted with grape vines, which are then pesticided so much that the pesticide ends up destroying the aquifers that lie five feet under the vineyards. Within one season, much of this pesiticde will find its way to a local creek, which empties into the lake (Clear Lake, largest fresh water lake in California.)

All this destruction strips the earth of the carbon dioxide removing machinery we know as trees. Then the habitat for dozens of species of animal and bird life is gone, and probably forever.

It used to be, even thirty years ago, that vineyard owners provided hedgerows for the birds and a few other species of animals. So that for every 500 acres, maybe one or two hedgerows. Now the profit-minded barbarians who are touted by city environmentalists can't afford even a bare minimum of habitat for the animals. So we are losing our animals.

I sat in a friend's living room once for most of a day. She was leasing her land to some vineyard guy. All the vines he planted were visible to us through her windows. And not a single bird, not even a sparrow, went near those acres of vines.

Beyond that, the vineyards cause desertification. But if the cow haters get their way, every acre in California will become vineyards and casinos and casino parking lots.