Big risks

It has been a theme of my columns lately to write about something I have read recently, and this month is no different. My wife, Emily, read the book “When It All Burns” by Jordan Thomas. She told me I should read it after she finished it.

As usual, she was right about whether I would enjoy a book. She has a better than 90% chance of being right, as I enjoy most books — even poorly written ones, because those make average quality literature seem great. If you are starting to feel like a member of a book club you did not sign up for, I apologize. That said, get ready to hear about forest fires and how I connected that in my brain to dairy farming.

It is not hard to feel connected to the huge forest fires that happen to the west and north of us, even if the biggest fire to happen in Minnesota was the Great Hinckley Fire back in 1894. If you enjoy small museums and would like to learn more about forest fires in Minnesota, I suggest that you stop at the Hinckley Fire Museum, located, as you’d suspect, in the town of Hinckley. Emily and I took the kids there a few years ago when we were driving through on the way to Lake Vermillion and we all really enjoyed it.

The last few summers, we have been curing our hay by smoking it instead of sun drying it. Any of you with respiratory issues like asthma or lungs that don’t work like they used to have probably been painfully aware of when the winds brought smoke from fires in Canada to the Midwest.

The Hinckley fire was the result of slash from logging being left in big piles, waiting for a spark during some especially dry summers at our state’s peak logging and sawmilling period. Even though an immense number of trees had been logged, which would make it seem less likely for a huge forest fire to occur, the remains of those trees had not broken down yet.

The big fires that occur today are similar in that they are caused by built-up fuel, but the fuel is not slash from logging. A hundred years of controlling fires in our nation’s forests to protect trees for lumber production and also people’s houses have prevented the smaller fires that, for thousands of years, burned at low intensities, keeping the forest floor from building up with too much flammable material.

Frequent smaller fires would thin the trees as well, allowing light to reach young trees so a forest had trees of different maturities rather than a canopied forest of mature trees. The absence of fire in forests meant that our country had extremely productive forests for a while, but that boost in forest production came at a cost we are paying now. With so much combustible material in forests, when a fire happens, it becomes so extreme that everything burns and it burns really hot. Mega fires like that are extremely costly to control, if they can be at all, and set the land back so far that it takes much longer to recover and become a functional forest again.

How do huge forest fires relate to dairy farming? You have probably been asking that for most of my tree-related rambling. Dairy farming has become more consolidated. As farms have more cows on one site, efficiency goes up, like in those thicker forests that never burned, but so does risk.

The avian influenza outbreaks in dairy cattle last year showed an often-overlooked risk to our industry. When cows were spread out over many smaller farms, there were natural “firebreaks” to disease, both distance and fewer animals on a site to produce and shed airborne pathogens like viruses. I don’t have an answer to whether it is worth the risks incurred to continue down the road of consolidation we as an industry have been on, but it is worth considering how much of the risk we all want to share. Rarely does a forest fire just burn one house down and leave others in the area untouched.

Until next time, keep living the dream and maybe don’t add hotshot firefighter to your list of things to try if you decide to leave agricultural employment. I think that might be one of the few jobs that’s more stressful than farming.

Tim Zweber farms with his wife, Emily, their three children and his parents, Jon and Lisa, near Elko, Minnesota.