Unsolicited Advice

“Nothing is as unappreciated as unsolicited advice.” – Allan Nation.

I have stopped people in the store and said, “If you keep drinking that it will kill you.” My cousin died from a brain tumor the size of a grapefruit. She was addicted to an artificial sweetener and consumed it mostly in diet soft drinks. There is a parallel graph that shows that when more of this sweetener is sold, there is a direct increase in the number of brain tumors. This artificial sweetener was once proposed as an ant poison.

Even with this information, most people will tell me that the government would not allow this to happen. And then they put more cans in the shopping basket. A few people tell me to mind my own business. Many just ignore me. When I teach nutrition classes, a substantial number will stop drinking the diet sodas immediately.

I often give advice in this newspaper. I sometimes write to help my thought process (it is more for me than the public), but I still like to share. Often times I don’t hear a thing about a particular article. Sometimes I hear a lot. Folks will tell me I don’t know what I am talking about or just tell me I’m plain wrong. A few will tell me that this is not what Texas A&M is telling them.

I have no problem with them following Aggie advice. I followed what I learned long after I graduated from A&M. But over time, many folks (like me) realize that some Aggie solutions do not work or only work temporarily. They do not fix the problem, just the symptoms of the problem. Then they hire me.

As a consultant, I charge for information when I go to a client’s property to help them with their problems. Like a doctor, I learned my skills over many years of education and experience. I also practice what I teach, but sometimes things don’t always go as planned. It doesn’t make the advice less useful. Circumstances can change the best advice. At any rate they are likely better off than they were before they hired me.

What I don’t understand is when people try the same things over and over, get the same results, and still take the advice of the people that led them astray. Most people would call this insanity. Others prefer to call it conventional thinking.

Conventional thinking says that applying weed killer year after year is helpful. And yet, ranchers see more and more weeds as the weeds become resistant to the weed killer. Then conventional ranchers are told by the conventional farm suppliers that they need the new and improved weed killer. This works for a while, but soon they are back to the original problem of the same weed infestation.

In all my years of farming and ranching I have never seen NPK chemical fertilizers improve the land. It may green up the grass or vegetation for a short period of time, but it hurts the soil microbiome. Years of use dull the beauty of the landscape.

Weeds are a management problem. Good management reduces weeds; poor management increases them. Fighting weeds with a chemical will kill the weeds. Then the following year, the same weeds are back from the seed produced a year to a decade ago. Little has changed. The grass is no better off when the chemical weed killer is applied. Research has shown that diversity of plants in the pasture grows more beef than a monocrop, so killing the weeds may actually reduce the weight gain the rancher is looking for.

Now my telling you this for free, which costs you nothing (except the cost of the newspaper) might be helpful. You can take the advice and use it or you can ignore it and spray the weeds in your pasture. If a drought occurs later this summer, you might think you will be better off than having those weeds competing for the groundwater. What you won’t have are pastures that are more drought tolerant. This may seem counter intuitive, but that is not what the data shows.

I look at my neighbors whose land suffered last year from the dry spell during the late summer and early fall. The pasture weeds seemed to save the pasture grasses from total extinction. The neighbors who sprayed had to apply more fertilizer than the previous year just to get a small start to grazing season. Even after a few good rains, cracks began to appear in the soil. Not nearly as many cracks show up in pastures with a healthy crop of weeds.

Personally, I would rather apply a good organic fertilizer than a weed killer. If I look at the cost of weed killer and apply the same dollar amount of organic fertilizer to the land instead, the land is much better off. I might not get the big “green up” or have a pasture without weeds, but my land would produce more grass. And every year that I apply the organic fertilizer, it would get better.

I hope this advice was worth the cost of the newspaper. If you doubt it, ignore it. If you think you might benefit from the advice, do it. If you feel better paying me for more advice, call. And donations are always accepted.

David E. Will is a local rancher and consultant. He can be reached at 830-629-9876 or by email at dwill207@satx.rr.com.