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Rural System? Just Dreaming …
A For-Profit Conglomerate for
Meaningful Jobs
Healthful Communities
and Improved Natural Resource Management
by Robert H. Giles, Jr., Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia
2007
Chapter 14. The Land Force
Dreaming: Hippopotamuses lolling, rope bridges, strange noises from the bush, rickety jeep dangers on the rickety passageway, cool drinks, too much heat
Tourists…ecotourists … spiny tourists…let's go, let's go…tally another site…to experience vs. to arrive … ill prepared, silly questions from adults…wildlife tourists… Safely frowning buffalo among the pup-tent-size ant hills … staring at me…frowning because they did not know there were no more lions… Why not more ecotourists?… Send us no Americans…their requirements are excessive…they are never satisfied…costs, costs, costs, costs…but we could …Just dreaming…
| Achieving a primary objective of providing local rural employment, the Land Force is also invaluable for achieving the human functions needed for monitoring and manipulating the land over time, especially for land having absentee owners. |
Farming and forestry are hard work, but when well done, well appreciated, and the joys of outdoor experiences sought along with healthful living, there is no finer life focus for an individual or family. That is …if the financial returns or bases are adequate. Farming and forestry, diverse rural life, are very much like living at the center of a giant multi-dimensional chess game with competition with the weather, diseases, national and state policies (reflected in laws and regulations), past investment decisions, local taxes, the international markets and commodity prices, oil prices, and the current interest rate. It is a tough game and one difficult to win…and many do not. They join the ranks of the "below the poverty level" or they leave! They love the farm but money must be made. For the elderly, the love is great, but the work to painful, difficult, or risky. The marginal farm has the same chance of raising a good crop as a good family. People hear about the individual farmer but cannot see the state or national picture (or refuse to look because a peek is too painful). People move off of farms and the US population is now about 80% urban. That movement has occurred in 50 years, faster than can be comprehended by people today. It represents a complete reversal in a rural to urban ratio of from for 80 / 20 to 20 / 80 percent. On May 23, 2007, there were for the first time in history, more people living on Earth in urban areas than rural areas.
Lurking behind that statistic is awareness that more than 16,000 farm operators reported working 200 or more days off the farm in 1997. I've met them in garages, factories, nursing homes, offices, and restaurants. The farm or the rural place surrounds the bedroom place.
Where the land in "absentee ownership" is very great and increasing, there is a need for someone to handle it… just handle it. You can hear the new urban dweller: Do anything… just something to let me return to the farm or at least enjoy the little time that I spend there. The time on the farm is no longer fun. It is the second job where problems pile up, maintenance is not done, vandalism always suspected, and those few steers over-graze pastures "up on the hill." Off-farm sources now provide 85 to 95 percent of income for farm households. (Large-scale farms, representing only 7 percent of farm operations, are responsible for 70 percent of total farm sales.) No one is watching out for timber poachers and there is not enough time to follow up on the people dumping trash by the roadside. "Handling it" is more than the average farmer can do and stay in business. Farm work is the big workload, modest return, and possible health care problem of the aged that collectively motivate people to go to the cities.
The Rural System Land Force is a response. It is one of the four major parts of Rural System. The others are The Tracts, the Q Works, and the set of diverse enterprises or Groups. It provides a reasonable solution with ten important parts for employees, for local children to stay in the area, and for all concerned about town and regional strength and stability. These parts are:
| Satisfaction for people looking for identity, purpose, and meaning in theie work |
Since the industrial revolution, farming has been unable to benefit mightily from those concepts. Now that people are leaving the farms and forests, new needs and organizations are needed. The Land Force is a smart work force. (Story 19 was told about it in Chapter 2.) It provides most employment opportunities. It tends the land according to plans. It uses knowledge about the land never before available and in a useful mapped form. It uses equipment safely with experience. It implements on the lands and waters the recommendations derived from research. It keeps the records and makes the changes needed for quantified improvements.
The diverse activities are a delight for the average worker who loves the outdoors, never wants a dull moment, always is looking for something new to see, and is usually seeking creative expression or some new concept to implement. There is equipment to make and maintain. There are fertilizers to apply in unique, new ways, new crops to prepare, and new vertebrate damage techniques to use. When crises arise, as they are well known to do, when projects of unusual size arise, then a unified work force is available.
Composed mostly of local people with rural experience, some returning from an attempt at urban life and from military service, the Land Force will hire superior students of colleges and universities with an early enthusiasm for outdoor and socially-relevant work. They will be encouraged to live in select areas and to "settle," especially in Rural System's environmentally superior building clusters provided for rent or sale or in Rural System Inns, the system of bread-and-breakfast homes throughout the region (Chapter 25).
The distinctive, comfortable work clothing brings pride to the members, added safety, and marketing gains for Rural System. Equipment is moved and shared, aided by linear programming optimization. Energy costs of transportation (people, tours, products, workers, etc.) are minimized by computer models. Equipment and skills are displayed in public fairs, tourist events, and special occasions.
Employment is encouraged within the Land Force, partially because it is the "industry or economic development" that all rural localities seek. It requires low capital investment, is easy on the land, retains a tax base, and justifies the historical roots that were once and remain the base for producing urban raw products and services.
Recognizing that in the future the world will be full of thousands of refugee camps and communities, the Land Force develops working procedures and equipment systems for different ecological communities to serve these camps. The Rural System paradigm will be encouraged for use within them. Early superior service by the Land Force will reduce major competition for government and foundation contracts for superior, humanizing services.
Power Places
There are training sessions, most in the field. These are conducted in Power Places. Not just a fancy name for the same old schools, Power Places is a for-profit enterprise within the Land Force that causes behaviors to change that improves life quality and allows individuals, families, and groups to prosper financially. It is especially valuable for bringing the behavior of the Land Force to the desired level and keeping it that way in a dynamically changing group of men and women. The end result, its objective, is to move youths and other people to regular behavior with incomes that allows them to sustain within bounds a high quality of life (defined by a set of personally-stated objectives).
Not locations, symbolically the power places are in the minds and bodies of world citizens, together. Power Places is a system designed to give people sufficient power over their environment and social conditions to allow them to reach and then sustain that condition. It is based on behaviors and thought patterns of individuals or small groups (like families) being profitable. It is more directed toward reducing costs and losses than toward "making money." It is a profit-making group with collective income from:
Rural public schools, unable to stop their drop-out rates and unable to resolve conflicting social interests and wars in athletics, busses, religion, etc. are ignored and "gone around" to offer a reasonable advanced private educational system to willing individuals. It is dependent upon the Internet and for occasional travel to highly-developed sites and meetings with mentors.
The broad view is that Power Places moves willing people, or those that can be motivated, into an objectives-oriented life system with measured objectives, all with fairly clear financial costs of achieving them … and with present-discounted monetary profit. It pays new parents of children to achieve a set of competencies and behaviors in life and accident insurance policies (reducing future costs and heading children into Power Places) It measures achievement and, once there is statistically significant evidence for it, certifies it and moves on with refreshers and attention to new desired behavior. It awards children prizes, trips, and various awards for achieving certain actions (self awareness of abilities and limits of others), physical attainments (weight, health status, etc.) and for core abilities (manners, speed reading, keyboarding, courtesy, speaking, writing, algebra, logic, elementary probability, elementary programming). Education "counts" for students for their near future (and as planned by Power Places for the distant future). Students progress at their own pace; rapid learning is removed as a requirement (except as it relates to costs). High fossil energy costs for school bus transportation are reduced by effective distance learning. It conducts distance-learning courses, augmented with small group conferences, demonstrations, and practical work sessions. It relies heavily on the precept of maximum significant desired behavioral change per unit dollar and teaches this concept by its very use. It employs high-technology education devices and uses such devices in continual evaluation of their effectiveness. Physical fitness, not athletics, is emphasized for lasting health. Competitive spirit is believed innate and developed over life and need not be equal in all. New sports of the Novosports Group are suggested.
Power Places provides youths hourly wage employment in healthful outdoor work experiences improving the environment (that primarily of Rural System). Rural System Guides are a specialized few of the Land Force members taught here. The social amenities of superior guide service are as much a part of their program as safety, first aid, emergency protocols, local history and dominant nature observations. Power Places moves high school youth out of failing streams flowing toward drop out, providing alternative certified performance for employers, and reducing social costs. It has the clear objective of moving students into a program of study better than that of the current very-diverse, wasteful-of-time, over-priced, grade-inflated, undergraduate college/university program.
It provides work-study programs. It works with the Courts in projects for some convicted people, and develops challenges and adventures. Meaningful, high-content computer games are profitable and beneficial to students and point to similar jobs. It conducts special programs for the stressed youth of broken homes. (It seeks the best current strategies for reducing drug- and alcohol-related influences, likely to be the major deterrent and detractor in this planned Rural System Group activity.)
The Line
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New pressures from rural areas for education-quality, energy-shortage risks, changing student numbers, modes of publication and the use of the Internet, and a changing work force now have reshaped that image. It is hardly recognizable. Simple analogies are no longer are relevant.
A time line here suggests how The Line provides qualified youth of the City and region opportunities to engage in quality work experience on System projects. After work on contract research projects, students integrate their profit-producing concepts and thesis/dissertations products into the enterprise during the next year, and then decisions are made about future work.
Rural System saw that a new pattern was needed. It was called the Rural System Line (hereinafter the Line). It is a cascade of action over many years. It includes meaningful work for high school junior and seniors during summers; co-op-like work for students in the college (work-study on campus); Master of Science and Ph.D. degree projects as requested and contracted with Rural System (especially for those having done co-op work); and contracted post-graduate employment (with assistance from the Land Force) for at least one year to test, prove, and make operational within the enterprise the thesis or project results from the contract.
The Line works with youth of the area, reducing their losses to "the outside" and increasing the payoffs from early involvement in career choice, from active participation in desirable projects, and from having a meaningful base from which to work while in college. Rural System policy was to have no more "dusty theses on the shelf" from its contract work. Students have a job when they finish school and have incentives for good work for they know their projects must "work." Of course, after project completion, they are free to pursue work elsewhere, including within the Land Force.
Early One Morning … Another story
It is not difficult to imagine four staff of the Land Force arriving promptly for an appointment with a landowner. Today, the field reconnaissance is to be started after several meetings. Computer maps are in their field computers. One moves off in her quiet motorbike to a distant corner to locate a survey marker and get a good GPS (satellite) location, verify the age, density, and mixture of a large stand, take 5 soil samples at specified sports, all located using GPS technology. These would enhance the quality of the preliminary soils map of the entire ownership. They had gotten in hand from office work over 50 map layers, 50 factors that can be mapped for the entire area. Single maps are not useful, only the many combinations of them that are now possible for the ownership.
The other three men from the truck unloaded safely a small 4-wheel all terrain vehicle, communicated with the biker and with headquarters, and then moved along roads and across pastures and field edges to observe plants, make soil collections, measure down- log densities and the depth of the soil litter layers, note fire scars, pin-point springs and moist areas (using plant indicators), and confirm wildlife reports by observing tracks and other sign. They took digital images at known points (for return and measured change), measured stand density in pines (preparing for the false claims of bark beetle attacks, which follow tree death resulting from moisture stress of the trees.) Points were mapped for stream crossings, water deflection for livestock watering, and vegetation patterns along stream sides were sketched. They made careful notes of indicator organisms, plants and animals. Few people know how strongly related these are to natural conditions and factors. To see the plant, to see or hear the animal, calls up from within experts whole paragraphs, whole chapters of knowledge of what must have been present and is now present for the plant or creature to be present and observed. Stored in the computer, it need not be repeated, it need not be re-learned…only refined and improved. The staff was always in the mode of creating an expert system about the presence of each animal or plant species. The computer was prepared to process (for example) …If species A is present, then there must be present most of the time factor a, b, c, d or e, f, g and b, and more than h multiplied by 12, and at least the cube root of the amount of factor j. To see species A gives the staff of the Land Force with their computer all of those factors. There are databases being built for each species. On most ownerships of the region, there are over 200 large animal species that can be readily seen within season, over 1000 plant species. The Land Force staff is continually building and adding to these knowledge bases and they are being used to make maps. Those maps are being used to show where the best places are for certain species of pasture grass, where predator species may be most abundant, where moisture stress is most likely…thus beetle attacks most likely…thus where stand management of density (including not planting!) is essential to avoid bark beetle attacks… thus avoiding pressures to make pesticide applications with their costs and harmful secondary effects.
Each vehicle is equipped with a recording GPS unit so that at the end of the day, a map can be made of the roads and trails followed by each vehicle. (A record of proof-of-presence is thus established.) These are combined and a map of desired corridors is quickly sketched for future work and detailed planning. Timely and energy-conserving access is the requirement along with minimum land being taken from production and committed to roadways. The roadway is always considered a difficult computer-aided decision. It has two linked parts. Once it is decided to connect two points on the map (e.g., main road to a timber stand to be harvested) if built (or retained and not replanted) the land itself has foregone production values, then there must be included cost of construction including water diversions within the roadbed, culverts and bridges, cost of maintenance, cost of equipment use (e.g., logging truck depreciation and maintenance costs are much greater on overly-steep roads), costs of reducing off site damage (e.g., silt moving into trout streams), and risks of potential litigation costs related to silt, pollution, water management, viewscapes, and other real or imagined losses…all over 150 years.
Erosion crisis points and pasture units needing immediate restoration are noted on the maps and these are fed in a computerized report to the Pasture and Rangeland Group and contact with the landowner for specialized project work. Similarly, muskrat workings at the corner of a small pond dam are noted and automated reports are sent to the Furbearer Group and to Pest Force. This sign of potential damage, even loss of the entire pond from the animals' burrowing, needs to become part of the inventory of work to be done. As elsewhere, each Group is working for the other Groups. While each works on effectively achieving its own project, each is promoting opportunities for gains or reducing losses with other Groups and thus profits for all groups.
Relations among Rural System Tracts became evident. Future trips to several areas could be combined, trails connected, and marketing of combined interests and opportunities from several areas could be achieved. The men and women working in the Force achieved locally much of the spirit, friendships, and collegial can-do spirit of recent members of US military groups.
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