More about Cowbirds

[savannah]

Originally Posted by Equilibrium

"One thing I am wondering since I don't travel. We have miles and miles of vast open land here between towns. Is it like that in the east?" Uh huh.... miles and miles of vast open land planted with Monsanto GMO'ed corn and soybeans. Real sustainable, eh?

Its not like that here. There is an enormous amount of land not being farmed or grazed. There is also a lot of farm and grazing land. There are only two large cities space way apart, a few medium sized cities, a slew of small towns and quite a few ghost towns and/or nearly ghost towns.

Oftentimes only portions of a section of land is suitable for economic use and sometimes whole sections. The state varies a lot in landscape from one end to the other.

Oil and gas are the economic bread and butter of this state along with agriculture. My grandparents both had land leased to oil and gas companies (we still do) and small areas of their land where the equipment or pump station was which had little effect on the rest of their land which they farmed (it's still leased to a farmer). Its not always like that but it often times is. I can't imagine the state without oil and gas production. No one ever complains here about the price of leases. Everyone always says "don't ever sell your mineral rights even if you sell the land".

I am not against wind power myself but I haven't looked into it deeply. There is a lot of wind here and I think I'd prefer it to a nuclear plant or coal. I really need to look into this one so I won't make a stupid remark but I don't see them much around but I am duct taping my mouth shut for now on it. Natural Gas is plentiful here and its currently so over stockpiled in storage that the stock is practically worth zero right now, the warm winter didn't help. Right now its called the "Widow Maker" but that ebbs and flows from one year to the next. It was very high about 6 years ago.

I don't think Oklahoma could survive economically without oil, gas, agriculture and cattle. Its a matter of trying to do both, use the and and preserve the land. The land being used for crops or grazing isn't the land being engulfed by red cedars. Its just land someone owns that sort of just sits there.

[savannah]

List of states by population - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I got curious and looked up population by state. Its something I need to keep in mind when trying to understand what presents problems in other places. There is no way what works or doesn't work or attitudes in one place would necessarily apply somewhere else. Illinois has 231.5 people per square mile and Okla. has only 55.22 people per square mile. Thats got to make a big difference.

[Bulucanagria]

I think that that is skewed by the Chicago area. Most of Illinois is not nearly that dense, although it's still more dense than most of Oklahoma, which has no cities so large as to affect the numbers to that extent.