Remembering the Forgotten War, 75 years later

 

This year will mark the 75^th anniversary of the start of the Korean War.

 

Given society’s increasing disinterest in history, will it be remembered? Will its participants be remembered properly?

 

The chances aren’t good. A cursory look through online event calendars for various WNY communities doesn’t find any special ceremonies around June 25^th (when the war started) or July 1^st (when the US entered the war).

 

That, sadly, is par for the course. For many years, this conflict has been known as “the Forgotten War” because, collectively, we as a nation have ignored it, its meaning, and its sacrifices, likely because it was bookended by an epic World War and the controversies of the Vietnam War.

 

It’s rare that we discuss it and it’s rarer yet that we give the participants their just recognition and appreciation. Consider this: Almost everyone can readily identify the center point of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC -- the restrained yet powerful Vietnam Wall -- but how many can identify the primary image of the Korean War Memorial?

 

For those who don’t know, the memorial, finally built in 1995, is a collection of 19 statues of American soldiers trudging across rough terrain, harried looks on their faces anticipating the next surprise attack.

That haunting memorial perfectly represents the Korean experience. It was a frightening war, full of dreadful fighting reminiscent of World War I’s close-quarters bloodbaths and stressful horrors of scaling a steep hill, wondering if the barrel of an enemy’s gun would be at one’s head at the next rise. Our soldiers paid a heavy price in life and limb and those who survived saw things on a daily basis that no one should ever see, memories they carry with them to this day.

 

It started off horribly as more than 1,000 inexperienced and under-equipped young soldiers were cut down in one of the first American battles of the war, U.S. and U.N. forces greatly underestimating the power of the North Koreans. The body count remained high throughout the three-year occupation when battles in extremely rugged and dangerous mountain terrain became the norm. The war was so violent that come 1953 — after both sides each lost more than 1 million soldiers — it ended with an armistice, a cease-fire that left a ravaged land and its two primary nations in no better shape than before the war.

 

It was a brutal affair, but so few know that. Ask anyone to list in order the three U.S. military involvements of the past 100 years that had the highest number of casualties. Most respondents will answer incorrectly. They will answer in a hurry, and correctly, with number one (World War II) and number two (the Vietnam conflict). After some stumbling over a response for the third slot, most everyone will come back with our country’s most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, responsible for more than 7,000 deaths.

That is the wrong answer. As horrific and heartbreaking as that death toll is, it is dwarfed by that of the Korean War. The bloody conflict accounted for the deaths of more than 34,000 Americans and the wounding of 103,000 more from 1950 to 1953.

 

It’s been a travesty that most Americans are uninformed in regard to something so great in scale of sacrifice. It seems that their only knowledge of the War is MASH, the classic television series and, even then, many people see that only as a piece of pop culture rather than storytelling built around the harsh realities of war. 

 

We need to use the 75^th anniversary as a means to finally celebrate the real-life heroes who inspired that show, especially since time is of the essence. Less than 11% of those who survived their service in the War are still alive today. They are in their twilight years and they won’t be with us much longer. The youngest of the Korean War veterans turns 90 this year -- the youngest!

 

This year, we need to give them the respect that is long past due, perhaps a ceremony and especially a heartfelt “thank you.” The Korean War veterans haven’t been told those two simple, yet powerful, words enough in their lifetimes. Let them know they weren’t forgotten.

 

 

From the 08 March 2025 Greater Niagara Newspapers and Wellsville Sun

Raising chickens brings value and values

 

The 2020s have been a rather “interesting” decade for chickens.

 

First, there was man’s pandemic.

 

The early days of covid saw a run on toilet paper…and a run on chicks. Hatcheries and retailers like Tractor Supply and Runnings that sell baby chickens couldn’t keep up with the demand.

 

So-called panic buying (something I would prefer to call “preparedness buying”) for these creatures had set in for two reasons.

 

First, there were fears of food insecurity. There were concerns that retailers could be shutdown as governments chased covid. And, there was the very real issue of an egg shortage, one that didn’t last too long, when the distribution networks had to make the sudden change from restaurants, schools, and food processors to consumers suddenly finding themselves homebound and egg-hungry.  

 

Secondly, there was a strong desire to be self-sufficient, just in case. As the lockdowns deepened, breadwinners were concerned that they might not see work again for months if it was a repeat of the 1918 flu pandemic.

 

So, with free time on their hands and a whole bunch of unknowns before them, it made sense for homeowners to build a backyard farm that could provide eggs and meat.

 

Now, that’s been followed up by the birds’ own pandemic.

 

Since 2022, avian flu -- more appropriately the response to it -- has resulted in the mass slaughter of 166 million chickens in the United States to keep it at bay, to no avail.

 

This has had a significant impact on the supply and cost of eggs. At the end of 2021, the average cost of a dozen eggs was $1.79. Today, it’s $4.95.

 

That quantum leap in pricing has many families now, like in 2020, considering starting a miniature chicken farm to weather this crisis that seemingly has no end in sight.   

 

When they do that, they’ll join millions of American with backyard farms who, among them, are my family.

 

We went all-in with chickens within a month of the start of the covid lockdowns. It was a long time coming. My oldest daughter had been asking for years. We knew that we’d get chickens, sometime. 2020 added immediacy to that.

 

Since then, we’ve finally come out ahead. When you invest in your own chicken farm know there’s financial value in it, but it takes considerable time to get there. You have significant upfront costs of coops, fencing, food and water containers, heaters, and more. After that initial start-up, your costs then go into cruise control – you’re buying feed and not much else (except maybe more chickens).   

 

But, you’ll find, especially if you have kids, that there’s something bigger in it -- if it doesn’t bring value soon, it will bring values immediately.  

 

The lessons that chicken rearing has taught my oldest are priceless. The hobby farm has added complexity and responsibility to her day-to-day life. Once, her chores might have mirrored those of her peers – pick-up after yourself, help with the dishes, give dad a hand raking the leaves. Now, she has living, breathing animals depending on her. 

 

She has to lock them in their coops at night so the minks don’t get them. She has to let them out into their runs in the morning. She has to keep them fed and watered. She has to clean out their nesting boxes a few times a week. She has to harvest and clean the eggs. She has to be cognizant of hawks, eagles, and foxes when letting the chickens run free in the yard.

 

That’s a lot of work for adult, let alone a kid. But, she loves it. Oh, she might complain when digging up the soiled saw dust shavings, but she adores those birds, the breakfasts and her little farm. As a matter of fact, over these five years she’s accumulated chicken do-dads – stuffed animals, Christmas ornaments, books and more. You don’t do that when you’re burned out. You do that when you enjoy what you’re doing.

 

Those chickens have become part of her identity…in more ways than one. These old-school lessons have taught her plenty about life and death, animal husbandry, scheduling, farming, health and safety, inventory management, biology, budgeting, food preparation, work ethic, love, and sacrifice.

 

So, future chicken farmers, don’t second guess what 2025’s latest crisis will make you do. Your hobby farm will do more than serve up breakfast. It will serve a higher purpose, too: Not only will you be raising chickens, you’ll also be raising capable and loving human beings.

 

 

From the 01 March 2025 Greater Niagara Newspapers and Wellsville Sun   

Drifting into highway safety

 

I wouldn’t be surprised if Niagara County commuters are battling carpal tunnel syndrome. It’s been a winter of white-knuckle driving as it seems like every day, for weeks on end, we’ve had to grip our steering wheels like we’re trying to squeeze the juice out of them when navigating our snow-covered rural roads.

 

That’s no fault of our plow drivers, who I count as the best in the USA and Canada. They’ve been busting their butts, plowing and carving at all hours.

 

We’ve received plenty of snow. But, that’s not the problem. Snow is manageable. Wind, on the other hand, is difficult to keep up with. A snowplow can make a pass and, on the return trip, it can look like the road was never touched. Winds in excess of 15 miles per hour, with many days seeing gusts above 30, have been the norm the winter, leading to significant drifting and whiteouts…and countless accidents.

 

This was most dramatically seen earlier this week when an eight-car pile-up happened in Gasport. It started with a two-vehicle head-on, but quickly devolved into more as incoming drivers had zero visibility. A video of the aftermath can be found on Facebook, shared by someone who was in the accident. Luckily, she wasn’t hurt and just one person was taken by ambulance. But, if you’ve seen the video you know that’s a miracle – the carnage was jaw-dropping.

 

Those reading this column who are of a certain vintage likely don’t recollect the roads being like this years ago. Even then, with vehicles less capable of handling the roads (before the era of SUVs, all-wheel drive, and trucks in abundance), the drives seemed less stressful. That’s because they were: Snow used to accumulate in large drifts rather than drifting across the road.  

 

It all goes back to past farming practices. At one time, there were more -- and smaller -- farms. In 1954, there were 4.78 million farms in the United States, averaging 242 acres in size. Those farmers used hedgerows as boundaries for either their property or fields of differing use. Those hedgerows became windbreaks and prevented blowing snow from spreading all across the land.

 

Fast forward to 2025. Because of the ongoing transformation of America away from an agrarian society, coupled with developments in farming technology and economics, it takes fewer farming enterprises than it once did to feed the masses. There are now 1.8 million farms in the US and they are much larger. Today’s operations purchased those smaller ones that dominated days gone by and added them to their property portfolios. By doing so, there is less of a need for property-delineating hedges. And, with a focus on larger, single-crop fields, there is less of a need for crop-dividing strips of trees.

 

Just as I did with plow drivers, I’m not going to fault farmers for our predicament. It’s an unintended consequence of an entirely different industry and economy. Every hedgerow equals a loss of revenue. In a state like this in which it’s difficult to do business, let alone a business the health of which hinges entirely on the prospect of good weather, the same business the profits of which are decimated by things such as federal milk policy, literally every single penny matters. Theirs is a struggle most of us cannot relate to.  

 

To make the roads safer, it will take local and state governments working with those farmers.

 

You certainly can’t ask farmers or local road crews to put up snow fences. We have too many roads. Niagara County alone has a whopping 1,700 miles of pavement. Can you imagine the man hours it would take to fence even a fraction of that? 

 

Living snow fences, like the aforementioned hedgerows, are the answer. They worked when my parents were kids. They worked when I was a kid growing up on a farm road. And, these fences don’t have to be trees.

 

With the development of the state budget underway, Albany should create voluntary incentive programs for farmers in troublesome areas to plant windbreaks. Incentives are necessary because we can’t ask someone to forgo revenue from abandoning fair-sized strips of arable land. 

 

Some states grant significant property tax deductions for the use of windbreaks. Indiana, for example, assesses windbreaks at a rate around $1 per acre. Farmland in New York is assessed at an average of $4,150 an acre. If we had a $1 assessment here for land repurposed as public benefit, imagine the participation. 

 

Other states pay outright for windbreaks. Minnesota gives farmers $1,000 an acre to leave corn stalks standing in 12 row increments through April (when done over a mile stretch of road that is one acre). That contract runs in one-year installments, and allows for use of other barriers, so a farmer isn’t bound if he chooses to alternate crops. The state’s Department of Transportation keeps this focused, in terms of safety and cost, on a few thousand specific trouble zones that are adjacent to state highways.   

 

These states have shown, quite successfully, that there is a cure for snowy roads that make our drives so dicey. We just need some local and state officials to hedge their bets with hedgerows, getting help from – and at the same time helping -- the ag industry.  

 

 

From the 22 February 2025 Greater Niagara Newspapers and Wellsville Sun