Our hearts go out to those in Eastern North Dakota who have experienced the severity that Mother Nature sometimes unleashes. I remember a line from the FFA Creed, "I know the joys and discomforts of farm life." Receiving unwelcome weather is certainly a discomfort.

Another discomfort, one that we can do something about, will be listening to the uninformed who will now, as they have in the past, blame farmer draining for causing the flood. Geologists familiar with flowing water say farmer drainage can add between three to seven per cent to stream flows. From my vantage point, I would say man usually slows, rather than increases, the flow rate of streams, because roads with culverts usually act as dikes to hold water back.

On a similar note of displeasure, our local USFWS employee has been saying the USFWS is building our local economy by promoting eco-tourism, which is the fastest growing type of tourism in the nation. I find it very ironic that they promote themselves as friends to tourists at the same time they have fenced out the public on their newly acquired property next to the Lake Alice Wildlife Refuge.

Equally unpleasant and misleading is a fundraising ad the USFWS has placed in the Readers Digest. The ad mis-states that we are loosing 100,000 acres of wetlands per year and each acre of wetland can filter 7.3 million gallons of water per year. (7.3 million gallons would be water 22 feet deep on an acre.) I have seen data that indicates wetland acres are actually on the increase in the United States.

We cannot do anything about the hand that Mother Nature has dealt us but we can speak out against the false and misleading information the USFWS and other eco-terror organizations would try to get us to believe.