Go Green

By John Sutter

Reuters reports that chicken manure is being used increasingly as a fertilizer in this region of the country — as conventional fertilizer prices shoot up. It’s becoming relatively less expensive to truck chicken waste around. The waste from farms in northeast Oklahoma is being used as far away as Lawton, in the southwest part of the state.

The story points out that the fact that chicken poop is high in nitrogen and phosphorus is both a blessing and a potential curse. Oklahoma is suing poultry companies for allegedly polluting the state’s waters and choking out aquatic life.

The news agency reports from Kansas City:

… with commercial fertilizer prices so high — over $100 an acre in some cases — farmers far from poultry operations see the economic benefits of buying bird waste, even in light of transportation costs.

“It’s a fantastic alternative to fertilizer,” said Kansas State University soil specialist Doug Shoup. “Of all manure, it has the highest concentration of nitrogen, good calcium, good sulphur, and a bit of a liming effect. It is a little bit like Miracle Grow.”

By John Sutter

In a much-delayed decision, a federal judge on Monday denied the state of Oklahoma’s request for poultry companies to stop spreading manure because it could degrade water quality and put the public in danger.

That ruling does not necessarily affect Attorney General Drew Edmondson’s case against poultry companies. Edmondson filed a lawsuit in 2005 and the trial is expected to begin next year.

Still, the ruling — which came after hearings in March –is not sitting well with environmentalists. Poultry groups applauded the decision.

Read more in this story by Jim Stafford.

Poultry waste is thought to be a problem because it is spread on land in such large quantities. Like other fecal matter, it can run into rivers, where it contributes to processes that sap the water of oxygen. That can kill aquatic life, and bacteria from the feces can make people who swim in the rivers ill.

In his ruling, Judge Gregory K. Frizzell says people, cattle and septic tanks may also contribute to pollution problems. The state did not prove that water quality and public health are in jeopardy because of chicken poop specifically, he wrote.

The ruling follows, but was not related to, a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which calls for more monitoring of concentrated animal farms, like the chicken farms in northeast Oklahoma and Arkansas. Based on figures from that report and from Oklahoma City, chickens in two counties on the Oklahoma-Arkansas border produce more fecal waste per year — 471,000 tons — than all of the people in Oklahoma City.

By John Sutter

Millions of chickens raised in two counties on the Oklahoma-Arkansas border create more manure in a single year than all of the people in Oklahoma City, according to figures from a government report issued Wednesday.The 14.3 million chickens in that area, and large-scale animal farms nationwide, may pose a threat to human health and the environment, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report. However, federal agencies don’t monitor air and water quality well enough to assess nationwide trends and possible threats posed by industrial-scale animal farming, the GAO report concludes.

The report says large animal farms may pose greater threats to the environment and human health when they are concentrated in small geographic areas. The report specifically mentions the Arkansas-Oklahoma border. The chickens in the two northwest Arkansas counties produce a total of 471,000 tons of manure per year, according to the document. That’s more than 1½ times the amount of feces that people in Oklahoma City produced in the 2007 fiscal year. The report says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency should develop a comprehensive air quality monitoring program for animal farms, and should keep a national database on the industry.

The GAO report says efforts by farmers to store waste and limit the manure they put on their land is helpful but should be supplemented with more thorough government pollution monitoring.

The rise in large-scale farms

Between 1982 and 2002, the number of large farms increased 234 percent in the United States, from 3,594 to 11,995, a government report found. The number of large broiler-chicken farms increased 1,187 percent to 2,227.

A greater percentage of animals are being raised on industrial-size farms. In 1982, 43 percent of animals were raised on large farms; that number jumped to 55 percent by 2002. Some individual farms produce more waste than large cities such as Philadelphia.

Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office

Background

The issue of chicken-farm pollution is the subject of a 2005 lawsuit filed by state Attorney General Drew Edmondson against several poultry companies.

By John Sutter

The Los Angeles Times has a story this morning on the 1,000 acre switchgrass field in the Oklahoma Panhandle. A reporter talked with the gentleman who’s growing the biofuels crop, which is native to this state and the Great Plains, and can be grown on marginal land:

Curtis Raines describes himself as “just a dumb old farmer” who’s not afraid to ask an obvious question: Why grow corn for fuel when it could be used to feed hungry people?

“That just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” Raines said.

State leaders are banking on that kind of common sense, and have invested in grass-based biofuels research. As I reported in The Oklahoman, the issue rests on the ability of industry to transform the grasses into fuel. That hasn’t been done on commercial scales, and is the focus of much of the state-funded research:

About one-fifth of the corn crop in the United States is converted into ethanol, a fuel that can be mixed with gasoline and then used in standard automobile engines.

Ethanol once was seen as a silver bullet in the nation’s battle for energy independence, and, to some extent, the battle against global warming.

But corn ethanol started drawing heated criticism late last year as food prices jumped around the world, putting basic nutrition out of the hands of many of the world’s poor. Jean Ziegler, the U.N.’s independent expert on the right to food, called food-to-fuel schemes a “crime against humanity.”

Officials say Oklahoma is free from any of that blame because it is not much of a corn-producing state. The 2008 corn crop here is expected to cover 330,000 acres, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s about 5 percent of the state’s total crop acreage.

Researchers and officials say switchgrass, which is native to the state and the Great Plains, will do better here. It will grow on marginal land not suitable for food crops. If managed properly, it wouldn’t contribute to food shortages.

Nathanael Greene, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, warned against taking the concept too far.

“It’s important that we not latch onto a crop like switchgrass as a panacea, because we could start harvesting corn fields and planting them with switchgrass and cause the same amount of complications — and reduce the amount of food available — as we do now,” Greene said.

“I don’t think any technology is inherently evil, or inherently the solution,” he added.

By John SutterNew York Times columnist Thomas Friedman joked that he felt somewhat out of place giving a lecture on the coming “green revolution” in an oil and gas state like Oklahoma.

In a speech in downtown Oklahoma City today, the Pulitzer Prize winner said that America won’t know that the environmental revolution has come until “you see bodies by the side of the road.” Those will be the bodies of oil and gas companies, which may not be able to adapt to the clean energy era, he said.

Friedman’s overall message, though, was one of optimism. He laid out a number of crises facing the world — climate change, biodiversity loss, overpopulation — and said that the United States and Oklahoma are amply equipped to tackle the problems with the right support from the state and federal governments. The country and state’s success in doing so will decide who controls global politics and succeeds in the world economy this century, he said.

“You can see these as problems or you can see them as the bird of the demand for a whole new industry,” he said. “Our country, the United States of America, has to lead this industry.”

The goal of this new world order? “Who can invent a source of abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons.”

Friedman, who is promoting his new book, “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” said all sectors of the economy, including energy companies, can be part of the change. But he said current efforts to green the economy are more of a self-aggrandizing party than a genuine revolution. He referenced a litany of “green” self-help books with tips on saving the planet and products as obscure as “vegan condoms and solar-powered vibrators,” which are supposed to denote a new era of environmental thinking.

Forces of environmental change are bubbling up from the bottom of America, he said, but “brain-dead” politicians in Washington D.C. have not acted in a proportional manner.

He advocated for a tax on carbon, which he said would put a true cost on the pollution, health risks, climate change, biodiversity loss, loss of national security and lessened respect in the world that fossil fuels create for the United States and around the world.

Friedman likened this energy and environment revolution to the Internet and technology movement of the 1990s. The difference, he said, is that clean energy offers no functional benefit over dirty energy — your lights work the same whether coal or wind powered them. Computer groups offered new products with entirely new functions. As such, energy deserves a push from the government to get started, he said, adding that he has more faith in the power of American innovation and capitalism than government forces to make the changes necessary. Both revolutions will have to operate by a “change or die” philosophy, he said.

He railed against politicians, including John McCain, who are preaching drilling for more oil as the solution to the energy crisis. That is analogous to companies at the dawn of the computer revolution calling for more typewriters and better carbon-copy paper, he said. (See video at top of post for more on that)

The foreign affairs columnist referenced the fact that Oklahoma biofuels and agriculture can play a part in the “green revolution.” He also mentioned U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Tulsa, by name on several occasions. Inhofe has become known nationally for saying global warming is a “hoax.” Friedman said Inhofe is wrong on that point, but, whatever you believe about global warming, America needs to become more efficient to tackle environmental problems and to ensure it has a top spot in the global economy.

He listed several major problems facing the world. All can be dealt with through innocation and market forces, with a government push, he said.

I’ll list some below:

1. Climate change: The weather is becoming “weirder,” not necessarily hotter, he said. Places that are hot are getting hotter, places that are dry are getting drier, places that are wet are getting wetter, and hurricanes are getting stronger, he said. He also said climate models are becoming more and more troublesome over time. For instance, it recently was thought that ice in the Arctic Circle would disappear by 2050. Current projections say that’s more likely to happen in 2012, he said.

2. Biodiversity: According to Conservation International, a new species goes extinct every 20 minutes. “We are the first generation that is going to have to think like Noah, and save the last two pairs” of animals of each species, he said.

3. Petropolitics: The U.S. spends $700 billion supporting some of the worst regimes on earth, he said. That’s because we have to buy their oil. “We’re in a war on terrorism and we’re funding both sides,” he said.

4. Energy and Natural Resources: Friedman said there are “too many American carbon copies” in the world, meaning that more people in developing countries want to live like Americans — they want to have big houses, drives cars over long distances and use lots of electricity. There aren’t enough resources around for that to happen, he said, and new America-like places are sprouting up all the time.

“If we don’t redefine what it means to be an American in resource terms, you’re going to see resource demand go through the roof,” he said.

5. Population Growth: There will be a billion more people on earth by 2020, and not enough resources to go around.

Some basics: Friedman’s speech was sponsored by the business school at Oklahoma State University as part of a lecture series. Tickets were $75, and the talk mostly was attended by older people who were wearing suits. A number of students also came.

Friedman is not the final word on these subjects, of course, although he is a well-known authority on globalization and global politics. Student groups have protested his talks in the past, saying that his support for military intervention in the Middle East and his usually hands-off global economic policies, which some say hurt the world’s poor. Students from Brown University reportedly threw a pie in his face recently (the clip is on youtube).

I’d love to hear what you all think about his talk. People in the audience seemed to give a mixed response, with most standing to applaud at the end, but no crazy cheers or anything like that. Nearly 900 people registered for the event.

By John Sutter

Here are some environment/conservation/nature stories you may have missed in recent days.

1. Lesser prairie chickens could be pushed onto the endangered species list because of wind farms in western Oklahoma. The funny little birds (be sure to watch some videos of the birds before you form an opinion on them) are terrified of anything that’s tall — and see wind turbines as hide-outs for their predators, like eagles. Some of my colleagues joked that maybe the birds just need a good counseling session. It’s not that their habitat is necessarily disappearing, it’s just that their skittishness keeps wind-developed land off limits.

2. Black bears are making their way further into the forests of northeast Oklahoma. Could be a problem because more people live in northeast Oklahoma (and they’re filing more complaints) than in southeast Oklahoma, where the bears have lived for a longer period of time. More from the Nature Conservancy.

3 and 4. New developments in efforts to get chicken manure out of northeast Oklahoma, where it’s thought to cause substantial water pollution: a feces factory, of sorts, plans to turn the chicken waste into liquid fertilizer and fuel; and a program to truck the waste out of the region is stirring controversy, as some fear pollution woes will be spread across the state.

5. Locavores — or proponents of local and sustainable foods — are gaining force in Oklahoma. Interestingly, though, farmers, farmers market organizers and the head of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative say there’s not nearly enough local food to meet increasing demand.

As a response to some of you who have taken issue with my portrayal of Sailor Orchard, I want you to know that I  found the peach orchard to be one of the most entertaining stops on a recent local farm tour (see video below). The host was a real character, and if I took some of his peaches home, I would have had a story to tell when I shared them with friends or family. That, I felt, was the point local foods advocates were trying to make — that meeting farmers is memorable, and it adds something to the eating experience. Mr. Mearkle is a former sailor, and a fun, outspoken one at that.

A tour with the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture visits Sunrise Acres, an organic farm run by two retirees in Newcastle.

By John Sutter

There’s a movement passing across dinner tables in Oklahoma. Local foods appear to be coming back in a big way.

The number of farmers markets in the state has grown 75 percent — to 49 — in the past year. Sales at the online Oklahoma Food Cooperative are up 70 percent over those in 2007, with $65,000 worth of Oklahoma food sold each month to subscribers. (disclosure: my household has a membership to the coop)

The reason for the changes are many. Some people are concerned about health scares associated with industrially produced foods. Some worry about growth hormones and antibiotics fed to cattle and chickens, or the humaneness of feedlots and confined animal feeding operations. Still others are concerned about the greenhouse gases emitted when food is trucked across the country and flown around the world to the dinner table.

Behind those arguments, though, is an overwhelming sense that society lost something when people started buying food from fluorescent-lit shelves instead of from their neighbors. What’s missing is a connection with the land and with people who still work with it, advocates of local foods, or “locavores” say.

That connection inherently involves people — farmers who consumers trust with their food, their values and their health.

Plus, there are the kooky stories. Food that comes from someone you’ve met has a story. Oklahoma seems to have plenty of them.

To learn some of them, I went on a tour of six Oklahoma farms with the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture. The non-profit group, which pushes for alternative and environmentally friendly farming methods, hosted the tour of part of an annual conference in Oklahoma.

On the bus with me were a number of types of people who were interested in local foods. There were would-be urban gardeners who just wanted tips for their tomatoes. There were traditional farmers interested in trying something new. There were farmers market coordinators and agriculture scientists. And there were a few local food pioneers — people like Cathie Greene, who requires that her customers visit her farm in far eastern Oklahoma (Wild Things Farm, in Pocola) so that they can see her methods and trust that she’s growing vegetables without chemicals and only sprays her strawberries sparsely with fungicide.

We started the morning at Oklahoma State University-Oklahoma City, where one of the city’s busiest farmers markets is held (find a full list of farmers markets in the state here).

Then we went on to meet an angry sailor who grows peaches, a goofy retiree who attacks shoulder-high weeds with a shovel, and a bison rancher who wears suspenders with t-shirts.

Meet these farmers and some others below, and be sure to check out their videos. (The one of the peach farmer is YouTube-worthy, even unedited.)

Old School Revolution

Robert Stelle and his wife Barbara have retired from their desk jobs — but don’t look for them to be resting any time soon.The couple spends many waking hours pulling weeds and picking crops from their small organic farm — Sunrise Acres — in Newcastle.Robert Stelle, with his conductor-style overalls and scraggly beard, exemplifies an interesting point about local food: it’s not new. While the “locavore” movement has caught on recent years, it’s really more of a throw-back to old times than a push for innovation.People on the tour marveled at Robert Stelle’s old-school farming tools, for example.The 61-year-old cut a triangle out of the tip of a shovel to attack the big weeds that grow in his vegetable gardens, since he doesn’t use chemicals to keep them down. And he constructed a rolling cart with a seat welded to the top so he could sit down while pulling weeds out of the ground by hand. He uses his feet to push himself back between rows of pepper and okra plants.

In a greenhouse, Stelle joked with the group about how he hasn’t had time to tidy up lately.

“It’s a rainy day job to clean this up, and it hasn’t rained in 40 days,” he said.

He said that the “canned generation,” which grew up eating food straight out of cans, is yearning for a connection with whole foods that have an origin you can explain.

Loud mouth peaches

In Blanchard, there’s a former sailor — covered in tattoos and has a mouth as filthy as Ludacris’ — who raises peaches on Sailor Orchard.Robert Mearkle, 63, yells at his peach trees like he would a Navy enlistee. He gets red in the face and flaps his hands around with limp wrists, as if mocking the plants that produce what he says are the best peaches in the state.Last year, it rained so much that his peaches were watery instead of sweet. That ticked off the irascible Mearkle so much that he took a chainsaw to 200 of his trees. There’s a big patch of mowed grass behind his house where an orchard used to be.

He teases customers relentlessly. Once he falsely told a group of older women that his watering system was actually controlled by a computer that kept all the bugs away.

They seem to come back for his juicy fruits again and again. He doesn’t put a sign out in front of his house, but people just seem to search him out, he said, mostly because the taste of fresh-picked fruit is so much different than the “cardboard” sold in grocery stores.

Mearkle seems mostly to be selling the flavor of his juicy fruit. That, and the entertainment he provides on even a short visit.

Buffalo with personality

The tour stopped for lunch at the Wichita Buffalo Company in Hinton. There, James Stepp, 56, and family served bison burgers, bison hot dogs and Oklahoma-grown watermelon, which was the sweetest I had ever tasted.

Over the lunch, he made a pitch for the other tour attendees to take up bison ranching. Mainly, he’s concerned with the healthiness of local food.

Bison meat is lean (it is a quarter of the fat of choice beef and a third of the fat of chicken, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture), and therefore is good for the overweight and the health conscious, he said.

Stepp, a short man who looks a bit like Alfred E. Neuman and was wearing a faded green t-shirt with suspenders with jeans, showed photos of his animals. He’s given them names — Pedro and Sally were the first bison he bought, in 1997 — and says he knows their personalities.

All of this plays into his marketing strategy in that it helps his customers feel connected to the animals they’re eating.

“It’s what we sell,” he said. “We sell that story and we tell it over and over and over again.”

No-hormone cheese

One of the final stops was at Christian Cheese, which is operated by George Christian in Kingfisher.

Christian doesn’t use hormones, preservatives or antibiotics in his cheeses, for those who worry about what effects those may have on people. All of the cheeses are made in a tin-roof building with doors you have to duck through and outside walls that are painted to look like a cow.

We stopped here for just a short while. Other tour members tasted the cheeses, I spend some time admiring just how many kinds he produces. Entire walls of a back room are lined with bricks and bricks of the stuff — all different colors and textures. (It also didn’t hurt that this “cold room” was a nice relief from a 100-degree day).

Check out their Web site for some family heirloom cheese recipes.

At the table

All of these stories come together on the dinner table.

According to local food proponents, eating a meal that’s grown and raised by people you know is a unique and reassuring experience.

“While the environmental benefits are important, I think the most important (benefits) are the personal satisfaction of just having a dinner table that represents a lot of friends and family and neighbors and farms,” said Doug Walton, community foods coordinator with the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture, a non-profit advocacy group. “It totally changes the whole proposition of food … it’s not just for the body, it’s for the heart and soul.”

That sounds all well and good, but for the average person it may not be possible — at least not all of the time. Some critics say local foods are too expensive for the poor. Others contend that all the cooking and shopping and thinking that has to go into an all-local diet doesn’t jive with our fast-paces lives.

Walton told me he doesn’t think local and alternatively farmed foods should take over the market. They have a niche, and that niche is growing, he said.

This was particularly evident as I left the tour. Our bus pulled into a parking lot in downtown Oklahoma City, and as everyone got off, I heard two of the tour’s leaders (Chris Kirby, director of the Farm to School program for the state Department of Agriculture, and Steve Upson, an ag consultant at the Noble Foundation) talking about how they wanted to grab something to eat.

It was 8 o’clock in the evening.

They said they wanted something quick.

Maybe … fast food?

[I don’t point that out to be critical so much as I thought it was an interesting illustration of a challenge facing the current sustainable food system.]

By John Sutter

Some Oklahoma farmers are getting paid to fight global warming by sinking carbon into their fields. It’s a concept that’s based on simple science: plants are made of carbon, and they pull some of it out of the air and store it underground. If, instead of plowing up the land or using it for crops, farmers plant native grasses or trees, they’re essentially cleaning up some greenhouse gases that are emitted by power plants and cars.

In this week’s environment podcast, I talk with two conservationists who are interested in hooking Oklahoma farmers up with people or groups who will pay them for these efforts. Some countries — like Canada and the European Union — regulate carbon dioxide emissions in a way that allows polluters to pay other people (maybe farmers in Oklahoma) to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

The market here is small. But a group called the Oklahoma Carbon Initiative is going to put a Web site (address is yet to be decided) up next month to help educate Oklahomans about so-called “carbon credit” payments. The group will even buy carbon from individual farmers and then sell it in packages to markets.

Here’s some background from the EPA.

And a diagram of the carbon cycle. Basically, people are looking for ways to put carbon back in the ground, since we’ve burned so many carbon-based fossil fuels, thus putting an excess of carbon in the atmosphere.

(photo by John Sutter: Makira National Park in northeast Madagascar is home to incredible biodiversity. You can see some of the forest near the park burning in the top right part of the image.)
By John Sutter

An Oklahoma State researcher has gotten lots of media attention for untangling the secrets of a tiny chameleon in Madagascar. Furcifer labordi lives a high-speed life that’s much more like the life of a plant or an insect than a reptile: it dies in a year, and spends much of that time trapped inside an egg.

It’s an all or nothing existence. The chameleon has one chance to mate. One chance to reproduce. It only has one season to survive. It operates like an annual plant, spreading its seed before dying off. That may be a survival technique, since the chameleons live in a harsh desert environment that would be tough to live through anyway.

Kris Karsten, the recent PhD graduate at OSU who did the research, told me the discovery shocked and excited him in part because it’s proof that humans know so very little about this planet of ours. People have known F. labordi existed for more than 100 years, Karsten said, but no one knew about its bizarre life style until just recently.

It’s that sentiment–the idea that so much of the world is unexplored, and everything we do know seems worthy of our reverence for its incredible complexity–that pushed me to move to Madagascar last summer.

The huge Indian Ocean island, just off the coast of Africa, is known for its incredible biological resources. Most species of chameleons in the world live only in Madagascar and nowhere else, to site just one example. The whole island, which has been on its own evolutionary track for millions of years, seems a Dr. Seussian adventure. There are beetles with periscoping necks, geckos that look exactly like tree leaves and palms that poke their fronds up in a perfect line. It’s wonderful and amazing. And, in some ways, tragic.

Much of Madagascar’s natural resources have been exploited, and conservationists say more than 80 percent of the island is now deforested. When you fly over the central highlands, you see why people call it the Red Island: the iron-rich red dirt is visible everywhere. But there aren’t simple causes or solutions. Madagascar is one of the poorest countries on earth, and locals burn down the forest to plant rice paddies so they can feed their families. Or they plant a few cash crops, and sell them at market to get money for food. Environmental groups say the burning practices are unsustainable and are ruining the soil, but some locals say the burning is part of their culture. Foreign groups are trying to teach more sustainable farming practices. They seem to be catching on well in some areas, and are largely ignored in other places.
One thing seems clear about the burning practices: when an acre of land is lost in Madagascar, species could go extinct. I spent a couple of weeks in the northeast part of the island near a national park called Masoala. There, biologists say you can find species of orchids and palms that exist in one valley on one side of one mountain. Nowhere else. If those patches of forest go, so do the species.

As you’ll hear in the podcast, there’s reason to be optimistic that Malagasy people can come to benefit from their rich natural resources. As mentioned, there is a government effort to expand protected land. But environmental groups are also trying to get carbon credits for local people who will protect virgin forest or replant land that has been burned.

All that aside, I found Karsten’s perspective interesting and refreshing. He showed a true appreciation for how complex nature is. When we take a minute out of our days to look at how amazing the details of natural systems are — that we’re still discovering new life cycles in species we know about, and are finding species we’ve never heard of all the time — then it’s hard not to be kind of impressed.

(PS: You don’t have to go to Madagascar to get that feeling. Did you know Oklahoma has more ecoregions than almost any other state in the country?)

By John Sutter

Because I know you didn’t spend the whole weekend sifting through newspapers, here are a few articles of eco-interest you may have missed.

Pig waste: Overnight last Wednesday, a Tyson Foods hog farm in southeast Oklahoma spewed liquid manure — 10,000 gallons of it — all over a field on its property. The spill is being called an accident by Tyson and the state Department of Agriculture. Its spokesman, Jack Carson, said regulatory action is unlikely. Terri Savage, who’s a member of the state environmental quality board, said pig farms like Tyson’s are a “ticking time bomb” for accidents such as this. Oklahoma is the 8th largest pig producer in the nation, with more than 2 million pigs.

Canadian River: A new state study shows creeks and rivers in the Canadian River watershed — which flows across south-central Oklahoma and through Norman — often are contaminated with bacteria 50 to 100 times state standards. Such contamination is common in Oklahoma and the country, but it means swimming can in these waters be risky for some people, particularly the old and young. Most of the pollution is thought to come from animal agriculture.  (you can send comments to the DEQ at an address listed on this public notice.)

Drought: Oklahoma Secretary of Agriculture Terry Peach is scheduled to visit the drought-stricken Oklahoma Panhandle this week. The situation there has been compared to the Dust Bowl by climatologists and Dust Bowl survivors. Locals have asked state officials to visit the area, and are pleased about Peach’s trip. The drought has received the government’s most severe drought rating. Climatologists in Oklahoma say the situation is consistent with predictions for drought patterns in a warming climate.

Oil spill: A leaky storage tank at Tall Grass Petroleum spilled about 10,000 gallons of oil near Skiatook on June 16. Rain carried the oil into nearby creeks, and environmental officials are still working to clean up the mess. Officials say ecosystems were not damaged by the spill. An environmental official with the Osage Nation, which owns some of the damaged land, said the oil was 3 inches thick on the water in some places. She said clean-up efforts were going well.