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Mark is visiting Glacier National Park in Montana.
I'm spending the afternoon at Glacier National Park in Montana with some National Park Service Rangers.
The impact of climate change is very clear at Glacier. ...In the last hundred years, the average global temperature has risen 1.5 degrees. But in the high elevations of Montana where Glacier is the temperature is warming at 3x the global average -- enough to melt glaciers.
Since the 1850s, the number of glaciers here has gone from 150 to 25. In a couple of decades, there may not be any glaciers left in the park at all. The people here have no idea what the effects will be when glacier water stops flowing into the ecosystem.
Thanks to all the rangers for all you do and for showing me around such an amazing place. We need to make sure parks like Glacier -- and the planet overall -- are around for future generations to enjoy.
Mark stopped by a cattle ranch in South Dakota.
I had lunch today with the Norman family on their 2,500 acre cattle ranch in South Dakota.
Several years ago at Facebook, our chefs cooked a whole pig. I remem...ber someone saying it would be delicious but she wished she didn't have to see where the meat came from. I've always thought we should be thankful and understand where our food comes from -- so for that year I set a goal to only eat meat that I killed and helped butcher myself.
A lot of our cattle starts in South Dakota where there are about three times as many cows as people. The Normans raise calves until they're about 600 pounds and then send them to feed lots to get fattened and harvested. A lot of cattle are fertilized through artificial insemination. As we were talking, it became clear "AI" means something very different out here!
South Dakota is in its third year of a bad drought, and that makes it tough to feed the cattle. One of the ranchers told me it's the worst drought he can remember -- and maybe the worst since the 1930s. The family will probably need to shrink their herd of 500 cattle by 10-15% since that's all the land can support.
The Normans talked about other challenges -- from regulations limiting the hours trucks can be on the road at a time (increasing the risk that cattle will die in the back), to high-frequency trading that makes cattle prices more volatile and harder to set, to the lack of harvesting plants nearby that means some cattle has to be sent as far as China to be slaughtered.
But overall, they seemed optimistic that technology was making their work easier. They talked about how their machinery was now more stable, how the balers that make bales of hay now measure the moisture of the hay to make sure it's ideal, and how they might use drones to monitor the herd in the near future.
The Normans are proud of the work they do -- not just feeding the country, but helping provide things like insulin, leather and makeup ingredients that also come from cattle. Thanks to the Normans for welcoming me into their home. Families like theirs don't always get a lot of credit, but we depend on the work they do.
