Climate change and grazing leases, winter weather and family in a bind.

Photo copyright L.G.;
all rights reserved.

I want to introduce y'all to Lorenzo. He's family. If you're a regular reader, you've already met him; he helped the guys with the bond beam on our house. He's married to Wings's niece, who you know from her fabulous art.

And he needs our help.

You've heard me talk, A LOT, about what climate change has done to our weather patterns. I wrote about it again just this morning, briefly, at Wings's site; it kept us from being able to plant our usual garden this year. For Lorenzo, for whom garden and fields are literally his livelihood, it kept him from much more.

The ten-cent version is this: Early hail destroyed what he'd managed to get done, all at the same time as the holder of his grazing lease for his cattle revoked it. No warning; no reason. She just "didn't feel like doing it anymore." He got hit with a perfect storm of circumstances that nearly wiped him out, and could still over the winter if he can't raise the funds needed to keep everything going. He tells the story at his YouCaring page, which you can read here.

So. In the middle of everything else we have going with the house, trying to beat the winter weather, we're also going to try to help him raise enough to get through the winter and keep his operation running come spring. It's a lot; he lost all the income from his garden ($25K annually), and from his hay. But the good news is that it's not a short deadline; this is an ongoing effort to raise the total in smaller increments throughout fall and winter and into spring. Here's the widget:

Please spread the code around, along with the link. We dropped the first $50 into the kitty, and a couple of other folks have already matched it. If we could get 20 people to match it, that would put him up over the first grand; if we could get 100 people to match it, he'd be one-sixth of the way there.

As I said, this is family, so Wings and I would take it as a personal favor if you'd share the link, and, of course, if you can afford to kick in a little, we'd appreciate that, too.

Thanks, everybody.

All text copyright Aji, 2016; all photos copyright Lorenzo Gallegos, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.