Gibson Family Farms

06/06/2026

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There has been a lot of discussion lately about New World screwworm, and if the name sounds like something that belongs in a science fiction movie instead of a veterinary textbook, unfortunately it is very real. The first thing to understand is that these are not your typical maggots. Most maggots are nature's cleanup crew. They feed on dead tissue. They help break down material that is already dying or dead. New World screwworm larvae looked at that entire arrangement and chose violence. They feed on living tissue. Healthy tissue. Tissue that very much belongs attached to the animal. That single difference is what makes them one of the most economically significant livestock parasites ever seen in North America.

The process is both fascinating and horrifying. A female fly finds a wound, a fresh navel, a dehorning site, a castration wound, a prolapse, a torn ear, a tick bite, or pretty much any opening that says, "Please do not lay eggs here." Naturally, she lays eggs there. Hundreds of them. The eggs hatch, and the larvae begin feeding on living tissue. As they feed, the wound becomes larger. A larger wound attracts more flies. More flies lay more eggs. More eggs become more larvae. More larvae create a larger wound. It is essentially the world's worst business expansion model. The larvae burrow headfirst into tissue in a screw-like pattern, which is where the name screwworm comes from. Somewhere there was a scientist staring at a wound and trying to think of a name and eventually said, "Well, they look like little screws," and honestly that was probably accurate enough.

What makes screwworm so dangerous is that the damage does not stay small for very long. This is not simply a case of a few larvae sitting in a wound. The wound can rapidly enlarge as more tissue is destroyed. Animals will experience pain. They may stop eating. Secondary bacterial infections can develop. Toxemia can occur. In severe cases animals can die surprisingly quickly if treatment is delayed. Cattle, sheep, goats, horses, wildlife, dogs, cats, and even humans can be affected. Before eradication, ranchers across the southern United States lived with the reality that virtually any wound could potentially become a screwworm infestation. Every calving season, every branding season, every castration, every dehorning, every fence injury carried risk. It was not simply an inconvenience. It was a major animal health and economic problem.

Then scientists came up with one of the strangest and most brilliant disease-control strategies ever attempted. Researchers discovered that female screwworm flies generally mate only once in their lifetime. That meant if a female mated with a sterile male, she would never produce offspring. So scientists began raising screwworm flies by the millions. Then they sterilized the males and released them into the environment. Think about that for a moment. Entire facilities were built for the purpose of producing flies that would go out into the world and be unsuccessful at reproducing. Somewhere there were highly educated scientists showing up to work every morning to help flies become terrible fathers. Yet the plan worked beautifully. Wild females mated with sterile males, no offspring were produced, and the population gradually collapsed.

The program expanded over time and became one of the greatest success stories in veterinary medicine and entomology. Millions upon millions of sterile flies were released. Then millions more. Then millions after that. Eventually New World screwworm was eradicated from the United States and pushed farther south through Mexico and into Central America. The reason most people have never heard of screwworm today is because generations of veterinarians, entomologists, ranchers, livestock producers, and animal health officials were extraordinarily successful at making it disappear. It is one of those rare stories where a massive agricultural victory became almost invisible because it worked so well.

Which is exactly why recent events have attracted so much attention. After years of northward movement through parts of Central America and Mexico, USDA announced a potential case in a calf in South Texas. That immediately triggered surveillance programs, movement restrictions, quarantines, trapping efforts, wildlife monitoring, and renewed sterile fly releases. Millions of sterile flies are once again being released every week because officials know exactly what happens if the pest becomes established and exactly how difficult it can be to eliminate once it gains a foothold. The goal right now is containment and eradication before that happens.

For producers, this means wounds matter. Actually, wounds always mattered. Now they matter even more. Fresh navels matter. Dehorning sites matter. Castration wounds matter. Prolapses matter. Lacerations matter. Ear tag tears matter. Surgical incisions matter. Fence cuts matter. If there is one thing screwworm flies seem remarkably talented at, it is locating the exact animal you were planning to examine tomorrow morning. Producers in risk areas are being encouraged to pay close attention to wounds, monitor animals carefully, and report suspicious cases quickly because early detection is one of the most important tools available.

The good news is that producers and veterinarians have better options available than previous generations did. Approved treatments and preventive products now exist, including products containing doramectin and fluralaner, as well as ivermectin under specific authorizations and additional wound treatments. Early intervention is critical because treating a newly established infestation is much easier than dealing with a wound that has been expanding unnoticed for days. For veterinarians, screwworm becomes an important differential diagnosis whenever there is a nonhealing wound, an enlarging wound, a foul-smelling wound, unexpected tissue destruction, or visible larvae in an animal originating from or moving through affected regions. Beyond the individual patient, diagnosis has broader implications because every confirmed case becomes an animal health concern affecting surveillance and control efforts.

For consumers, the situation looks very different. This is not a food safety panic. It is not a reason to stop eating beef. It is not a situation where grocery store shelves suddenly become unsafe. Animals entering the food supply are inspected, and affected animals do not simply pass unnoticed through the system. The primary concern is animal health, animal welfare, wildlife impacts, production losses, movement restrictions, and the economic burden placed on producers if the pest spreads. The people most directly affected are ranchers, dairy farmers, veterinarians, wildlife managers, and animal health officials who would be responsible for controlling it.

Honestly, the entire story serves as a reminder that some of the greatest victories in agriculture are the ones nobody notices. Most people have never spent a single minute thinking about New World screwworm. Most people have never thanked an entomologist. Most people have never considered that somewhere there are facilities producing millions of flies whose greatest contribution to society is failing to reproduce. Yet that strange strategy protected countless cattle, wildlife, pets, and people for decades. If you ever find yourself wondering whether science sometimes sounds completely ridiculous, remember that one of the most successful livestock disease-control programs in history can essentially be summarized as this: raise millions of flies, make sure they never have children, release them into the wild, and save the cattle industry. By all accounts, it sounds absurd. By all accounts, it should probably not work. And yet it remains one of the most effective animal health programs ever created.

05/08/2026

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05/03/2026

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The longest-running experiment in human history was started by a British scientist in 1843, involves jars of wheat planted in the same fields every year for 180 years, has already outlived every person who began it, and its most important findings concern how catastrophically wrong Victorian scientists were about almost everything they believed about soil.
The Rothamsted Long-Term Experiments were initiated in 1843 by John Bennet Lawes and his collaborator Joseph Henry Gilbert on Lawes's estate at Rothamsted in Hertfordshire, England. Lawes had begun experimenting with fertilizers on his estate fields in the late 1830s, leading to the development of superphosphate fertilizer, which he patented in 1842 and manufactured commercially — a business that made him wealthy and provided the financial foundation for the experimental program. The centerpiece of the research program was a set of field plots in which wheat and other crops were grown continuously year after year under different treatment conditions — different combinations of mineral and organic fertilizers, unfertilized control plots, and managed organic plots — with detailed records of yields, soil chemistry, and atmospheric conditions maintained continuously from 1843 to the present day.
The Victorian scientific consensus that the experiments were designed partly to test held that soil fertility was primarily a chemical question — that adding the right mineral compounds would sustain agricultural productivity indefinitely and that the biological components of soil were secondary. What 180 years of continuous data have demonstrated is almost the precise opposite. The unfertilized control plots, expected to decline sharply in productivity, declined more slowly than predicted. The heavily mineral-fertilized plots showed yield improvements but simultaneously showed degradation of soil biological diversity and structure across long time scales that shorter experiments could not detect. The long-term data has been essential in demonstrating the role of soil microbiology, fungal networks, and organic matter cycling in agricultural productivity in ways that 19th-century chemistry alone could not capture. The experiment's archives, which include soil samples from every year since 1843 stored in the Rothamsted sample archive, allow researchers today to measure the direct material composition of Victorian agricultural soil — a form of scientific time travel that has proved invaluable in understanding long-term environmental change.

03/21/2026

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The Farmer Who Kept His Neighbor's Land
Iowa, 1933 — 1945
On a February morning in 1933, Henry Voss drove his truck to the Shelby County courthouse in Harlan, Iowa, and paid the back taxes on his neighbor's farm.
The neighbor was Carl Bergstrom. Carl had gone to a sanitarium in Des Moines six months earlier — tuberculosis, the disease that the Depression seemed to be sending to collect what the drought had left behind. His wife Ingrid had followed with their four children to be near him. They had left in October, locking the house, leaving the livestock with Henry, telling him they would be back in the spring.
Spring came. Carl was not better. The taxes came due in February — $47 on 160 acres of Iowa farmland that the county would sell at auction if the taxes weren't paid.
Henry paid them.
He paid them from money he did not have to spare — from the small reserve that he and his wife Clara had saved for their own emergencies, in a tin box under the floorboard, for the year when their own crops failed or their own roof needed replacing or their own tax bill couldn't be met.
He did not tell Carl. He wrote to Ingrid — a short, factual letter: The taxes were due. I have paid them. The land is safe. Come home when Carl is better.
Carl was not better in spring. Or the following spring. Henry planted Carl's fields in 1933 and 1934 and 1935 — planting his own 200 acres and Carl's 160, farming 360 acres alone with his two teenage sons, the work nearly breaking all three of them, the extra fields adding eight-hour days to days that were already fourteen hours long.
The money from Carl's harvests went into a separate account at the Harlan bank — every penny of it, carefully tracked in Henry's account book, separated from Henry's own money with the scrupulous honesty of a man who understood that he was not doing this for profit. He was doing it because Carl's land was Carl's land and Carl's money was Carl's money and that did not change because Carl was sick.
He paid Carl's taxes every February. He farmed Carl's fields every year. He wrote to Ingrid every month — the same short factual letters, the same accounting of what the fields had produced, what the prices were, what was in the account.
Ingrid wrote back. Carl was improving. Carl was stable. Carl would be home soon.
In 1938 Carl came home. He was forty-four years old and thin and moved carefully, the way people move when they have learned that their body requires negotiation rather than command. He drove up the road from Harlan on a May afternoon and stopped his truck at the edge of his fields — his fields, still his, planted and growing in the Iowa spring — and sat in the truck for a long time.
Henry was in his own fields nearby. He saw Carl's truck stop. He walked over.
The two men stood at the fence line between their properties. Carl looked at his fields. Henry stood beside him and said nothing because there was nothing to say that the fields weren't already saying.
Finally Carl said: "What do I owe you?"
Henry shook his head.
"Henry."
"The account at the Harlan bank," Henry said. "Five years of harvests, minus the taxes I paid. It's all there. Every penny."
Carl turned and looked at him.
"That's not what I asked," Carl said. "What do I owe you?"
Henry looked at the fields for a moment. His fields and Carl's fields, side by side, the fence line between them the only difference.
"Nothing," Henry said. "You'd have done it for me."
Carl farmed his land until 1962. Henry farmed his until 1971. Their children grew up together, married into each other's families, farmed adjacent land for another generation.
When Henry died in 1971 Carl was at his bedside. He was the last person Henry spoke to.
Nobody knows what Henry said. Carl never told anyone.
What people in Shelby County did know was that Carl Bergstrom walked out of that hospital room, drove to the county courthouse, and paid the taxes on Henry's farm for the next eleven years — every February, without fail, until Henry's son took over the farm and the taxes and the tradition of standing at a fence line with your neighbor and knowing that the line between your land and his is the least important thing about either of you.

"He paid forty-seven dollars in 1933 to save our farm. He planted our fields for five years. He kept every penny of our money in a separate account and gave it back without touching it. When my father asked what he owed him, Henry said nothing. That was the most expensive word Henry Voss ever spoke and the most honest." — Erik Bergstrom, Carl's son, Harlan Iowa, 1985

02/15/2026

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10/28/2025

Beef is to high? Well what about the other expenses that have gone up? I think we need to take a look at some other things that have sky rocketed before the beef costs.

What do you think?

10/22/2025

President Trump’s plan to import Argentinian beef to lower beef prices is the wrong approach. This plan only creates chaos for America’s family farmers and ranchers while doing nothing to lower grocery store prices. Argentina has a deeply unbalanced trade relationship with the U.S. and a history of foot-and-mouth disease. Instead of helping Argentina, tell President Trump to stand with American cattle producers!

10/10/2025

Combine driver dies in train crash in Cass County. Full story: https://www.kxnet.com/north-dakota-news/combine-driver-dies-train-collision/