A funny thing happened on the way to changing the clocks: Farmers got blamed for Daylight Saving Time (DST).
“Not only is that not true, but it is 100% not true. It is as far from true as one could get,” David Prerau, author of Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time, told Nebraska Public Media in 2022.
“People think it was put in place for farmers, but the leading group against daylight saving time has always been farmers and agricultural people.”
In July, the House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act, a bill which – should it become law – would make daylight saving time permanent. While many across both the country and the political spectrum celebrated this move, for rural communities like mine it would be detrimental.
If anything, moving to permanent standard time makes more sense for agricultural communities – and probably your community, too.
Daylight Saving Time was established by Congress in 1918 to conserve energy during the First World War. Even back then, farmers opposed it.
“Shifting the clocks back and forth is hugely disruptive for our farmers and ranchers, not to mention any livestock they keep,” Congressman Dan Newhouse, a Republican from Washington State, wrote in 2022. “Do you think a dairy cow knows what time it is?”
Of course not. Farmers and ranchers – not to mention the livestock they keep – operate by the sun, Newhouse points out. The rhythms of nature know no clock.
Personally, I’ve always enjoyed springing forward and falling back. It’s a twice-yearly ritual I find marks the changing seasons nicely. Suddenly, spring and fall feel like an event.
I understand why others find it frustrating, though. There is always the one clock (on the oven, in the car) we forget to change. Coming home from work in the dark night of winter can be a real mood-killer, especially if you live somewhere like Chicago (my old stomping grounds) on the eastern edge of a time zone. We all need Vitamin D, and making DST permanent would help make January just a tad more bearable.
At what cost, though?
Dr. Karin Johnson – an associate professor of neurology at UMass Chan Medical School Baystate and medical director of the Baystate Regional Sleep Medicine Program – is the Vice President of Save Standard Time, a nonprofit and nonpartisan group advocating for the preservation and extension of “longitudinally correct Standard Time across North America.”
Studies show our hormones remain with the sun even when we switch the clocks in March, meaning “we end up living our social life by a clock time, when we go to work and school, but our body’s clock is on that sun time still,” she told NPR’s Weekend Edition. This can lead to poorer sleep and more sleep deprivation, she said.
If this seems worth it for more sun in the afternoon, consider a study released last year by scientists at Stanford Medicine. While the study did find that not changing the clocks – staying in either permanent DST or permanent standard time – is better for human health, it found that permanent standard time “would lower the nationwide prevalence of obesity … and the prevalence of stroke,” as both conditions are influenced by circadian health.
That circadian rhythm – our sleep-and-wake cycle – would be severely compromised under permanent DST. An analysis by CNN earlier this year found that, should the Sunshine Protection Act pass, Los Angeles would see sunrise as late as 7:59 a.m., while New York would see it as late as 8:20 a.m. Seattle would be darker even longer, not seeing sunrise until as late as 8:57 a.m. Parts of Montana would see the latest sunrise after 9:30 a.m.
Proponents of permanent DST never reckon with this fact. For farming communities in these regions, this would be devastating. Farmers rise with the sun, but they can’t safely sow winter wheat or tend their cattle in the dark. If the sun isn’t rising until 9:00 a.m., their lives become not only harder, but more dangerous.
Never mind those of us with long commutes on desolate, dark rural roads. Night driving increases the chances of hitting deer or antelope, a problem permanent DST will only exacerbate.
It’s not just adults who commute, either. “If we eliminate changing our clocks, in certain areas of the country … our kids are going to be going to school in total darkness,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia, said in July.
Children waiting at dimly lit bus stops on suburban streets. Rural kids crowded in a school bus zooming around dark mountain curves in Kentucky or down pitch-black prairie highways. Kindergartners learning their ABCs when their little bodies are telling them it’s still bedtime.
We’ve been here before. In December 1973, Congress voted to try permanent DST for two years. Children immediately suffered the consequences. A six-year-old girl was struck by a car on her way to school, while two other students were hurt in February. Eight kids in Florida were killed in traffic accidents in the weeks following the change, up from two in the same period the year before.
Recognizing the mistake, Florida Governor Ruebin Askew summoned the state legislature into a special session to consider immediately returning the Sunshine State to standard time. “Any amount of disruption in commerce would be small indeed when compared to the life of even a single child,” he said, according to a contemporaneous report in Time Magazine.
Others soon agreed. “It’s time to recognize that we may well have made a mistake,” U.S. Senator Dick Clark of Iowa said in January 1974 – a mere month after the experiment began.
We all want more sunshine, but permanent DST won’t accomplish that. Nothing can. Instead, it creates a human fiction that the sun sets later – but at the cost of precious morning light. Our farmers, our children, and our health all need that morning light.
Skylar Baker-Jordan is the editor-in-chief of the Glasgow Courier in Glasgow, Montana.
The post Commentary: Permanent Daylight Saving Time Is Bad for Rural – and All – Americans appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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