Recently, I went to an Electric Coop Directors Convention in San Francisco, Calif. Through the years, I have met lots of folks who I renew my acquaintance with at these meetings and talk about agriculture in their country. The lasting drought has not loosened its grip on the west, many like a director from Wyoming explained they count on winter snow – his report this year was that very little snow has fallen in his area.
I know several people from west Texas who are going on three years of no sales. That means they sold their cowherd and can’t grow anything. That is a pretty tough situation. A central Illinois farmer told me his last year’s corn crop yields were down 25 percent. But the price per bushel was good enough to make it a good year.
One man told me the truckloads going by his house in Louisiana lost so much hay off the round bales they were hauling that they probably didn’t get there with half of it. There has been lots of hay sold. One lady from Colorado told me she bought horse hay that was compressed baled. And it was on wooden pallets and so compressed you could get a ton loaded by a forklift into her ton truck. She sounded like this compressing of hay was really working.
In many areas of the country, electric coops have to look for wind-made electricity to fill out the green power requirements that was passed by state legislatures. I saw where congress passed $30 billion to subsidized the wind power in this country next year. People have no idea how complicated those windmills are. They also have lots of problems to keep them working. But people tell me, “the wind is free.” It needs to be because to be in competition with coal and natural gas it requires that much money to get them built and sending electricity that is not competitive with the above unless we subsidized it.
The “warming people” said El Nino was forming because of our heating. The first report of the Pacific heating was reported in the 1600s by the Spanish conquistadors. It happened way back then and killed all the fish along the west coast of South America. Happened many times since then, but they can’t claim it as a product of CO2.
In the 1970s congress spent money trying to figure out why we were having such cold winters. They didn’t get answers and wasted money.
Economists that I heard simply don’t have a good hold on what will happen next. They say things like Obama Care is too vague; they can’t tell how it will hurt the U.S. economy. California newspapers reported that their resident’s health insurance premiums would increase 50 percent under the plan. Housing is recovering now but the carpenters are off working jobs in the petroleum industry. One man said they were making more money there than they did driving nails. Here we go again.
God Bless you and America
Western novelist Dusty Richards and his wife Pat live on Beaver Lake in northwest Arkansas. For more information about his books you can email Dusty by visiting ozarksfn.com and clicking on ‘Contact Us’ or call 1-866-532-1960.
