Air March 22, 2000

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. Since this is Ag Week here in Kansas, I reckon its only appropriate that I share a few thoughts about agriculture this morning. Mark asked the somewhat rhetorical question Monday morning about what I thought of the great American Meat out. Well, everyone’s entitled to their own lifestyle choices. If your choice is a vegetarian, that’s fine, just make sure that you are following all the steps to eating a well balanced vegetarian diet. I’m inherently an omnivore and prefer a mix of meat and plant food sources. What you also have to remember is that humans are not ruminants. We can not make near the utilization of leafy plant material that a cow can. Cattle have multiple stomachs to better utilize forage based diets. 2/3 of Geary County is grassland. It is grassland because the ground is too shallow, too rocky or too steep to grow grain crops. Growing grass is what it is best used for. Now, those folks that want to stop using farm animals for food are certainly welcome to come out and try to survive eating that grass. Personally, I’ll run that grass through cattle first.

Like everyone else, I’ve been watching the skyrocketing gas prices. Now all of you service station owners relax, I’m not blaming you - it’s not your fault. When I moved to Geary County, in February 1982, unleaded gas was $1.23.9 During the Gulf War it got up to that price again and other than that, I had not seen gas prices locally that high, until the last couple months. And I know what the price of gas should be if it had followed the rate of inflation. But I want everyone to stop and think of what it would be like if the price of food, all food, at the grocery store and the restaurant, had gone up 50% in the last 4 months. We stop at the convenience store, grumble about the price of gas we just filled up with, then spend 75 cents to a dollar on a snack that has about a pennies worth, farm value wise, of flour and sugar. Currently farmers are getting less than $2.50 per bushel for wheat, less than $5 a bushel for soybeans and under $2 a bushel for corn and about a $1 a gallon for milk. If the prices farmers received had followed the same inflation rate as everything else for the past umpteen years, wheat should be $9.62 a bushel, corn $6.64, soybeans $13.90 and milk $2.63. That’s anywhere from 2.5 to 4 times more than they’re currently getting. And remember, it’s all being produced with fuels that have gone up in price, just like your vehicle gas has. A little food for thought during Agriculture week!

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2000.

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