AIR MARCH 17, 1999

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. Well, we dodged a bullet last week, although if the truth be told, there were some of us wanting snow. I was talking late in the weekend with a farmer/stockman friend south of Hays who said he wound up with 20 inches of snow. I think a lot of producers are glad we the weather service missed that one!

This is National Ag Week. I find a certain irony in that. On Secretary’s Day bosses take the secretarys out to lunch or something like that - Mother’s Day and Father’s Day we do special things for the celebrant, so do non ag folks come out and do chores for the farmers and ranchers one day during ag week?? Novel idea! Well, if nothing else I always hope that during Ag week that the general public stops and thinks for a couple of minutes about the food that they eat and the items that they use that they can thank farmers for. Does the general public ever stop to think about all the time, effort and money that producers spend trying to produce a high quality food resource while protecting soil, air and water resources? It seems like all we ever hear are scares and warnings from this group or that group about something in this food or something in that food. It seems like the agricultural producer is always caught in the crossfire; if it isn’t some group complaining about unsafe this or that it’s politicians using food as a weapon. Yet travel to some third world country and see if they are complaining about the same concerns. I’ll bet they’d just be glad to have half the food we through away every day. Agriculture is not without its sins. It has had to face the music before and it continues to. The watch dog groups do perform a service in keeping us on our toes to make sure that we are doing everything we can to protect the valuable food resource that we have. But at the same time we need to make sure that we don’t take this food resource for granted. Have you ever wondered what it would be like if 95% of the food production was controlled by 10 or 12 large companies? I don’t know if it wold ever get to that point, but what if 100 companies controlled 80% of the production. It’s a scary prospect and one that we should make sure never happens. So when you sit down to lunch or dinner today, as that first bite approaches your mouth, just take a few minutes to remember what a valuable and rare commodity our agricultural producers really are!

This is Chuck Otte, Geary county Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook '99.

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