Air December 8, 1999

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. I know I might be in a minority here, but I really enjoyed seeing that snow. Snow is wonderful stuff. It is one of natures marvels and one of the natural equalizers. It brings wonderful moisture, a nice insulating blanket and a lot of beauty. If you look at the long term averages, we are way behind on snow for the past several years. We are due for a catch up year. It might be this year, it might be next year or the year after, but a snowy winter is coming. Make sure you are ready!

With seventeen days til Christmas, I’m sure there’s a little bit of panic starting to well up inside you if you don’t have much shopping done yet. One of the toughest things I hear from farm spouses is what to get that farmer/rancher for Christmas. You can only buy so many pairs of overshoes or insulated coveralls before it starts to get old. So I thought I’d pass on my ideas for Christmas presents, somewhat warped as they may be. First of all I feel that the ability to keep in touch is important. A lot of folks have cell phones now days, but if your spouse doesn’t have one, this is pretty darn handy. There aren’t too many areas in the county anymore, where you can’t get an adequate enough signal to phone for help in an emergency. It may sound foolish or unnecessary, but they can be not only handy, but life savers. Another thing big on my need to get list, is safety equipment. Of course buying it for them is the easy part, getting them to use it is another story. In particular I feel that we have entirely too much damage being done to the hearing of our ag folks. Good hearing protection is cheap and readily available. You don’t have to go with the big hot and heavy, fully over the ear type of ear muffs. You can get some of the reusable ear plugs that are not very uncomfortable and work very well. I have several pairs that I use with any kind of equipment that has a gas engine on it and even with some of my electrical powered tools. Hearing is too hard to replace and too easy to protect NOT to be doing it. Do you have a computer yet? This might be the time to move forward and get one in the house. The prices are very competitive, Y2K is almost a non-issue anymore so you can’t use that excuse to stall. Buy a computer and Internet access and find out all the information available out there. Don’t worry about buying a record keeping program yet, just get everyone familiar with using the computer - productivity will come later. That’s enough Santa hints for this morning. If you need more ideas, give me a call!

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook ’99.

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