UPfront

Quoteable “From the backbreaking work of plowing fields with a team of mules or horses, today’s farmer is likely to be driving a $250,000 air-conditioned combine, and at the same time he’s checking the futures on the markets and watching the latest weather forecast from the cab in that tractor. You know, that’s real-time change and significant opportunities. The fact [is] that farming today is much more of a white-collar managerial occupation than it’s ever been before. The skills required are a lot more than just pulling calves and being able to do a hard day’s work. Today you have to know something about distribution and accounting, you have to be adept at transportation and computers, and you have to have an education and skills to deal with the complexities of today’s marketplace.” —Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer at the Agricultural Outlook Forum 2008

Wessler finishes dairy term
Outgoing Missouri Dairy Growth Council chairman Dr. Alan Wessler is congratulated for his service by new chairman Dale Ludwig of the Missouri Soybean Association and Missouri Soybean Merchandising Council. Wessler, vice president of Feed for MFA Incorporated, led the group for 5 years. MDGC is coalition of almost 30 organizations and companies including MFA and continues to work to help Missouri producers and promote Missouri as a dairy state.


Riding high
For 17 years, MFA Incorporated has annually provided one deserving Missouri 4-H member in equine with a western saddle. This year, Megan Crudup of Cass County earned first place in the contest. Crudup is currently enrolled in Northeastern Oklahoma A&M and participates on the collegiate horse judging team. The saddle was awarded to Crudup by MFA equine feed specialist, Janice Spears at the Missouri Equine Council’s annual celebration.


Houston MFA Agri Services helps FFA
The Houston, Mo., FFA Chapter recently received a donation of $1,000 from Houston MFA Agri Services and Red Brand Wire. Turns out that Houston Agri Services manager Darrell Scheets ran into a little luck at an MFA buying conference in January. He signed up for a giveaway from Red Brand Wire designed to help high school FFA chapters. And he won. Representatives from the local FFA chapter were gracious upon hearing about the donation and report that the chapter will employ the funds to purchase auto-darkening welding helmets for the shop.


Working dogs a'plenty
Livestock Guardians
by Janet Vorwald Dohner
240 pages
Paperback - $24.95 click here to buy
ISBN# 1-58017-695-8

Livestock guardian animals are one way to fend off predators. In fact, it's an increasing popular way to protect livestock herds.

Livestock Guardians, by Jan Dohner, is a comprehensive guide for farmers struggling to reduce predation of sheep, goats and other livestock. Dohner, who has more than 26 years of experience with guardian animals, helps owners understand the keys to effective livestock protection: careful selection of the right guardian animal, proper guardian livestock bonding, dedicated training, etc.

The book delves into the use of guardian dogs, briefly explaining how to evaluate, train, understand, and socialize these working dogs. There is also a section that describes guardian breeds from around the world. There are additional chapters on livestock guardian donkeys and llamas. The book includes health care information; breed profiles along with an appendix with resources, organizations and Web sites.


Hiss or pop for agriculture’s bubble?
It may be neither a hiss nor a pop. Higher ag prices could be here to stay. Bruce Babcock and the crew at the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State took a look at agriculture’s recent economic surge in the winter edition of the Iowa Ag Review. Contrasting current price and demand to the last period of high prices in 1995, the authors point out there is a difference.

“The futures market is telling us a very different story today. Although we are coming off a record corn harvest, the 2008 new-crop corn harvest is more than $5 per bushel. The new-crop soybean futures price is more than $12.50 per bushel. In contrast to the 1995/96 high price period, the markets today are not indicating that these record prices are temporary. Farmers can sell their 2009 and 2010 crops for about the same price.”

Good news, right? But if it is true that we’ve reached a plateau of high prices, there will be some reckoning in the economics of farming. Rent and land prices come immediately to mind. The authors at CARD figure with these prices in mind, land rent in the Corn Belt should increase by a factor of about 2.8, even after negating government payments. And of course, land prices follow. For Iowa farmland, which had an average value of $2,914 in 2005, that 2.8 factor (based on $5 corn and $12 beans) would calculate into an acre of land costing something like $8,000 or more.

Babcock’s report goes on to examine how biofuel policy might play out to keep prices high and in what scenarios prices could drop. He writes that the first key assumption for continued high prices is that biofuel mandates survive in the face of opposition groups. And he points out that if seed companies can coax higher annual increases for yield, corn prices could soften. Read the full report by visiting http://www.card.iastate.edu/iowa_ag_review/winter_08/article1.aspx.
 

What will the price of corn be after the new mandate is met?

Three scenarios for price project value. 1) Elimination of the $0.51-per-gallon subsidy given to wholesale buyers of ethanol, wholesale price of gasoline at $2.50, and ethanol valued at its energy value. 2) Continuation of the $0.51 subsidy, $2.50 gasoline, and ethanol valued at its energy value. 3) No ethanol subsidy, $2.50 gasoline, and ethanol valued on a par with gasoline value.

The right words 

Missouri’s poet laureate has a long-time home on the last page of Today’s Farmer

At the beginning of 2008, Today’s Farmer contributor Walter Bargen became Missouri’s first poet laureate. The position was created by Missouri Governor Matt Blunt who signed into law that, “The Poet Laureate shall serve for 2 years, at the pleasure of the governor, and be responsible for promoting the arts in Missouri by making at least six public appearances per year at public libraries and schools across the state. The Laureate shall also compose an original poem in honor of Missouri that may be used for publication and distribution.”

We caught up with Bargen to visit about the position, his tenure at Today’s Farmer and why he saves the enigmatic surrealism for other publications.

TF: Inside the offices of Today’s Farmer, we’ve seen your work for many years (since the fall of 1988, to be exact). And we’ve been to www.walterbargen.com to see that you’ve published 11 books of poetry over the years. What we don’t know is what it’s like to be Missouri’s first poet laureate. Tell us a little about what the position entails.

WB: Right now it is being involved in a lot of interviews and photo shoots. This week I’ll visit the Cooper County Historical Society. Next week I visit Lincoln University. The week after that is Truman University, and then keynote at something called the Writers Project. I’m lined out for a number of schools, and I’m reading at a number of libraries. Being far busier than I’ve ever been is part of the duty. I’m assigned specifically six public events. I don’t necessarily decide on which ones. Those decisions come from either the Center for the Book or the Missouri Arts Council.

TF: Your books serve a different audience than Today’s Farmer. Do you approach our back page, Closing Thought, with a specific audience in mind?

WB: The KC Star described my writing style as a combination of rural reveries and enigmatic surrealism, and, generally speaking, I don’t give Today’s Farmer the enigmatic surrealism—I stick with the rural reveries. But that’s part of my style. People in the past have called me a nature poet. When I grew up in Belton [Mo.] it was still a very small town, not yet a part of Kansas City. We were surrounded by fields, pastures and crops. I have visited these themes before. There must be a point when I consider the audience.

TF: You grew up in a rural setting but you weren’t a proverbial farm boy. Has writing for Today’s Farmer taught you anything about agriculture?

WB: I’ve learned to love fence posts and the sides of barns and aerial shots of cornfields. You give me challenging photographs. Yet, those are all things that I’ve noticed previously and have often appeared in the poems I’ve written. Still, sometimes it’s difficult. I remember an image of a frost-encrusted clover in a tangle of leaves. It’s images like that with no strong focus or a diffused subject that are most challenging.

TF: We live in a time of fractured attention span. We take our media in snippets. Do poems still matter in this kind of world?

WB: I think that a poem has a number of advantages when you consider written text. First, if it’s true that people’s attention span is getting shorter, a poem offers the advantage of appearing on one page. You have a beginning, middle and end. You have the entire text right there. Sometimes that text is really dense, depending on the poet and what they’re trying to say. The St. Louis Post Dispatch described my writing as accessible but complex, but a poem need not be complex to get something out of it. What I encourage people to do first of all is just enjoy the poem before they try to beat meaning out of it. Enjoy the words and the images. I think that gives a poem a distinct advantage over having to pick up a novel for example. But I’d like to think that they’re not in competition, but rather they serve different audiences and have different functions. And I should mention, I have a blog now. It’s www.walterbargen.blogspot.com.

Today’s Farmer at 100 

Combines arrive
When binders were dropped for a new fangled machine

Editor’s note: 2008 marks 100 years of publishing Today’s Farmer. We pull this material from our archives to celebrate our history and offer some perspective on what farm reporters have brought to these pages in the past 100 years.

It was May 1929 when editors at this publication (then called Missouri Farmer) first addressed the combine at length. The story came from Missouri Farmer publisher William Hirth, who took time to comment on what the combine might mean socially to Midwestern farms:

“The buzz of the aeroplane overhead admonishes us that we live in the midst of the greatest mechanical age the world has ever known. There are [a majority of ]farmers still living who during their young manhood swung a cradle… then came the dropper with human binders, then the side rake, then the self binder and finally the header. [But] during the last few years, the combine has appeared on the scene, and bids fair in the not distant future to send both binders and headers to the ‘Happy Hunting Grounds,’ where most human devices and inventions wind up sooner or later. But there is this difference—the combine is the last word in harvesting, unless indeed a contrivance should finally be added which not only cuts and threshes, but also converts the golden wheat into flour in the process.” Hirth admitted that this last sentence was a joke, but later wondered on the page if additional farmers would be displaced from the land by the arrival of ever-more efficient machinery. In hindsight, we well know the answer to that question.

But even in the face of what combines might mean to the social structure on the farm, Hirth works through the argument to favor the machines.

“Often during recent years we have watched the displacing of man power by machinery in our big factories; we have wondered whether it is a wholesome and sound tendency—whether the day is not coming when society will be brought to realize that the right of men and women to ‘live in the sweat of their faces,’ is a higher right than mere frenzied ‘economy of production,’ and it does indeed present one of the big and troubled problems of our time. But if ‘economy of production’ can be justified anywhere, it is upon the farm from whence the old time farm hand has almost entirely disappeared, and especially is this true at harvest time, which waits upon neither tide nor man—for when the wheat and oat fields turn yellow, the harvester must work from early morn until the day eve, lest the unkindly elements destroy the fruitage of his sweat and toil.”

Going on to write, “Recently we have given considerable thought to this matter and the following may be said to be the chief points which the advocates of the combine urge its favor,” Hirth laid out six practical points about the combine.

His first point was that the combine “does away with shocking, stacking, twine costs and much of the present threshing cost.” Hirth figured a combine could thresh 30 acres of grain per day at an average cost of 50 cents per acre.

The second point was that the combine allowed a harvest with less loss of grain due to the excessive handling. Before combines, the harvest process included shocking or stacking grain prior to threshing.

Third, grain could be cut in better condition. “The loss from shrinkage which occurs when [grain] is cut in semi-green condition is avoided,” wrote Hirth.

Fourth, “The Combine returns straw evenly upon the ground which it grew, and therefore helps to maintain soil fertility.”

Fifth, Hirth pointed out that without shocks dotting the landscape, plows could return to the field earlier.
Sixth, “The Combine can be pulled by a two plow tractor. It is said to work well in down, tangled or weedy grain and does away with ‘waiting for the threshermen,’ and also relieves the farmer’s wife from having to cook for the threshing crew. It is indeed the last word in present-day harvesting.”

“If ‘economy of production’ can be justified anywhere, it is upon the farm from whence the old time farm hand has almost entirely disappeared.”

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