Watching the mercury drop

[altivo]

Going down again, though not as far as yesterday. We had almost four inches of new fluffy snow overnight last night, and another inch or two during the day today. Drifting is a real problem on the roads, though the wind has died down somewhat now.

Gas in Marengo is $1.76, but as close as Woodstock (same taxing district, just nine miles from here) it was $1.57 this afternoon. I wonder when the last time was that it was so cheap. It has been years and years, I'm sure. Food prices are not dropping, alas, though this week at least I didn't notice anything that had gone up. I'm pretty sure the local market is losing business due to the economy though. With gas down so far from where it was six months ago, and steeper discounters like WalMart within a 15 mile radius, I strongly suspect that people are going farther afield to save money on the groceries.

As I remarked last week, I find that the discounters are inadequate for my needs. I cook from raw ingredients and require a decent selection to be available. WalMart has little produce and it's overpriced. Their offerings in terms of unprocessed ingredients, such as flour, fresh or frozen fish, whole grains, or dried beans and peas are also very limited. They have a huge amount of floor space, but it's largely devoted to preprocessed and packaged stuff that you stick in a microwave. I have noticed that more and more people seem to live almost entirely off that stuff, but all I can say is "eeewww, no."

Today Rob and Gary had a music gig over in Belvidere. We picked Rob up at the train in Woodstock, had a late lunch there, and then they went off to their performance (some sort of holiday festival) while I made dinner because there would only be about an hour window between their return to the house and when they would have to head to Woodstock to get Rob onto the last train back to Chicago.

Of course, with one thing and another, they were late returning, which I sort of expected. Dinner was easily held until they arrived, but they had to eat it in a hurry, like Jews at the Passover I think. We had sloppy joes made from ground turkey that I'd let simmer in a crock pot all afternoon, fresh rolls from the bakery, an improvised pasta salad with green pepper, sweet onion, celery, and slivers of tomato, dressed with low fat mayo and a little sour cream, and baked French "fries" (much less fat.) Not the most balanced meal I've ever created, but at least it could be managed quickly and they got out the door in time unless they hit some mess on the road to Woodstock.

Tess was less grumbly today because (I think) the temperature got up almost to freezing. She still didn't get to go out though, because the wind was bitter and I have no blanket for her. I really should get one, I suppose. She's happy enough turned loose in the arena as long as Gary or I go visit her occasionally. The sheep were captive indoors in their pen as well, but she ignores them for the most part.

And that's the news from the farm here, where the horses are fuzzy, the sheep are noisy, and the dogs are asleep unless it's time to eat.

Comments

[marzolan.livejournal.com]

I love that last line ^^

And yeah, I keep hoping food prices will come down... It'd make things easier in a lot of families...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

In spite of the lies and promises that this is just "a recession," I fully expect we are going to see a lot of prices dropping in the next year or two. There are too many bubbles bursting, too many things collapsing, and while some products may just disappear and be unavailable, necessities like food are going to have to decline in price because they simply will not sell at current levels when no one has money to buy them.

Today's program is brought to you by the letter "D": deflation and depression. This has been served out courtesy of supply side economics, the Republican party holding too much control for too long, and an incredible amount of greed on the part of a small number of powerful individuals.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

I wish I had the interest and ability to cook like you do :) The food always sounds delicious. I tend to eat more instant meals because well I'm lazy really.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Cooking is simple and need not take a lot of time. You just have to do it, like brushing your teeth and washing clothes.

[doco.livejournal.com]

What's the big deal with the food prices anyways?

Butter is at half its price from the 1970's (not even accounting for inflation), milk had a brief rise after the farmers complained that they weren't really making any money but now it's back to 40 cents like it was, and there's this grocer who recently found some old junk that had fallen behind a shelf in his store that cost 1.01 in 1999-ish and 1.09 in 2008....

Then again, word has it that we're the country with the lowest food prices in the western world anyhow, so that *may* be an American thing.. I dunno. People complained they *felt* a massive price hike during the introduction of the Euro in 2002, but in fact the inflation rate stayed the same before and after.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Obviously there is something different going on there. Food prices in the US are at all time highs. Butter and milk are the highest I can remember them being in my lifetime. (Milk is about $1 a liter, butter as high as $5.50 a pound, ordinary cheeses $6 a pound or more.) These prices are not so much reflections of what the actual producer gets, but rather of the added costs of intermediate profits, taxes, packaging and distribution.

There seem to be several big factors in this, but the increases over the past year have been particularly steep. Most of it has been attributed to the cost of fuel for transportation, and the fact that so much production has concentrated farther and farther away from the centers of population. As fuel prices more than doubled from January to July of 2008, the price of anything that had to be shipped went up accordingly, and then of course local goods rose to match.

There has also been an almost hysterical behavior among midwestern farmers that I call "ethanol madness." This was fed by the misconception being promoted by the oil companies and the administration that producing ethanol from corn would somehow solve the oil price crisis, even though today's methods of maize production consume huge amounts of oil products, quite possibly using as much energy as the resulting grain could produce by the time it is actually turned into alcohol and burned. Farmers jumped on the bandwagon, plowed up all their other crops, and planted nothing but maize hoping to reap high prices. That is turning into another economic bubble that is bursting, now that oil prices are dropping and we see (well some of us) that actual production plants for ethanol take years to build and probably longer than that to be tuned for real efficiency. The idea of a renewable energy source from agricultural production is quite possibly viable, but maize isn't going to be the crop that does the trick. Meanwhile, corn prices rose rapidly, and since corn is used to feed most of the meat production in the US, meat prices skyrocketed. Likewise, since production of other field crops shrank as acreage was turned over to corn, the price of foods used directly by human populations also increased. I expect to see a sudden jump in acreage planted with wheat around here this year, because maize prices will collapse in the face of cheaper oil, and at the moment wheat flour is up almost 30% in price from what it was a year or two ago.

[doco.livejournal.com]

I see, that's pretty much diametrically opposed to what is happening here then.

Of course, the E85 craze never happened and turned out to be more of a diesel craze instead; they pondered rising the biodiesel quota at some point, but first the auto clubs complained, then diesel and regular petrol prices pretty much levelled (it used to be a 10 cent price difference or more, now it's three cents at most), so that biodiesel thing never really took place.

[aureth.livejournal.com]

The price for actual wheat has collapsed from it's summer highs, just like corn and soybeans. I have no idea why flour has gone up, the world actually had a pretty good wheat harvest this year, and last time I looked at the demand numbers, there were plenty of bushels to go around. The US actually harvested more wheat in 2008 than it did in 2007...2,066.72 million bushels in 08 compared to 1,812.04 million bushels in 2007.

The grocery industry spent millions this summer running an anti-ethanol campaign, blaming it as the main cause of corn price increases and thus food price increases. Basically ignoring the other rising costs associated with modern food production. With the corn price having collapsed to below $3 a bushel from it's record high of near $7 a bushel this summer, has the price of cornflakes decreased by the same percentage? I'd guess not. Gee, must be something else going on there.

The cost of producing a bushel of corn is currently around $4.50 a bushel (land rent, seed, fertilizer, herbicide, fuel, machinery, labor) for the 2009 growing year. The current price of corn in December 2009 is $3.51...better than the current marketing month's price of $2.93, but it still means we're going to lose a dollar for every bushel we produce. Not fun. At least most farmers made money the last two years.

Just a few data points from someone in the 'industrial agriculture' business. ;)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your input. I value your inside knowledge on this topic. I did mention that farmers weren't seeing much benefit from the inflating food prices, of course.

I do expect those prices to come back down, at least in part due to the huge drop in fuel prices though diesel remains high around here in comparison with gasoline. That sort of thing always takes a while to trickle back through the little tubes. For one thing, the economic collapse just keeps getting bigger every week, and food distributors will end up lowering prices in order to sell what they have at all.

My observations about the "corn bubble" are based on what local farmers are telling me and on what I read in the Wisconsin farm paper we get each week. Wisconsin farmers were certainly pumped up at the idea of huge corn prices due to ethanol demand, and they seem to be about to take a major bruising on that front.

I've been watching with interest over the last five years as farmland here in McHenry County that had been used solely for soybeans and corn in alternate years for as far back as I could observe has suddenly been put into wheat production. Two and three years ago we saw what appeared to be a huge expansion of wheat. Then this last summer almost all of it disappeared and was replaced with corn. My hay supplier told me that his friends were actually plowing up winter wheat that had been planted in the fall of 2007 in order to replant with corn in the early spring of 2008, because they expected huge corn prices due to the ethanol demand. It's amazing how foolish people can be, I guess.

I suspect that two of the factors in today's low corn prices are the drop in both the economy and in oil prices, and the overproduction of corn this last year.

[aureth.livejournal.com]

Wheat in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin is always a bit of a marginal crop. Corn and soy typically make the farmer more money, but we have a decent market for wheat (Illinois river for export, mainly), and some farmers like to break up the planting and harvest workloads, and a few fields of wheat will fit into that. It looks like wheat plantings in this area were up this fall, so you'll probably see some more of it next year.

The corn and soybean market are very tied to the oil market. Demand for corn and soybeans has continued to be pretty strong, and we did not have as a big of a corn crop as we had hoped this year, but the commodity markets are not trading on what we call 'fundamentals' right now...they're looking at the rest of the economy and going 'oh shit'. :)

Thanks for giving me the chance to ramble on about ag issues.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. I like talking about farm issues, though I certainly don't know as much about them as someone like yourself. My grandparents were all farmers but the Great Depression took them off the land. I was frustrated by the boundaries of city or suburban living all through my childhood and teen years, and I've always been fascinated by the details of the farm economy and its underpinnings. My father was greatly amused when as a teenager I used to wake up at 6 am every day to listen to the farm report on the radio. ;p

I sort of figured that the "bloom" in wheat around here meant that there must be new cooperatives sharing equipment for planting and especially harvesting. Since so many of the fields and farms here are on the small side, it seems like the economies of buying and maintaining specialized equipment are bound to influence the direction in which the production goes. If everyone else is planting beans, you can buy or rent equipment more easily, and get advice and help more easily too. Switching to something quite different, such as wheat for instance, must involve a major effort to "go against the flow" at first, no?

[soanos.livejournal.com]

*nuzzles* I love the last line... I like fuzzy horses. *grooms*

Also happy to hear Tess is feeling less grumbly. I myself have joint aches, and the symptoms are relieved when it goes below freezing and the humidity levels in the air lower down a bit. I hope Santa brings her a warm blanket. :)

Andw hat comes to your cooking, it really sounds deliscious. I wish I could have joined for a meal. My dinners are usually something I just stick on because I have no motivation to cook :\

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Alas, except for a long mane, I'm not very fuzzy. ;p

On cooking, I've always thought that a desire to eat should easily inspire a willingness to cook. I'm puzzled why it doesn't seem to work that way.

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Would need a willingness to live too. :P

*nibbles on your mane* Mmmm... Yummy. What do you wash it with? o.o

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Green apple scented shampoo, of course. ;p