Luke just closed on a house about a week ago. It was a foreclosed home, so he is definitely getting the opportunity to use his talents at drywalling, plumbing, etc. It's a great neighborhood, though, and there is a lot of potential. So as you look through the pictures below (click on the second pic, the entryway, to start a slideshow), consider this a "before" and just imagine how great the "after" will be.
My sister was able to play the sympathy card and convince Daren to welcome little Basco into their home and lives. I babysat him one weekend, and he was naughty every single second of every single day (eating drywall and screws... waking up and making noise at all hours of the night...). He's going to turn out a wonderful dog, however. He already retreives his "pheasant" like a pro.
Gee, they ( <---- ) don't look too happy. Cheer up! 44 bushels per acre! To put that in perspective, my corn last year barely made 40 bpa (and corn usually outyields soybeans by about 2.5 - to - 1) and the national average yield for soybeans this year is expected to be about 39 bpa. So even though prices have been plummeting, all is not lost. My field was harvested in between rainy streaks and with good yield, to boot!
Here are some pictures from Saturday. Yes, there were four combines (Mark's John Deere and 3 Cases from the Blumengarten Hutterite Colony) on my 40-acre field. Overkill? Perhaps, but it sure was nice to have it done.
Luke and I went fishing at Lake of the Woods last week, and my thoughts as I review the trip are these:
- I am clearly a superior walleye fisherperson. Although Luke's trophy fish was indeed *larger* than mine, I caught many *more* fish than he did. So there.
- Fishing is immeasurably better than working.
- Someday, maybe, I might like to hunt a bear. Sounds exciting.
Back in March, I got my first jatropha seeds from Rick Oshel in Iowa: http://elainekub.vox.com/library/post/grand-agricultural-experiment-2-the-magic-beans.html
But even the optimism I had back then -- as tentative as it was -- turned out to be completely unfounded. I got a pot, some dirt, a lamp, and a timer to get those little bastards started in my cubicle at work (I even tried 2 different trials with 2 different kinds of dirt... plain old potting soil and some sandier cactus potting soil) and... NADA.
That second trial was even done with a separate sample of seeds, mailed to me by a separate email buddy, Tom Grundman of Minnesota, who ordered those seeds directly from Brazil. By the way, thanks, Tom!
But I simply do not have a green thumb.
So I admitted defeat and mailed the remaining seeds up to my mother in South Dakota, who did god-knows-what voodoo magic to them (I think the key was a heating pad underneath the pot, rather than a 40-degree office environment) and got one to sprout seemingly within hours of planting it (I exaggerate).
But here is something that is not an exaggeration at all. Apparently, the day the first plant germinated, it grew 6 inches overnight! Some people have all the luck. Methinks these have the potential to become noxious weeds in the wrong (right?) kind of environment.
I got an opportunity to attend the Iowa State Fair over the weekend, and some of the outstanding crops that were showcased there reminded me of another corn crop from 2007 that was not so spectacular.
My field does seem to be on track to do better this year -- and God willing, it will avoid hail and stay on track -- but this little trip down memory lane does keep me from getting too smug.
Despite the concerns raised by a certain Nebraska agronomist who claims these are awful because it's mid-August and they haven't canopied over yet (sunlight is being wasted) or started setting enough pods yet for his southerly tastes, I am just so thrilled that they are green and tall and weed-free and mostly pest-free and blooming in the perfectly lukewarm, damp weather this summer. There was a hailstorm at the farm on Monday night, but nothing serious enough to damage this beautiful field.
Plus, I'm blonde now.
Note the extremely dead weeds. Anyway, this is a picture of the roller being let down to, you know, roll the soybean field. Apparently, this is a not a common practice outside the glacially-formed, rocky regions of South Dakota and Minnesota. In fact, it is such a novelty DTN's agronomist Dan Davidson did a blog piece on it: http://online.dtn.com/online/common/link.do?symbolicName=/ag/blogs/template1&blogHandle=production&blogEntryId=8a82c0bc193f98a2011a34b74d190a38
So, I've had a request to lay out the case I made here: http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=756737470 in a little more detail. Something about the petulant look on my face led a viewer or two to believe I had more to say on the subject. Hmmm.
- Just because the prices of a certain commodity go down, does not mean that the high prices were the result of a "bubble." Supply and demand outlooks change. Prices change.
- Just because the prices of a certain commodity are up from a year ago, does not mean they are unjustifiably high. Supply and demand may be tighter than it was a year ago (in almost every commodity case, it is).
- Just because you can point to a few commodities whose prices have come down since the March/April peaks when speculators were diving out of stocks and into commodities, does not mean there is a SECTOR-WIDE "bubble." There are many more little case studies you can do with commodities like soybeans or corn, whose speculative interest has fallen since that time, but whose prices have not. To me, this suggests those prices were not some spec-driven, artificially-inflated "bubble."
- To repeat myself, to have a "bubble," you'd have to have prices out of line with what the real value of the product is. It's not like stocks where you do a DCF valuation or something to figure out what the company is worth in comparison to its market cap, but in fact it's easier! For instance, people are paying about $5.70 for physical corn, and front-month futures are about $6.15, which is actually a pretty normal relationship (there are obviously transportation costs involved in the arbitrage). If buyers really weren't willing to pay today's high prices for these goods, then yes, maybe you could call it a bubble... but they are. Soft red winter wheat (but no other class of wheat!) is the egregious exception here -- some cash bids are more than $2 below the futures price in Chicago.
- Lastly, before I'd go throwing out the "bubble" word and started shorting volatile commodity markets, I'd want some actual proof that a bubble exists. However, because the current CFTC reporting practices obscure who is doing what and where certain classifications of traders (large banks "hedging" swaps with customers, index funds, etc.) actually have their money and when... the data is simply not available to create a reliable statistical conclusion about how prices behave according to truly speculative activities.
While friends of mine were making money at Vegas casinos, I got myself into a different kind of gamble: soybeans. On the same 40 acres as last year's corn, these are my crop of choice this spring. Now go eat lots of tofu.
