When things get tough we get back to priorities like our ancestors did. Unfortunately, throughout the centuries gone by the old barter system has been replaced by our now taken for granted money system. The days of, “I’ll help you today and some day you’ll help me” have been replaced with, “if I don’t have enough cash today, I’ll borrow some and pay later.” The difference is that today, when you borrow money, when you pay it back, it will involve paying considerably more when the interest is tacked on.
Let’s take a look at the basics. We have borrowed too much from air and water by polluting for centuries. Now we are faced with the very expensive job of cleaning or de-polluting our air and water so that our future generations can live. The cost of clean-up will not only be very, very expensive, but our very lifestyle will have to change to slow down, stop and reverse pollution.
When this very persistent COVID-19 virus caused the entire world to slow down and in many cases hunker down in our homes we stopped taking expensive far away vacations and we began to make our own homes more fun to live in. Some even bought a much larger, more expensive home with the money not spent on a big vacation.
Guess what? Building supplies and houses both increased in price and all trades people became very busy and hard to get. Now that expensive home improvement or new larger home has to be paid for over several years.
COVID has also caused us to find different ways to have fun. Travel and restrictions on capacity at sports and entertainment events have caused us to seek less expensive vacations closer to home, use social media and TV to take up our free time. Cooking real food at home and growing a small garden became ways to not only pass our time but to reduce food costs and provide exercise and entertainment that saved money.
COVID-19 also reduced the time we spent window shopping, walking in a mall and buying clothes and other items that maybe we didn’t need right away. We also had more time to think about the quality of clothing that we buy and not just look at the cheapest prices. Most clothing is tossed out, not because it is worn out, but because something else is more fashionable. We now realize that name brand clothes at the nearly new stores are often better quality than those cheap offshore clothes.
When we examine food and health it is almost impossible to look at one without the other. Any veterinarian or medical doctor will tell you that the majority of health problems are related to the food that we eat.
Although an increasing percentage of consumers are becoming very aware of the importance of how food is produced, the nutritional quality of the food, and the harmful residual chemicals or sprays that it might contain, the majority of food is purchased on price and convenience.
Lately there has been lots of press about upcoming food shortages and large food price increases. Everyone has just recently noticed an increase in gas and fuel prices at the pumps. Although there is talk of electric cars coming soon nearly all farm tractors, combines, and trucks that move food stuffs from field to storage, to manufacturer, to processing plants, to food warehouse, to distributors, to stores to your house all burn gas or fuel.
Although all grain prices have been very good this year, wheat prices are at an all time high. Grain is either used for human consumption (bread, pasta, cereal, margarine, cooking oil, buns, etc.) or animal feed (chickens, hogs, beef, dairy, etc.) All grains are harvested in the fall and a high price now will carry through until next fall.
Chickens don’t eat hay, so both eggs and chicken, turkey, duck and goose prices are tied very closely to grain prices. Hogs and fattening beef cattle are also fed mostly grain so meat prices are heavily influenced by grain prices. Because a dairy cow’s diet is about 50 percent forage and 50 percent grain, then milk and other dairy products are less affected by grain prices.
As consumer eating trends change, consumption of different meats or grains can affect needs to produce different foods. It only takes a year for farmers to switch from one grain to another but when beef consumption drops, beef farmers begin selling off mother cows. It can take several years to breed replacement cows, who next year have a calf which takes another year to fatten enough to make a beef steer.
If a beef farmer sells his farm and switches to grain, then it may be many years before a young farmer can decide that he wants to farm beef, secure financing and build up a new beef farm.
Our grandparents kept a big deep freeze stocked with half a beef, pork, a turkey or two and some chickens. Grandma could get over high food prices for a year without buying expensive food. A third of the food wasted in the world is leftovers that are thrown out.
We had a great Thanksgiving dinner, let’s plan for Christmas.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
gladcrest@gmail.com
