Saturday, July 19, 2008, 21:17
Sticker Shock
I must be more out of touch with reality than I thought. When my husband called and said the cost to fix the brakes on his truck would be nearly $600, I almost fell over.
Randy had taken the truck into the shop a couple of months ago, and they had told him there was nothing wrong with the brakes -- even though they were noisy and we could hear them squeaking and squealing all of the time.
The truck is a 1999 Silverado. A nice, bright red. He actually bought it in self-defense. When he used to drive the little 1994 blue Cavalier, which was much more fuel-efficient, he had near-accidents all the time. People would feel free to pull out right in front of him from side roads when he was driving on the highway at 55 mph. They also felt free to pass him on the highway when there was hardly any room to spare for oncoming traffic. This does not happen with the big red truck.
It's a sad state of affairs that a person has to drive something bigger so other drivers will stop taking chances with *your* life. (My opinion is -- if you want to kill yourself taking stupid chances, go ahead. Just be sure you leave everyone else out of it.)
At any rate, with the squeaking, squealing brakes, it finally got to the point where Randy decided he'd better take the truck in again. The shop is convenient because it's just a short walk from the office where he works.
As it turns out, the brakes were shot all the way around, front and back. But it was not the labor that cost so much. It was the parts. In years past, you could almost always count on the parts being the smaller part of a repair bill. Not anymore, it would seem.
My brother says that tractor parts are through the roof, too. (A part that you think is going to cost you $25 ends up being $150.)
I suppose the drastic increase in the price of parts is related to the price of petroleum. Whatever fuel is needed to make the part gets added into the cost, and then the price of shipping the part also gets added into the cost.
We Americans are stuck in a bad downward spiral. And there is no way out. None. It is only going to get worse. The cost of everything has gone up because of increased petroleum costs and increased shipping costs related to increased petroleum costs.
Employers cannot raise wages enough to make up for the loss of income for increased costs because then they would have to pass the cost onto customers -- which means none of us would be one centimeter ahead of where we are now.
I hope that the corporations and their big shareholders are enjoying themselves while they can because I think it is all going to come crashing down.
I am predicting that in the not-too-distant future, ordinary folks are not going to be able to afford to buy anything that's been shipped from overseas. Ordinary folks are not going to be able to afford groceries, either. Or medicine when they need it. (Nothing like killing the golden goose, is there.)
I think the manager of the local cooperative hit the nail on the head, so to speak, when he said that not much will change economically until we start to see the credit card companies going under.
LeAnn R. Ralph
Friday, July 18, 2008, 14:36
A Sign of the Times
I've been seeing something around here lately that I haven't seen before.
A few years back, the county changed the intersection with a county road and a state highway, leaving about an acre of open land. This year, the farmer who owns the acre cut the grass growing there -- well, either that, or the county cut it when the crews were out mowing the right-of-way -- but at any rate, the grass was baled it into four big round bales.
On my way into town for a county board meeting Wednesday evening, I saw that a lawn had also been allowed to grow up and was baled into four rounds bales. At one time, the place had horses. A few years ago, the fence was taken out and the section of land, also about an acre, became part of the lawn and was mown regularly. Except for this year. This year it was baled into hay.
Across the road from the lawn that became hay bales, there is a subdivision. A small strip of land between the houses and road is mostly prairie plants (sow thistle; flea bane; alyssum). That too has been baled up as hay.
And then, too, the neighbor baled the 8 acres next to us. Nothing has been done for years with it because the field has been in CRP. It's out now. And this summer, the neighbor cut the grass (mostly timothy) and baled it into big round bales. He had to leave about a foot of stubble because the ground is so rough with gopher mounds. But he cut it and baled it. I bought one for Kajun and Isabelle to give them some hay until our oats field is ready to bale.
This is something I have not seen before -- that any available forage is being baled for hay. The county extension agent tells me that small square bales are selling for $4 to $6. Unheard of. In the past, hay has usually been $1 per bale, although sometimes $2 or $3 for second or third crop. Up until recently, the price of hay stayed pretty much the same for the past 30 or 40 years.
If you have animals who need hay and you must buy hay, the long and short of it is -- good luck in finding hay even if you can afford to pay the price. We've had a drought the past several years, but that's not it. It's that so much of the available land around here has been planted to corn, presumably because of the ethanol plant seven miles down the road. Which is kind of silly, really, because a lot of it is not very good corn ground. The soil is too light and dries out too quickly.
I'm hoping that corn ethanol will soon become obsolete and that we will make ethanol from other plant material. Corn is so wasteful. Only the corn off the cobs is used and the cobs and the plants go to waste. Plus, growing corn is very water intensive. When the weather turns dry, the corn farmers turn on the irrigation, if they have it. Experts say the high capacity wells for irrigation do not affect surface water, groundwater and wells. I'm not so sure. Springs in the area that have been running for the past hundred years, or probably for much longer than that, maybe for a thousand years, have dried up.
Corn, too, has become very expensive. For years and years, corn was right around $1.50 per bushel. The last I heard, it was up to $8 per bushel. The next thing you know, cornflakes will be $25 per box in the store and a container of cornmeal will be $50.
LeAnn R. Ralph