“The bright sun filtered through the clouds, warming the fields of alfalfa that my father was mowing. Within a day or two it would be put into bales of hay, gathered from the field, stored in the hay loft and used to feed our livestock. I stood at the fence line with the lunch my […]

Our sixth-grade son, Wonderboy, has gone to camp. Camp being yet another thing the school district cooked up specifically to test me.
Much like the whole “Fifth graders totally belong in middle school with big giant huge children who look like they eat fifth graders for mid-morning snack!”
They have helpfully decided that in sixth grade, […]

I’m not a Scrooge, really, I’m not. So I can’t blame it on the upcoming holiday season. Maybe it’s just because I’m getting old(er). Or maybe I just need more chocolate. But for whatever the reason, I seem to be getting less tolerant of some of the news that crosses my desk.
For example, there is […]

USDA released the Sunday night Crop Progress Report Monday after the close, and it was not pretty. Harvest still drags on, and rain coming into the Midwest this week will not help.
Thanksgiving will come and go with corn, and even soybeans, still in the fields.
One of the biggest traditions of my youth was […]

If Walmart were in the cattle business, it would probably serve as an operating definition of “least-cost producer.” People might refer to its cowherd enterprise as the model for slashing expenses.
That’s the way to make more money in this margin business, isn’t it? The simple economic equation is income minus expenses equals profit, so […]