September/
October 1998
Prairie Ramblings
By Tracy Sayler
Library
Back
Prairie Grains is the
official publication of
the Minnesota
Association of
Wheat Growers,
North Dakota Grain
Growers Association,
South Dakota Wheat,
Inc., and the
Minnesota Barley
Growers Association.
So who to call? You won't see "Shirley's Psychic Services, down the street from Cenex Oil" any place around here. I wanted to call Dionne Warwick's outfit, Psychic Friends Network, but they went bankrupt. (You think they would have seen it coming.) So I did a web search on the Internet and picked one called Mystic Visions. I had some big-time reservations about giving them my credit card number, but I did anyway. The cost of my reading was $2.99 a minute, plus a long-distance charge. Lord the things I do in search of journalistic truth and enlightenment.
My reader was Jan; with a strong Texas twang she sounded like Flo from the old TV show "Alice." Jan informed me that she is clairvoyant, would use fortune-telling tarot cards for my reading, and that I should take three deep breaths before we start. "It helps me pick up your vibrations, since we're doing this by phone," she said.
She began a rehearsed rambling about my personal relationship, that "the future's unstable but I have a lot of love to give," yadda yadda yadda. I caught her off guard when I interrupted and asked about grain prices. Not a question she gets every day, I'm sure. After hemming and hawing, she concluded that "it won't be a completely successful harvest, that there'll be some problems but because of that in the end what production there is will be worth more." Better go back to Psychic School, Jan. Good thing you didn't plunk that hard-earned crystal ball cash on September call options.
With my ten-minute time allotment expired but yearning yet for clairvoyant clarity, I called again, this time speaking with a psychic named Rachel. (same name as my wife's, incidentally.) The soothsaying I got from Madam Rachel on current ag trends was a bit more telling.
"I feel (production) might go down, probably due to some kind of weather. I'm picking up obstacles beyond your control, like nothing you can do can make it better. It's not a matter of working harder or doing this or that. I'm feeling there will be less of a crop this year than in the last couple years; below normal due to weather. I don't know if that's good for you or not cause you probably make more money on what you have but there's less supply for the demand.
"I do feel money coming to you though, I did draw a money card for you (tarot cards again) but this kind of money card is more of the kind of some type of help from someone, an aiding or something of that nature."
"From the government?" I asked. "Yeah, probably. Money to help rectify the situation. Some financial backing there."
"Anything else farmers can do to manage down prices?" I asked. "I feel a lot of them will go into new directions, probably take on other work or maybe plant something else. Kind of shifting the energy from what they've done in the past to something new. Something along the same lines but something different. A lot may pick up and do other things and not be able to stick it out. There will probably be a group of people who probably have been in it for a long time so they probably won't give up so easily. An idea will spark and the people that are going to stick with it will start to work on their new ideas.
"I'm feeling like you guys are going to decide to grow something else that will grow in these conditions, probably grow faster than what you may grow now anyway. I feel you'll reap the harvest quicker. But I do feel that when it's better again for the other things you're growing, you'll go back to that too and probably keep both things going at that point. But this will probably boost you up because it will add to what you already do. There'll be money dips but it'll be OK."
"When do you see things improving?" I asked. "Things could change around for you quickly, however it's going to take, you know if you're trying to fight a losing battle, in the sense of trying to save something that's not going to be saved, that's what's going to cause the delay. The quicker you move past that and start thinking of new revenues and new ways to earn your money or grow new things, the quicker it will happen. It could happen as soon as you want it, it's basically up to you, I think.
"I feel strongly about something to do with the government kind of propelling you into a new direction or helping you start something new. So I would probably start soliciting their aid, because the sooner you do that the sooner you will move through this problem. I can't tell you when this is going to change. My advice to you is that the situation will not get any better with what you're doing so start looking at something different or new that you can add, and the other situation will come around again. But in the meantime you'll have something else working out for you. I don't know what it is exactly you can do. I'm sure you have ideas, perhaps even talked about now. If it's not, then it will be very soon that people will be coming together and exchanging ideas to come up with new things to do."
She can't be too clairvoyant; she kept calling me Terry, and my name is Tracy. Her reply to prices and production were abstract. Still, for someone who isn't an aggie, doing this psychic stuff from a downtown apartment in a metro area somewhere, her over-the-phone palm readings weren't too far off from the "Freedom to Farm" ballpark. n