April/May
1999
Some things we may never understand
By Tracy Sayler
Library
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.
ponderings I received in an email awhile back:
• If a man is standing in the middle of the forest speaking and there is no woman around to hear him, is he still wrong?
• Why isn’t there mouse-flavored cat food?
• Why don’t sheep shrink when it rains?
• How do they get the deer to cross at those yellow road signs?
• Why are cigarettes sold in gas stations when smoking is prohibited there?
• Why is it that when you transport something by car, it’s called a shipment, but when you transport something by ship, it’s called cargo?
• Where are Preparations A through G and what happened to the first 6 "Ups?" (think about it).
Here’s another: Why do we prize the front-row seats of a football game or a concert, but shun them in church?
Then, there’s the mechanics of economics. Things that have to do with business and commerce, prices and markets. There’s a lot of things I still don’t understand. I’ve got to level with you, I’m still a bit fuzzy on who and what the Dow Jones industrial average is all about; I do know that it involves stock trading and when the market numbers go up, that’s good.
I don’t know why spoiled singers, athletes, and movie stars get millions for strumming tunes, playing games and make believe for a living, while teachers, daycare providers, and farmers – who, by teaching and caring for our children and growing our food might hold the most worthy job responsibilities in America – struggle to make a buck.
It puzzles me how "wheat grass juice" can be sold for $2.75 a shot glass in metro juice bars (you can find one such bar at the Minneapolis airport) while 60 pounds of the same darned stuff in kernel form won’t fetch much more at the local elevator.
There’s a joke about the farmer who was plenty tired of the games played by the local car dealer in town. One day the car dealer informed the farmer that he was buying a hobby farm and would be stopping in to buy a milk cow. The farmer attached the following price information to the cow:
Basic Cow: $600.00
Two-tone exterior: $150.00
Extra stomachs: $200.00
Underbody storage compartment: $100.00
Straw chopper: $60.00
4 spigots@$30/each: $120.00
Genuine leather upholstery: $135.00
Automatic fly swatter: $60.00
Dual horns: $60.00
Dual exhaust: $15.00
TOTAL: $1,500.00
It’s a joke with a message: Too bad farmers can’t price their products like other industry sectors. Take utilities, for instance – electric, cable TV, and phone companies. You gotta envy them. Little to no competition, more deregulated by the minute, service that’s sometimes less than stellar, and the seemingly uncanny ability to assess additional fees for everything.
Let’s run through my last long-distance phone bill, for example. In addition to basic long distance service, there was also a presubscribed line charge, service charge, pay phone surcharge, city sales tax, state sales tax, state gross receipts surcharge, carrier universal service charge, regulatory fee, and federal excise tax.
Your bill probably doesn’t look much different. Each month, with a lick of a stamp and not a blink of an eye, we pay our utility bills laden with phantom fees we really have no clue about. Yet if someone were to propose that, along with the price of your basic food items in the grocery store, there should also be a presubscribed food production charge, service charge, farm-to-market surcharge, city sales tax, state sales tax, state gross receipts surcharge, producer universal service charge, regulatory fee, and federal excise tax, there’d be rioting in the streets.
Like I said before, I guess there are just some things in life we may never understand.
Grains Magazine
April/May 1999