Tonight the Omaha area has been pummeled by tornadoes. I've been corresponding with The Mighty Favog, who reports horrible news about a Boy Scout camp having been destroyed. Full of Scouts. Favog:
There were 100 Boy Scouts at the camp 50 miles northwest of here in Iowa. No basements. They say the entire camp was leveled. Around 40 of the 100 injured; four confirmed dead. They say many of the injured have head injuries. They were on a weeklong campout. And now the whole place is gone. Gone.
Lord, have mercy. What a terrible weather year this has been. And the Midwest's suffering will ripple outward. The harvest this year is liable to be down because of the rain and flooding. From the NYT:
Bob Biehl, whose farm is near St. Louis, has managed to plant only 140 of the 650 acres he wanted to devote to corn. Some farmers in his area "haven't even been able to take the tractor out of the shed," he said.United States soybean plantings are running 16 percent behind last year. Rice is tardy in Arkansas, which produces nearly half the country's crop. "We're certainly not going to have as good a crop as we had hoped," said Harvey Howington of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association. "I don't think this is good news for anybody."
Harvests ebb and flow, of course. But with supplies of most of the key commodities at their lowest levels in decades, there is little room for error this year. American farmers are among the world's top producers, supplying 60 percent of the corn that moves across international borders in a typical year, as well as a third of the soybeans, a quarter of the wheat and a tenth of the rice.
"If we have bad crops, it's going to be a wild ride," said the Agriculture Department's chief economist, Joseph Glauber. "There's just no cushion."
Miserere nobis.
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"I wonder if anyone will try to sell the idea the Midwest is being punished for it's sins."
I wouldn't put it past the Westboro Baptist Church.
If you live in farm country, every single spring and summer you hear about how the harvest is going to be bad this year. It's too wet, too dry, too hot, too cold, too windy, too grasshoppery, whatever. Then harvest time comes, and we end up having a record or near-record crop. I'm not kidding, it never fails. Tell me there's a 16% drop in the soybean numbers in October, and then maybe I'll take it seriously.
I suppose that's the analog to the "Holiday Shopping Decline" stories we hear about every year in urban areas around the first week of December. Retailers invariably lament that this year's sales are so disappointing, far fewer people at the mall than expected after Thanksgiving, it's going to be a bleak year for the retail sector, consumers must be sending terrible signals about the U.S. economy, etc. Same story EVERY year for 2 decades at least. Human nature is the same everywhere.
There are some really special people out there. Or, at a minimum, ONE very special person out there.
Was it you, Anon?
If so, this post is for you.
Ironically enough, this has been a banner year for my garden with all the rain...I would hearken back to your crunchy con roots and say that perhaps it's the sustainability of the methods used that is the root of this particular problem? If more people would work towards having a small garden (I know that is not possible for everyone...) at least a small part of this strain could be relieved. Most will not grow everything they need; however, the experience itself of understanding what goes into food production is priceless.
I also know that at this point in the game it is unrealistic to expect to sit back and just blame it on the fact that our entire system of agriculture is dependent on mega-farms and giant tractors instead of small-scale human labor...however, for those of us who break our backs every year to do things the old-fashioned/organic way and get laughed at for it, well, I guess we can feel at least a little bit better about all our hard work.
Let me say it again: My garden is doing great. Everything's growing gangbusters. I can't feed the world, or solve the current food shortage with that. But it's a good start.
As of this moment, we having more rain and the wife and the cat have just joined me here in the conning tower of our submarine.
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