The sun is just rising when the little old octogenarian lady climbs the ladder to the huge John Deer parked in her shed! Balanced precariously, she hooks her right arm in the grip and scowls wickedly as she fishes in her pocket for keys to the cab.
Keys she mumbles. Keys for a tractor, disgusting! Keys on a farm, unthinkable just twenty years ago. Her late husband never had keys to anything but his car and pickup. Even their house didn't have a lock until ten years ago. She cursed again, apologized to the Lord and fished out the door key.
As she prepared to start the big machine, she remembers this is not her father's tractor. Then again her father preferred a team of mules. She grabs the lamented check list:
Right parking brake: on
Left parking brake: on
Pre-heaters: on
Check voltage: bank one
Check voltage: bank two
Set throttle to start
Transfer case to two wheel drive
Transmission to: Neural
Check exhaust stack: clear overhead, no birds nest
Check equipment: get up look behind tractor
Check hydraulics
Shutoff sound system (she'd added this, the 40 year old kid who does the plowing always leaves it turned up so loud.)
Engine cut off lever: in (At least that was like her fathers first diesel.)
Fuel pump: on
Key: on
Check fuel pressure
Press starter
Check engine oil pressure
Check hydraulics
Get up check to the rear again
Open left door check forward
Open right door check forward
Raise plow
Adjust seat and petals
Check brakes
Release parking brakes
Engage clutch
Transmission to third
Get to work
Feeling more like an airline pilot than an aged farm wife she eases the quarter million dollars worth of equipment to the fuel tank a 100 yards away.
She sets the hose to automatically fill the tank, gets a ladder and checks the oil in the big machine. 100 gallons latter she uses the ladder and a rubber hammer to tap on the fuel tank, just over a hundred gallons left. Enough for today.
Carefully she backs the 28 foot wide, 45 foot long tractor and it's attached 16 bottom plow, away from the fuel tank. Working her way out to the wheat field. Corn, her advisers tell her will be at least $13.00 a bushel by harvest time! It was $2 to $3 a bushel, less than two years ago. She can't waste a field on wheat.
Waiting for the hired man she calls her fuel jobber (the man that delivers her gas and diesel) The guys wife answers, they exchange pleasantries. She orders a 1,000 gallons if they can deliver after 1 PM or 900 before. The lady ask will you be their? Why? "Because at $4.35 per gallon we need cash or a check, I'm so sorry she says. Were getting two $250,000 loads of fuel a week and they're making us pay cash! We're a small business we don't have that kind of money." She orders the fuel.
She tells her man to plow, the wheat under. She'll bring him lunch at noon and refuel the tractor.
Walking back towards the house she calls her son in law, would he go to the stock auction for her? She wants a dozen beef caves, she'll put them in the woods pasture, they'll be a little tough, but no one will have the corn fed beef we love. At $13 a bushel, no cow or chicken is going to eat that corn. That's not yellow on the cob it gold!
She wonders what she just did to the cost of flour. As she walks down the lane she remembers all those years feeding the Nation, but the soybeans to the right and corn to the left will all go to bio-fuels.
We all know the cost of fuel of fuel has gone up 33% in the last year, but do you know food cost in general has gone up 40%! Do you know the third world can't afford corn or beans for their people.
Our evil "Green" Congressmen have promoted another crack-pot idea without regard to the consequences!
Now, these same demigods want to buy up the REO's for low income rentals. Assuming their usual competence, we can say good by to life as we knew it!
Bill
William J Archambault Jr
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