The vagaries of weather

I am a child of farmers from both sides of my family. My great grandfather Cooley was a grocery store owner and politician, but everyone else, short of several ministers, were farmers and grew up on farms. Farming is a profession in which the elements of disaster are always nearby: the wind, the weather, the temperature, the soil and the market. All of these factors, all of which are beyond the control of the farmer, are close to the farmer at all times.

Beyond subsistence farming, most successful farmers were able to grow crops which brought a high price because of the demand. In my family that crop was tobacco. If not for the addictive qualities of tobacco, the value would not have been there. Now that there is so much social pressure against smoking and dipping and chewing, the value of tobacco is diminishing.

In the time before the Civil War, the deep South was able to create a viable economy with cotton. The problem with cotton was three-fold: it required a lot of cheap labor to cultivate and bring it to market; it burned up the soil's viability; and it could be cultivated in other places like Egypt and India, causing the market for southern cotton to diminish. When the cost of producing cotton became higher than what the market would pay, the end of King Cotton became manifest. The Civil War was the first nail in the coffin; the boll weevil was the last.

If you look at the world agricultural economy, you can look at Afganistan, where the farmers still grow poppies for opium and develop a strong economy which will not be supplanted by American good intentions. If you look at South America, the demand for cocaine and other derivatives will continue to make the production of coca plants viable.

We have to feed ourselves. The problem is making that requirement a desirable undertaking for farmers, valuable to them, but not so valuable as to make their products too expensive for the consumer.

Today it is raining. The pick city on NBC was Dallas, Texas, where it was going to be raining and a high in the 50's. In California, a Santana wind is blowing out from the desert, causing wild fires and heat. Isn't weather fun?