Prairie price takers

 

Serpentine Proxies

Prairie Price Takers

Incoming!

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

 

 

            It’s time to start wearing a straw hat, I guess.

            The marker used to be holidays, but logic has altered that thinking. Memorial Day was long considered the appropriate day to start wearing a summer straw hat, and, then, Labor Day was the unofficial start date of the felt hat season. It made calendar sense. In the depths of ranchland, though, a more serpentine methodology is looming evermore appropriate.

            Since rattlesnakes are both literal and figurative bookmarks of temperature thresholds, the first and last seasonal encounter with them seems to be simplistic and practical trigger dates.

            May 12 became the 2021 start date for straws. If it is warm enough for a dang snake it should be warm enough to leave the felt hat on the hat rack. In what is the latest date in memory, that first encounter took place last Wednesday. Pepe and I were down in the boneyard trying to finish stacking steel when we uncovered the first cascabel of the season. It was coiled between two pieces of tin. We both did our best involuntary rendition of the snake dance.

            It was a Mojave, too.

            Twenty years ago, we just didn’t seem to see this species, but it is, seemingly, becoming more prevalent. We are told it is the most dangerous of the genus in that its venom is both type A and B which refers to both hemorrhagic and neurotoxic toxins. One source says it can be 16 times more dangerous than its belly crawling cousins.

            Our snake dance gestures suggested that might be the case, but that is neither here nor there. The experience only signifies that our daily fight can now be carried on under straw lids if we choose to be fashionable. If we don’t, we can continue the fight under felt knowing that serpiente de cascabel is simply the next snake in the long line of poisonous and snake proxies we encounter.

            The world is full of them.

            Prairie Price Takers

            The cow business is only a description of glamor.

            Our business should more appropriately be labeled Prairie Price Takers. Going down the road with a trailer load of weary saddle horses should elicit responses like, There goes another droughted out PP Taker.

            The point is our existence is largely predicated on only one side of the ledger, the cost side. Surely, our income side must be maximized by calf crop and that implies management, but expense is the only dynamic managed directly.

            So, it matters what prices are and what price movement is. Stability is hugely important. When inputs go up our bottom line is immediately impacted without being able to offset the income side with an adjusted change.

            Remember, we are price takers and not setters.

            That is why the current trends in prices are so dangerous and onerous to our businesses. For example, freight is said to be up 70% from a year ago. Some components of lumber are up over 300%. Steel is up variously and enough to put capital investments on hold. The feed inputs are trending off the charts in a state of confusion. March posted the highest monthly rise in inflation since 1981. Truck drivers cannot be found because living on welfare beats logging miles. The disconnect between boxed beef and cutouts and the price of live and feeder cattle is making less and less sense. In combination, outlook and plans of a year ago are becoming disrupted. Current suggestions of business optimism are about to come crashing down at a time when this killing drought only deepens.

            If there is an upside in this political chicanery of COVID and poisonous partisan calamity, it is federal handouts. The problem is we don’t want to be in this situation. It is a hideous place to be, and we fear all this as much as handling wet dynamite.

            Given the choice, we’d take the rain, free market fundamentals, and reliance on our wits.

            Incoming!

            The cavalier, masked man residing in the White House has gotten our attention.

            Wearing tailored suits and riding roughshod over cultured, honored standards he seems to be intent on leading us toward some sort of new social and environmental Valhalla. The only problem is there is nothing new under this sun. That is the only certainty.

            Beyond the parched grasslands of our immediate horizons, the world is in ever greater danger.

            This precipitous fall from grace has many sidebars, but several things loom higher than the rest. With COVID antics aside, this fellow has no fiscal aptitude much less an American compass. In days, he has orchestrated the price rise of fuel from its lowest point to the highest point in seven years, and he picks and enables global friends with fatalistic disregard.

            Together, these have certain consequences.

            The war Israel now faces is an indicator. Where would our minds be if we faced indiscriminate and daily rocket attacks? As 2020 concluded and 2021 peeked around the corner, peace was trying to find its legs in the Middle East. That is now a memory that will be corrupted and reinvented by the press.

            We are facing the same fundamental threats with the lobbing of figurative bombs from our government. Name an issue and there are damaging constitutional outcomes.

The border is again emerging as being fully managed by cartels with the drugsters on the south side and the enviros on the north. Federal spending has no limitation. Patriotism is treated as a social disease. Election fraud is the tool of choice. The energy sector is being treated as the major antagonist to our existence, and, as far as we can see, these are only the beginning.

I’m not sure we can manage the cost side of this, but, as for the snakes, … it’s best to kill them one at a time.

 

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “Yea, I’m wearing straw, and … keeping my shovel handy.”