reality check

Fromn the latoc board; Acpowpuncher says:
<table border="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td valign="middle"></td> <td valign="middle"> Don't bullshit me
« on: Today at 08:53:39 PM »
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</td> </tr></tbody></table> <hr class="hrcolor" size="1" width="100%"> Sabbath eve, August 21, 2009. Wendy Thompson, Dub Whitehead and a couple of young cowboys came out today to gather and work cattle on our Nelson place, near Gonzales. The team worked like a well-oiled machine; the work went smoothly. The cows are wormed, young calves vaccinated, those calves that were bulls, now aren’t. Fifty larger calves, three cows and a bull now wait in pens at the Gonzales auction for what will prove to be a tragic end for most, if not all. Each will be one of many.

Normal runs at the Gonzales sale average 1,200 head, once a week, every Saturday. For six weeks running, over 2,000 and up to 2,700 head per week have arrived, many of them cows with potentially useful years left in their lives. All livestock auctions in South Texas have seen similar increases in business

Today there was no joking and kidding around like I’ve grown to expect among my cowboy friends. They were hot, dirty, and exhausted from day after day of fighting brutal heat and blowing dust, feeding the stream of animals being evacuated from the land. Drought and the current depression is taking its toll on my friends, and on me as well. For the fourth year out of the last five pastures look more like moonscape than the fertile green fields of grass we are accustomed to seeing in these parts. A beef cow’s existence is always tenuous at best but there’s always been a sense of continuity—the new replacing the old. Today it feels like everything is dying, new and old, including the trees that normally provide shade to man and beast, and the rivers that flow through the land.

I can’t help but think back to the written accounts of the 30’s dust bowl days so masterfully compiled and written about in Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time. Visions of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath also crowd at my thoughts. We will too see a time so terribly difficult? Is that what we’re already seeing?

But then I turn on the news to discover that all is well. Housing prices are on the rebound. What ****ing world do those people live in? Surely not the one I occupy. The disconnect between the propaganda we get fed, and yes, that’s what it is, and what’s happening outside my door, astounds.

New for sale signs spring up daily like the desert termites consuming what’s left of dead grass up and down the roads I travel: on the land itself, on houses, cars, trucks, recreational vehicles, boats, and motorcycles. These items do not sell. People lose jobs left and right, if they haven’t lost their job, hours and or pay have been reduced; virtually any and all businesses are affected. Even David Shelton, the owner of the livestock auction, whose business flourishes at the moment, walks around with a worried furrow in his brow; while he may be making commission money short term, each of those cows heading to slaughter won’t be raising a calf to sell next year. He’s killing that which feeds him.

I know the whole country is not in a drought. But I also know from Internet forums I visit that the economy sucks everywhere. Big time.

We are being lied to.

I take that as a personal insult to my intelligence.

http://www.doomers.us/forum2/index.php/topic,51358.0.html

 

I just see cowpunchers moving their herds to market early to get the most money from them before the drought ridden range saps them. Look for the price of beef to drop (glut
)in the near term; and rise exponentially, later (
no breedingstock left forcontinuity of the herd.)

 

And as our beef herds die off, look for the imported South American beef to get much more expensive.......