PS-Christmas Shopping

If you are stumped on a Christmas gift for the readers on your list, don't forget

They are available locally at A Book Barn in Clovis. Also available at Amazon.com and Xulon Press.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0692232281?keywords=betancourt%20this%20week%20books&qid=1450065343&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=betancourt+ten+reasons+books

http://www.xulonpress.com/bookstore/bookdetail.php?PB_ISBN=9781624198168&HC_ISBN=

Merry Christmas Y'all

P

On the Farm in 2015

On the Farm in 2015

By Paul H. Betancourt

December 2015

With another year in the books it is fair to ask how things went on the farm this past year.

            The year has had its challenges. The weather has been good, except for that rainfall thing. But, warm weather makes for good farming, usually. Yields were down for most crops. There seem to be a lot of reasons for that. Prices are softening, which is not unexpected. We all like higher prices, but it is the nature of things that prices cycle up and down.

            The drought is obviously the big news in California. There are tens of thousands of acres around our farm that have been fallowed. Production of row crops like cotton and wheat are way down as farmers conserve. What water they have for permanent crops like grapes and almonds. Letting a wheat field go fallow for a year hurts, but if you don’t water a vineyard or orchard for a year you kill it and lose years of work.

            On our farm we are preparing to install another drip system. I did the math a few weeks ago when a friend asked what the drought had cost me personally. Over a three year period we will have spent $400,000 in drip systems and well repairs. I’m not complaining, my pockets are not that deep. Some day I would like to be out of debt.

A while back a neighbor said, “All the indicator farmers are gone.” Huh? I asked what he meant by that. He said all the weak managers are gone. All the poor money managers are gone. All we have left now are the survivors.

One of the things that cracked me up this past year is that no sooner had the long range forecasts started saying we had a strong El Nino event coming and people started saying, “Even if we have a big El Nino rain event that won’t mean the drought is over.” Actually, that is exactly what it would mean. Droughts are when it does not rain. Droughts are over when it starts to rain. What they seem to be saying is, “We want all the water whether it rains or not.”

            Yes, we have had low rainfall the past few years. That happens in California. I have said before, we have wet years and dry years. We are fools because we do not save water from the wet years for the dry years. We have made this drought worse because of how the government has managed the water supply. We had a six year drought from 1986-1993 and we had more water available for our cities and farms. Eric Johnson of The Water Agency has documented how we have more water in storage at the Shasta Reservoir in this drought than we did in the ’86-93 drought. This has caused a lot more pain in our cities and farms than was necessary.

            Technology is always on the move. There are more and more electronics on the farm and in farmers’ pick up trucks all the time. Even drones are on the farm. A former student is starting a business doing aerial videos by drone. It gives you such a good birds’ eye view that birds attacked his drone while we were filming and clipped one of the rotors. The next step will be infrared videos which will help track stress and pests in the plants. Pretty amazing.

            There is also more paperwork. I am starting to not like January. It is too foggy to go for a motorcycle ride and there are all sorts of forms to fill out. Have I mentioned how much farmers really don’t like paper work lately? It was one of the perks of the job. You may be up and dawn and work past sunset. You may freeze in the winter and bake in the summer. You may end up knee deep in mud and muck, but you didn’t have to sit and do paperwork. Well, that’s over. Now we have to report our fertilizer use. We already track that because it is a cost. But, now we have to attend meetings and fill out forms. Arrrgh. I do not see an end to this. In fact, I suspect it will get worse as time goes on. I do not make my living filling out forms. I make my living growing food. Society does not benefit from me filling out forms. Society benefits when I grow food.

As we head in to 2016 the survivors have hope. We hope the predictions of an El Nino year are correct. We hope some of that will end up as water for our farms.

I'll check in with you all again after the first of the year.

We wish you all the Merriest of Christmases and the Happiest of New Years.

Peace on Earth. Good food for all!

Do You Pay Enough in Taxes?

There is always something to do on the farm. The crops for this year are in. We are busy getting ready for next year. Here we are preparing to plant 70 acres of almonds. The ground was deep ripped by the tractor in back, in the center. We are chiseling and discing the ground so we can put up berms and install the drip system. Go. Go. Go. At least for now. we are all looking forward to a break for Christmas.

Does any body out there think they are not paying enough in taxes? Are you wondering if they will ever back off?

A Modest Proposal- 2015

By Paul H. Betancourt

November, 2015

 "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground." -Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, May 27, 1788.

Can we set the government on a budget like the rest of us are on a budget? The growth of government in recent decades is taking an increasingly greater of our national income. If this continues eventually they will be taxing us at 100%.

The general logic is they see a problem and raise taxes to spend money to solve this problem, or raise fees to solve this problem. There is no end in sight to this logic. We live in a fallen world, there will already be problems to solve. [Of course the logic question is- when did it become government’s job to solve social problems? That is not in the Constitution, but that boat sailed long ago.]

My proposal is this- that we decide what portion of our national income we will dedicate to government and then they decide which portion goes to roads, or national defense, or whatever. How about 20%? That would be a lot of money. If the national economy is $15 Trillion, the government gets $3Trillion. That includes national, state and local taxes and fees. Heck, the church only asks for 10%, giving 20% to the government seems downright generous.

            You and I have to live on budgets in our homes and in our businesses. If there is not money for something we want we either get another job or save up for it. As a farmer I don’t get to go to my customers and say, “I need a new pickup so I’m going to have to raise my prices.” How would the market respond to that? Yeah, they’d laugh and go on to the next guy.

Mr. Jefferson was on to something. The tendency is for government to increase and our freedoms to decrease. Do you remember what the Founding Fathers did about that from your civics class? They separated the powers of government. They did everything they could to restrain the power of government and give us the most freedom. We just keep giving government more power and more of our money. It is like that old story about the camel with his nose under the tent.

Since we have grown up under the current system we think this is normal. It is not. In the Declaration of Independence Jefferson said government’s authority comes from the “consent of the governed”. They can only do this if we allow it.

Jefferson also famously said of religious freedom that he did not object another person’s religion as long as it did ‘not pick my pocket nor break my leg.’ Well guess what? A lot of pockets are getting picked. Recently I was reading in the book of Genesis where Joseph saves Egypt from famine. In the final years of the famine the Egyptians sold themselves and their land to Pharaoh. They were forced to give 20% of their crop to Pharaoh and this was considered slavery! (Genesis 47:23) How many of us are paying more than 20% of our income to the government in taxes and fees and we are supposed to be living in the ‘land of the free.’

Time has proven Jefferson right. He wrote about the ‘natural progression of things in 1788. Have you seen anything to prove him wrong? If we do not accept this modest proposal they will take more and more of our pay checks until they have it all.

Gas Prices

That was the gas price in Phoenix yesterday, Saturday November 28, 2015. Californians, what did you pay this week? A buck more a gallon?

In a little more than a year, the price oil has gone down 60%, from $100/barrel to around $40/ barrel. Our gas prices have gone down 25%. Where has the rest gone? I'll give you a hint, it's not to the oil companies.

Governor Brown will be prancing around Paris this week telling everyone how California is leading on climate change. Do you know how he's doing this? By stiffing each of us $1/ gallon.

This is a Regressive Tax

   Where are Liberals and Progressives when you really need them? This is a regressive tax. It hurts poor and working class people more than it hurts the Hollywood or Silicon Valley elites. Do you think this is hurting Barbara Streisand's bottom line? Or the folks at Google?

More With Less?

Look at your water bill. How much has it gone up recently? They are making us stop watering our yards, then they charge us more for our water. The hippies have been pushing their 'more with less' ethic for forty years and this is what we get. Watch your power bills. Their next. There's a cost for all this green energy. There's a cost for all those wind turbines that were built and then let sit idle. You know who's going to pay for that. 

I have said before I agree we have a mandate to care for the planet, in fact a divine mandate. But, when things are this badly handled it only breeds cynicism.

PS-the roads in Arizona are in great shape. It is amazing what you can accomplish when you use road tax money to fix roads instead of squandering it.

Farm Quotes

Finishing cotton harvest and shredding stalks.
Time to run the demolition derby- get the ground worked and the wheat planted before we break everything and the winter rains hit. Rock and Roll.

Here are some of my favorite farm quotes I have picked up over the years.

“When tillage begins the other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.”

                                                            Daniel Webster
                                                            1782-1852

            “No other occupation opens so wide a field for the profitable and agreeable combination of labor with cultivated thought as agriculture.

            Let us hope that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us, and the intellectual and moral worlds within us, we shall secure an individual, social and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.”

                                                            Abraham Lincoln

                                                            Address to the Wisconsin                                                                   Agricultural Society

                                                            September 30, 1859

            “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are toed to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests by lasting bonds.”

                                                            Thomas Jefferson

                                                            Letter to John Jay

                                                            August 23, 1785

 “I am one of the class of people that feeds you all, and at present is abus’d by you all; in short I am a Farmer.”

                                    Ben Franklin
                                    On the Price of Corn and Management of the                                     Poor
                                    1766

           

“The cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. Unstable is the future of the country which has lost its taste for agriculture. If there is one lesson of history that is unmistakable, it is national strength lies very near the soil.”

                                                            Daniel Webster

            “It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination.”

                                                            Henry David Thoreau
                                                            1817-82

            “Of all the occupations from which gain is secured, there is none better than agriculture, nothing more productive, nothing sweeter, nothing more worthy of a free man.”

                                                            Marcus Tullius Cicero

                                                            106-43 B.C.

“Sometime in the future, when all the accomplishments of the 20^th century are recorded for posterity, it will finally be acknowledged that our greatest achievement by far has been the introduction of high-tech, high-yield agriculture. Measured in terms of benefit to human society, an adequate diet of nutritious, abundant and affordable food eclipses all other developments of this most remarkable century. Neither computer technology nor transistors, robotics, advances in communication and transportation, life saving antibiotics and modern medicine, nuclear energy, synthetics, plastics and the entire petrochemical industry rank as high in importance as the advances in food production. And all these other wonderful breakthroughs probably would not have happened without a well fed population.”

                                                Dixie Lee Ray

Environmental Overkill

            “Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,

            It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.”

                                                            Walt Whitman

                                                            Song of the Open Road

            “Farmers are the only people I know that buy high, sell low and pay freight in both directions.”

                                                            John F. Kennedy

            “If you want to behold a truly religious man in action, go to Fresno and watch a farmer watering his trees, vines and plants.”

                                   

                                                            William Saroyan

            “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from a cornfield.”

           

                                                            Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Burn down your cities and leave your farms, your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city of the country.”

                                                            William Jennings Bryan
                                                            Cross of Gold Speech

                                                            Democratic National                                                                           Convention
                                                            July 8, 1896

“If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need.”

                                                            Cicero

“In no other country do so few produce so much food, to feed so many at such a reasonable price.”

                                                            President Dwight Eisenhower

“Cultivators of the earth are the most virtuous and independent citizens.”

                                                            Thomas Jefferson

“The problem is not supply- it is access to food and natural resources like land and water.”

                                                            Jose Graziano de Silva
                                                            Director of the UN Food and                                                               Ag Committee

“Feeding the world is going to be a big issue and science is going to help that.”

           

                                                            Ellen Kullman

                                                            CEO of DuPont

“Whoever makes two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before, deserves better of mankind, and does more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.”

                                                            Jonathan Swift
                                                            Gulliver’s Travels 1726