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CLAYTON RYE

By Staff | Oct 22, 2010

Once a job becomes routine, we look for ways to keep monotony from becoming part of it. Usually a radio or some form of background entertainment is used to keep us alert while doing the work at hand.

I enjoy a radio and once I am current with the markets and heard all the talk radio I can take, I turn to music. I have my favorite 473 songs in MP3 form on a memory device that is broadcast on a tiny FM transmitter.

I tune the FM radio to the transmitter frequency and then I just let them play, occasionally singing along when a particular favorite is played.

One of my favorites is by Hawaiian Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. He uses a ukulele as accompaniment while singing a mix of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “What A Wonderful World.”

A favorite line in the song is when he sings, “Dreams really do come true.”

After last fall’s disaster of a harvest, here we have this fall’s more-perfect-than-we-could-have-imagined harvest with dry corn, dry fields and high prices.

It is a good year to be a grain producer.

A friend of my son has been helping us this week running the combine while we hauled loads. At the end of one day, when we removed 12,000 bushels of corn from 66 acres (I’ll pause while you reach for a calculator to figure out my average yield), his friend, whose sense of humor is intact, remarked on the day’s accomplishment saying, “We did pretty good for being the Three Stooges.”

Adding to his comment and referring to our 1994 model combine with tractors from the ’70s and ’80s I said, “And we did it with a bunch of old machinery.”

One belt was replaced on the combine during harvest, a belt that was installed on the assembly line when it was built 16 years ago. No flat tires, no failed bearings, so far. That is the kind of fall we have had and we have less than two days of harvest left.

I do sympathize with my local supplier of liquid petroleum who is inthe same shape as other LP suppliers who probably bought ahead in preparation for this fall’s harvest and now have plenty of supply with no demand.

Last year we had a shortage of LP with suppliers scrambling for every truckload they could get.

Our own LP source bought our everlasting loyalty because while they could not fill our tanks, they said they would do everything they could to keep us going.

It was tense for about three days while we ran on one tank that sometimes was almost empty, but we never ran completely out and finished the harvest with LP purchases one and a half times more than usual.

Now we have this year and we have not even started the drier. We were filled ahead of harvest and that same LP will be in the tank for next year’s harvest. We haven’t even started the drier this fall to see if it works.

For two years in a row, it has to be tough to be in the LP business whether you are the boss or the delivery driver.

Last year their phone would not stop ringing, and this year they probably pick it up to make sure it is still working.

Like my relatives, those fans of the Minnesota Twins who lost to the Yankees in the post season series, there is always next year.

For my local ethanol plant that shut down for two days this past week, as they were full of corn, because of the USDA report of a week ago, the ethanol plant’s $4 corn became $5 corn, a nice inventory profit.

For LP suppliers my dream is more of a nightmare for them, but for we grain producers, it is the best of times.

As final proof, I believe that there are 33 miners in Chile, who were pulled up from a hole in the ground half a mile down after 69 days, who would say, “Dreams really do come true.” Or as Kamakawiwo’ole and I sing it, “Dreams really do come true-ooo-ooo.”

Rye is a Farm News staff writer and farmer from Hanlontown. Reach him by e-mail at crye@wctatel.net.