Pima: Poor Prospects

The Pima crop which started out poorly seems to be finishing up poorly. That's how crops go. They sometimes get worse; they never get better. If our tenant somehow manages to get 2 bales per acre out of the mess he has out in his Pima fields, he'll be amazed. And to top that off, the price for Pima cotton remains stuck at around $1.00 per pound. The current tremendous runup in commodity prices has so far declined to pay a visit to Pima's stall in the marketplace.

Our Tenant's Very Own Black Swan

The latest rage in pop economics is the idea of black swans, introduced by Nassim Taleb in his book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. If the reader is interested, we suggest Google-ing "Nassim Taleb" and "The Black Swan." The basic idea is that, well, stuff happens. Sometimes it's good stuff, and sometimes it's bad stuff. And it almost always comes as a surprise, although it often shouldn't. Our tenant has run into quite a good Black Swan.

Our tenant is enitled to use a certain amount of Federal water. He doesn't use it. Instead, he trades it off to a neighbor in exchange for custom farm work. This year, due to the extreme drought, the Endangered Species Act, a bunch of "environmentalist" human-haters, and a Federal judge in Fresno (who really didnt have much choice but to interpret the above-mentioned law as written), that Federal water was worth a surprising amount of money. So our tenant did not trade it to the neighbor; he sold it. Instead of facing a very difficult year financially, he has been granted a financial reprieve. He will have some actual income, and we will probably receive a thoroughly acceptable amount of rent.

Random, Irrelevant Picture

Our tenant has no new, or even new/used, farm gadgets this quarter. In an effort to juice up the entertainment quotient, we are including a picture from our world-renowned Ace Photograher.

Robert Sturgeon
Publisher, Editor, Reporter, Ace Photographer, Newsroom Flunky, Webmaster
rsturge@inreach.com
http://www.vistech.net/users/rsturge

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