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Countdown to Election Day


 

Q. I’m thinking about lately.

The letter, not the conspiracy. My partner and I played Scrabble one afternoon last week. It was a rousing game, which in Scrabble is one that’s evenly played. There’s only one Q in it. And given that most Q words require a U to make anything, that’s tricky. It’s 10 points, so you want to take advantage of any double or triple score boxes, which might require waiting to play it. But likewise, it’s 10 points and you don’t want to be caught with it at the end.

In election or campaign terms — we’re just two weeks out now — you want to spend every single dime you have to attract or convince voters. But, you don’t want to run out before the campaign ends. Tricky. A story: My father never went to college, and his completing high school came in two stints. But he had a silent mastery with figures, especially large ones. We raised cattle, and he studied the industry data voraciously, the numbers like cattle on feed, the anticipated calving crop, the number ready for slaughter, the price per pound per carcass. If there was a heat wave in Kansas, a big ranching state, he knew that would lead to stress and lower weights, maybe even some cattle dying. Less supply. If prices rose quite a bit, he knew it would lead to more cattle, though not instantly; the bigger numbers would come 18 months to two years out.

When he died, we had an auction a few months later. That’s common in farm country, a way to disperse the machinery, the feed bunks, the supplies to those who could still use them. He ran, we came to realize, a pretty tight ship. Almost none of his equipment was new. Some of it, in fact, went for a pittance or even had to be scrapped. He’d made it work, but no one, even my father in the 1990s, used a corn picker anymore. Harvesting is all done by combine now, chewing through 8 rows at a time, minimum.

His ease with numbers came back to me last week, when Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst flubbed a question on commodity prices. The moderator had asked her opponent, Democrat Theresa Greenfield, about the break-even price of a bushel of corn, and she responded with a quick but nuanced answer. Then the moderator asked Ernst, a Republican, about the break-even price of soybeans. Those two crops comprise the preponderance of all grains grown in the state. A lawmaker from Iowa really ought to be conversant with either.

And most expected Ernst to rattle off an answer; she’d won her seat in 2014 partly on the strength of an advertisement about growing up on a farm and castrating hogs (she’d make the big spenders in Washington squeal, just like those hogs, get it?).

But she floundered. It was clear she didn’t know. She was already in trouble in her race. It’s an odd thing for a political epitaph, but not knowing the price of soybeans might be it. According to the debate moderator, it’s $10.05 per bushel for soybeans. As my father knew, and my farming cousins now repeat, it all depends on your costs. My father, with no debt on his land,a small operating loan most years, and machinery that was mostly old and make-it-work, could make a profit when a lot of people couldn’t. I plan to early vote on

Oct. 27th or 28th, days that are a bit slower in our production cycle here at Newsroom headquarters. What’s your plan? Vote!

Until next week.

Douglas Cunningham is editor of the Putnam County Courier and the Putnam County News and Recorder, in Cold Spring. Reach him at 845-265-2468, or at editor@pcnr.com.

LETTERS: 500 words or less, send to me, put ‘letter to the editor’ in the subject line. No PDFs. Include a phone for verification.

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