$7 corn, $4 gas

There is speculation that corn prices this summer may rise to an incredibly high $10 a bushel. Which means that if my brother and I planted our father’s vacant back acre to field corn this year, worked it and harvested it by hand, a relatively small, simple, easy amount of work, and even if we produced only 150 bushels on that acre, that would leave us with $1500 for having a casual conversation while incidentally pulling weeds a couple of evenings a week. On the other hand, if gas hits $4 or even $5 per gallon this summer, as would not surprise me, that would mean a cost of roughly $250 for the fuel for me to travel back and forth from our house to his a couple of days a week. Leaving my total share at more like $750. Still probably worthwhile.
However, I don’t think we’re either one going to do that, at least not this year. I’ll be working at Westbred a few days a week on field crew. On the other day or two per week, I’ll probably be fishing, as I have been quite frequently since the weather turned warm. There’s not a type of fish in the lake that doesn’t have meat on it, and although many people are uninterested in eating things like carp, buffalo, and drum, I find that they’re just as food-worthy as any other species. I found a muddy creek close to our house where the carp and catfish are especially thick right now, so that’ll likely be where a good chunk of our meat comes from in the coming weeks.
Otherwise, we are settling into life, which at times seems to violate my youthful ideals, and frustrates the hell out of me for brief periods, but all in all, we’re enjoying it. Some processes just take more time than I’d like them to. Exhibit A: Saving up for, Finding, and Purchasing Land. Life always seems to complicate budgets and savings plans, but we’re getting there slowly. The extra income I’ll be bringing home from Westbred this summer will certainly help things, just as it would help if I could stick to any one project for long enough to actually make money on it. In the past year, we’ve seen a number of ideas come, develop, and then stagnate: cheesemaking, wine brewing (I’m experimenting with beer now), moccasins, primitive self bows, and hide tanning to name a few. Most of these things I’d say I’m fairly proficient at, but I continue to lose interest once I figure something out, and I end up just making enough bread and cheese for us to eat, wine and beer for us to drink, etc. These things are all really good, and ultimately they probably still save us a marginal amount of money, not to mention keeping me busy through the week and giving me something to be excited about, if only briefly, but they are certainly nowhere near “income-producing.” Oh well. Life is good in the meantime, so who cares if it takes us several years to get the money together for our own place?

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