Hang around the places that ranchers frequent these days and you might not hear the grumbling normally associated with farming.
Beef prices are pretty darn strong and farmers are pretty darn happy.
The Rapid City (S.D.) Journal reports:
Cary and Codi Reese and Cary's mother, Colleen Popham, went home happy from the Jan. 19 sale at the Belle Fourche Livestock Exchange.
The Upton, Wyo.-area ranch family had sold 50 older butcher cows for an average of 65 cents a pound, about double similar types of cows were bringing three or four years ago.
"I've been ranching 50 years," Popham said. "These are the highest prices I've ever seen."
The higher prices mean more profits to spend.
Dean Strong, owner of Belle Fourche Livestock, said calf and cattle prices have been at record levels over the past year. Last fall, calves were generally selling from $1.25 to $1.50 a pound on the hoof, depending on weight and other factors. "That amounted to $30 to $40 more a head than last year, and last year was pretty good," Strong said.
The improved market has been a welcome turnaround from the low prices that had persisted for the previous 15 years or so. Three or four years ago, calves were bringing 70 to 80 cents a pound.
For a 600-pound calf, at even $1.25 a pound today, that's a difference of $300. If a rancher sells 100 calves in the fall, that's a $30,000 bigger paycheck.
Cattle prices have been good for two years now, according to Carrie Stadheim, executive director of the South Dakota Stockgrowers Association.
At Faith Livestock earlier this month, 600-pound, drug-free calves were bringing $1.40, and the others were bringing $1.25 to $1.30 a pound, Stadheim said.
"You just never heard of a $700 calf in past years until last year and this year," Stadheim said. "Now, it's kind of a norm."
"It's fun to go to a sale now," she said. "After the gavel hits, there's a smile on the rancher's face. It wasn't that way for a while. It was almost depressing to take their calves to town."
For more information about livestock and cattle prices, you might want to take a look at the United States Department of Agriculture's
Livestock and Grain Market News Branch Web site.
Half of Iraqis Favor Attacks on American Troops
Knight Ridder Newspapers reports a sobering poll result. A poll, conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, says that half of Iraqis favor attacks on American troops. The poll was published on PIPA's Web site, WorldPublicOpinion.org.
The Web site says:
PIPA is a joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA) and the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM). COPA was established in 1992 to give the public a greater voice in the public policy process by seeking to discern public opinion on public policy and communicate its findings to the policy community, academia, the press and the attentive public. CISSM was established in 1987 and is based at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland. It is located just outside Washington, D.C., in College Park, Md. -- a site that reflects CISSM's roots in the academic community and close ties to the world of policy.
According to the poll, 80 percent of Iraqis think the U.S. is planning to keep a permanent base there. You can find PIPA's summary and the full report [PDF], along with the questionnaire and methodology [PDF], here. The poll was conducted on Jan. 2 to Jan. 5, among a sample of 1,150 Iraqis. (Keep in mind that, according to the CIA World Factbook's most recent estimate, the population of Iraq as of July 2005 was 26,074,906.)
Savings Rate Lowest Since Depression
The Commerce Department says that, last year, Americans actually had a "negative" savings rate -- meaning that not only did we not save money, but we spent more than we had.
Why Do High Schools Fail So Many?
The Los Angeles Times is running a blockbuster series on the many thousands of high school students who fail out of classes and drop by the wayside.
The newspaper tells the story of thousands of students who can't pass algebra, so they do not get a diploma. They take the test over and over, they still get Fs.
In some school systems, if you can't pass algebra, you can't graduate. The paper even has an online algebra quiz to test your skills, in addition to a number of other interactive and multimedia features.
One of the stories in the series includes this passage:
In the fall of 2004, 48,000 ninth-graders took beginning algebra; 44 percent flunked, nearly twice the failure rate as in English. Seventeen percent finished with Ds.
In all, the district that semester handed out Ds and Fs to 29,000 beginning algebra students -- enough to fill eight high schools the size of Birmingham.
Among those who repeated the class in the spring, nearly three-quarters flunked again.
Five States Consider Bans on Funeral Protests
The Washington Post reports:
At least five Midwestern states are considering legislation to ban protests at funerals in response to demonstrations by the Rev. Fred Phelps and members of his Topeka, Kan.-based Westboro Baptist Church, who have been protesting at funerals of Iraq war casualties because they say the deaths are God's punishment for U.S. tolerance toward gays.
Though the soldiers were not gay, the protesters say the deaths, as well as Hurricane Katrina, recent mining disasters and other tragedies are God's signs of displeasure. They also protested at the memorial service for the 12 West Virginia miners who died in the Sago Mine.
"The families weren't able to bury their loved ones in peace," said Kansas state Sen. Jean Schodorf, who has proposed legislation. "We felt pretty strongly that we needed to do something about it."
Kansas already has a law banning demonstrations at funerals, but Schodorf said the existing law is vague and hard to enforce. The proposed bill would keep protesters 300 feet away from any funeral or memorial service and ban demonstrations within one hour before or two hours after a service.
Legislators in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and Oklahoma are looking at similar bills. Proposed legislation in Indiana would keep protesters 500 feet from funerals, and make a violation a felony punishable by a three-year prison term and a $10,000 fine.
State Sen. Anita Bowser said she thinks the demonstrators are hoping to provoke a physical attack so they can file a lawsuit.
Fee Frenzy
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that cities, trying to avoid tax hikes, have resorted to hiking every imaginable fee instead. The net affect is the same, people are paying more to their government for the same services. The fees range from snow- and ice-removal fees to fire-hydrant maintainance fees. The paper reports:
Statewide, communities levied a collective $8.3 billion in property taxes for 2006, just 2 percent more than a year ago. But tax bills don't include service fees, a small but fast-growing way for local taxing districts to pay for rising service-related costs while holding down property tax increases.
Nobody's got a current count on fees, but the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau estimated the fees at $2.6 billion in 2001.
"The entire nation is experiencing a tsunami of new fees at the state and local level," said William Ahern, communications director of the Tax Foundation in Washington, D.C. "It's hard to track down; a lot isn't characterized as tax revenue. But if spending is way up, that money has to be coming from somewhere."
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible.
