Want To Sell Your Ag Widgets Abroad? Here's Where To Show Them Off.

Because our main web site, agfax.com, carries listings for upcoming ag events -- field days, commodity conferences and such -- we get occasional calls from manufacturers asking if we have or know of any comprehensive directory of meetings. The requests sometimes include listings of international ag events, especially trade shows.

Up until now, I didn't have a ready source, especially for events outside of the U.S. Sunbelt, our prime coverage area.

But a German company is now offering what sounds like a fairly comprehensive directory of international ag trade shows. The soon-to-be-published directory, the Eichberg Ag Trade Show Report, will compile decision-making data about more than 200 ag trade shows in the U.S. and abroad.

It will be published by Tobias Eichberg, owner of Eichberg Consulting and the former Show Manager of the Agritechnica Show in Hanover, Germany. Agritechnica is a sprawling event with exhibitions covering farming, equipment and technology, and it attracts exhibitors from most of the inhabited continents. So, who better to develop this kind of guide than Agritechnica's former manager?

The directory, as Eichberg explains, will go beyond the customary data about attendance and, he says, burrows into the product categories that form a show's focus. His attempt will be to help potential exhibitors determine which shows to buy into and which ones to avoid.

For more information, here's the link, which includes another link to a fax order form.

Two editions are available, one covering about 140 shows in the northern hemisphere and another covering 45 in the southern hemisphere.

The directories are priced in Euros. At the current exchange rate, the northern hemisphere edition is about $260, while the southern hemisphere edition is about $90.

Shalom, Skeeter

A chapter recently closed in the history of my hometown, Rosedale, Mississippi, when we buried Jerome Levitt “Skeeter” Michael, who as far as I can tell was Rosedale’s last resident of Jewish descent. He was 68.

Jews have been living on the riverside of Bolivar County since the first cotton planters came there. Some early Jewish settlers became cotton planters, themselves, and you can still find a scattering of farmers in the Delta with Jewish lineage.

The rich, deep dirt of the Delta created opportunity and drew people. Skeeter’s own family qualified as pioneers. Much of the Delta’s interior was still swamps, forests and cane breaks when the Michaels came to Rosedale.

Along with operating a retail business, Skeeter's step-grandfather, Isadore Mostkoff, bought and sold furs. Rosedale is situated between the mouths of the Arkansas and White Rivers as they converge on the Mississippi from the Arkansas side, so for anyone in the fur trade it would have been an ideal location at the turn of the last century. Where you find rivers, you find fur.

On occasion, Mr. Mostkoff traveled along the Mississippi and up the Arkansas River to buy pelts from riverfolk. He carried a substantial amount of money on those trips, and his traveling companions were a pair of hardy rivermen, Johnny Mott and Fred Couey. Mr. Couey, himself, was part Indian. They slept on sandbars to make it harder for anyone to sneak up and rob them, as Skeeter recounted the family stories to me a few years back.

Even within my memory, the Michaels still bought a few furs from part-time trappers. But the frontier by then was well in the past, and the Delta was changing in ways that made small town merchants obsolete. After World War II, mechanized farming reduced the need for steady labor. Farms consolidated, which also cut into the population. Skeeter and his father’s half-sister, Louise Mostkoff, made a run at keeping the family’s clothing store open, but their customer base kept shrinking, and with better highways, people drove to Cleveland or Greenville to shop.

The Michaels also had gotten into the pecan business, buying nuts from local folks and selling accumulated loads to brokers. Eventually, Skeeter put most of his time into the pecan trade.

Skeeter was always on the short side, physically speaking, which accounted for his nickname. Like many small men, he was animated, trying to fill up more space than physics would allow. He came naturally to partying in a section of Mississippi that never quite switches off its social life.

Everybody at the funeral had a story about Skeeter that involved either a girl, a late night out, a deck of cards or an Ole Miss football game. Somebody remembered how his friends went into a panic when Skeeter didn’t come back one night from a trip on the river. Search parties were dispatched, only to find that his motor had conked out.

The Delta was ingrained in Skeeter Michael like part of his DNA, and Skeeter’s funeral reflected his own history and personal journey.

First, a priest officiated at a brief service at the town’s tiny Episcopal church. At some point along the line, Skeeter had joined the church. In the first write-through on this, I thought it was simply because Skeeter's first wife was a Baptist, and Anglicanism was a compromise of sorts. But one of Skeeter's relatives told me later that he thought that Skeeter's friend, the late Harry "Brother" Wilson, had led him into the Episcopal faith after the divorce.

After that service, we drove 5 miles south to the cemetery at Beulah where Marshal Klaven, a thoughtful young rabbi from Jackson, said prayers in Hebrew, read scripture, delivered a brief homily and led a throng of Baptists, Catholics and assorted other Gentiles in the 23rd Psalm. He didn’t know Skeeter but spent most of two days in Rosedale hearing stories about him from friends and Skeeter’s wife, Vivia.
 
When Skeeter’s Uncle Toby died a number of years ago, the rabbi in nearby Cleveland officiated at Mr. Michael’s funeral. The rabbi, who was the last one the city would ever have, told one of Skeeter’s cousins that in the 1950s the Cleveland synagogue was the spiritual home to about 125 families, including those in Rosedale. By the mid 1990s, maybe 25 families were connected to it, many of them elderly couples whose children had moved away.

And now Skeeter is gone. He’s buried among the same folks he grew up around. They are all Skeeter’s people, even if their roots trace to other places, other times and other faiths.

At the end of the service, the rabbi invited us to pass by the grave, take a handful of dirt and throw it on the coffin, a traditional way to honor the deceased and to say goodbye.

I walked over to the still-cool pile of dirt. It had been brought up by a backhoe, so you knew the deepest soil was on top. It was loose, silty, good for growing cotton, even from that far down. After a season of drought, it even felt faintly moist. It was the same soil that had drawn so many people to the Delta.

And now the Delta with its rich earth holds Skeeter Michael, and he will belong to it for the ages.

- Owen Taylor

Wireless Carriers Want To Muscle In On Cell-Phone Signal Boosters. Charges Ahead?

Do you use a cell-phone signal booster, either in your vehicle or in a building?

The cell phone carriers would just as soon you didn't, and a trade organization representing wireless companies has filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). demanding stricter regulations of signal boosters.

Both AT&T and Verizon have filed papers supporting the complaint, which was made by the trade group, CTIA-The Wireless Association.

The industry is asking that “the use of signal boosters be coordinated with and controlled by commission licensees and the sale and marketing of such devices be limited to authorized parties.”

Cellular carriers claim that the boosters interfere with wireless networks and disrupt service to other customers. Essentially, they want to control booster design, authorization and marketing. The boosters cut into the carriers' own efforts to market similar products.

Companies that manufacture boosters say they move is nothing short of a campaign to put them out of business. More than 1 million boosters are now in use, it's estimated, with many of them used by farmers and other rural residents who live too far from cell networks for consistent voice or data service.

The underlying problem is that cell companies have not increased wireless capacity enough to handle the proliferation of smart phones, much less the new bandwidth-hungry tablets hitting the market.

Here's a short article in this morning's New York Times that goes into more detail.

Oklahoma!: A Celebration Of Rural America

Last night for maybe the fourth time, I immersed myself in Oklahoma!, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical set in the Oklahoma territory as it pushed toward statehood early in the last century.

You come out of Oklahoma! wanting to sing, which to me is the hallmark of a great musical.

For America and perhaps even for agriculture, Oklahoma! also is an important work of art.

Before its debut, Broadway musicals were mostly set in cities, and plots were as thin as wax paper, barely enough to string together a few ditties and at least one lavish production numbers with sequins, glitzy dancing and top hats.

Not to spoil the opening for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but Oklahoma! begins quite simply with a cowboy strolling onto the stage singing perhaps the best-known opening lines in any modern American musical. More on that in a moment.

The musical’s humor still holds up well after 67 years, which explains why it's been revived so many times and why road productions like the one I saw last night still make money.

Unlike most of the musicals Broadway produced up until then, Oklahoma! also had a dark thread woven into it, the sociopathic Jud Fry.

But at its heart, Oklahoma! celebrated rural America, more so than any musical before or since. It tells the story of people who grow food for an evolving nation, sending grain and beef to the far off cities. Nobody in Oklahoma! makes a quick fortune or marries into money.

In the Oklahoma territory of this story, times are certainly changing but values remain constant. Near the end, the cowboy hero, Curly, realizes that he’s about to become a farmer, with the certainty that he will be rubbing blisters on his hands with a plow, not a rope.

Curly and the other characters are laying a foundation, both for themselves and the coming state. Oklahoma!, it’s worth noting, was based on the barely noticed 1931 play, Green Grow The Lilacs, which premiered just 24 years after Oklahoma was admitted to the Union.

Oklahoma!, the musical, broke new ground with its rich plot, its portrait of good versus evil and its focus on common folk far from citified ways. For some historians, Oklahoma! is considered the beginning of modern American musical theater. It’s to contemporary musicals what Huckleberry Finn was to the American novel – the alpha, the beginning.

If you have a favorite musical – regardless of its subject – you can trace its lineage to Oklahoma! and that cowboy stepping onto the stage with a song in his heart.

As for the opening, I read once that Richard Rodgers -- the man who composed the music -- was, himself, a negative person who rarely saw the bright side or dwelt on it when he did. He’d had some personal losses and at least one difficult creative partnership. So it’s all the more remarkable the way his music sparkles so brightly from one generation to the next.

His connection with Hammerstein -- who crafted the words -- had been formed initially to create Oklahoma! after Rodgers ended his long-running partnership with lyricist Lorenz Hart, whose alcoholism pushed them apart.

On the very first song they shaped together, Hammerstein -- the new lyricist -- sent Rodgers the words to the opening number, which began:

There's a bright golden haze on the meadow
There's a bright golden haze on the meadow
The corn is as high as an elephant's eye,
An' it looks like it's climbin' clear up to the sky.

Oh, what a beautiful mornin',
Oh, what a beautiful day.
I got a beautiful feelin'
Ev'rything's goin' my way.

That’s what Curly sang as he strode onto the stage, so full of optimism and energy. If you’ve ever seen Oklahoma!, you can’t read those words from Oscar Hammerstein without also hearing the music of Richard Rodgers whispering ever so faintly in your mind.

We should all start our day with such a song in our heart.

Monster Trucks You Can Drive To Work

For anyone who can't find a truck that's quite big enough, check out bigasstrux.com, the web site of a Salvisa, Kentucky, custom shop that turns used 2- to 2.5-ton tucks into beefy, street-legal rides.

The owner, Mike Powell, shortens the trucks and drive trains enough to fit a dually bed on the back, which he raises with a reinforced subframe so that it blends with the cab..

Don't drive one of these if you don't like attention.

In some cases, you can buy one of these one-of-a-kind transports for what it might cost to fully pimp out a half- or three-quarter-ton pickup enough to make it look almost like a "big" truck.

No lift kits are used. These trucks are high-clearance because that's how they came from the factory.

Powell, a professional diesel mechanic, starts one of these conversion projects with a truck that has been well maintained.

"Once they're in my shop, I inspect the chassis and perform any needed repairs before making any modifications," he says. From there, he shortens the frame and drive train, builds the subframe and then mounts the bed.

Each vehicle, he says, is truly "one of a kind...No two trucks are alike, and each has it's own personality." And a lot of it, too.

- Owen Taylor

Cotton Consutlants, Mother Nature And The Danger Of Sweeping Generalizations

Cotton consulting has not gotten easier with the advent of Bt and Roundup Ready varieties.

Quite the contrary. It's become more of a challenge.

Dealer reps and Extension scouts who regularly work in cotton say the same thing. For every solution, there is a problem.

Here's how that's worked with cotton insects:

• The shift to Bt cotton caused a corresponding shift in the insect complex.
  
  
• Pests once considered minor became significant problems.
  
  
• And in many cases, the newer pests are harder to scout or they complicate treatment decisions due to move away from broad-spectrum materials and/or insecticide resistance issues.

Through the years, we've conducted several consultant surveys, asking about business practices and in-field scouting methods. As early as 2004, we asked if cotton scouting was easier, harder or about the same in Bt cotton compared to conventional varieties. The response was heavily weighted toward harder. Also, consultants overwhelmingly indicated that it took more time to scout transgenic fields.

All of that was before most people recognized the coming of Roundup-resistant weeds, notably Palmer pigweed and marestail. Plenty of consultants who started their careers as insects scouts are now dealing with weed management issues. And for whatever reason, more leaf spot diseases are hitting cotton in parts of the South, adding one more hot spot of concern to the consultant's check list.

Some people predicted that Bt cotton would, in fact, make cotton consultants an endangered species. I heard that more in the Southeast than the Delta, perhaps. And demand for consultants fell off for several years. Between Bt varieties and declining cotton acres, many practitioners either left the business or learned to scout other crops, particularly grains.

One veteran Extension worker told me halfway through the last decade that in a few years there really would be no need for cotton consultants due to the near-universal acceptance of Bt cotton. With more research, he reasoned that pests like plant bugs and aphids could be managed with treatments timed according to degree-day accumulations.

He was dead wrong. Nature is always trying to fill empty spaces, which means that somebody needs to be checking.

I've been around long enough to have heard those sames kinds of sweeping generalizations about other new technologies.

• In the 1980s, a few weed scientists said, half jokingly, that Johnsongrass might soon be on the verge of extinction with the introduction of that era's over-the-top grass herbicides. It didn't happen.

• The same goes for Roundup Ready. Monsanto positioned it as a super herbicide, only to find that nature positioned a super weed against it, meaning pigweed. The handful of Extension specialists promoting resistance management were faint voices in the wilderness.

All this came to mind today as I read Roger Carter's weekly e-letter.

Carter, whose consulting firm operates in east-central Louisiana, discusses how pest spectrums have changed and what that has meant to the way consultants must now scout cotton.

Here's a link to Roger's comments.

They're well worth reading if you are a consultant, you pay one to check your crops or you're considering it.

But they're particularly important for any farmer who doesn't intend to use a consultant, dealer fieldman or Extension scout to check his cotton in 2011. The natural order of things keeps changing. If higher cotton prices are luring you back to the crop after dropping it for several years, forget most of what you remember from the last time you picked a bale of cotton. Depending on where you are, the insects may have a new game plan.

Read Carter's comments and remember that nature is always sneaking up on you.


- Owen Taylor

Ag Students Get A Free Pass For Southern Conservation Systems Conference

John LaRose has put out the welcome mat for ag students interested in learning more about conservation tillage in cotton and rice.

LaRose announced this week that university ag students can qualify for free admittance to the upcoming National Conservation Systems Rice And Soybean Conference (NCSRSC). LaRose is the publisher of Mid-America Farm Publications and chairman of the conference steering committee, His company also organizes the event.

It takes place at the Crowne Plaza, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 1-2. This will be the 14th year for the annual conference.

“The Southern Corn & Soybean Conference and the Southern Precision Ag Conference will be held at the same time, giving students access to 128 different speakers,” LaRose noted this week.”

That makes the combined events one of the largest ag conferences held in the South, he added.

Free student admission is limited to the first 100 students, and a current student ID card is required for registration. The conference is sponsored by Cotton Incorporated and the U.S. Rice Producers Association. Mid-America Farm Publications organizes the event.

For more information go to: http://www.nctd.net.

Cotton Market Peaked? An Odd Signal, Perhaps.

Have cotton prices peaked?

Sharon Johnson, senior cotton analyst with First Capital Group in Atlanta, suspects that may be the case.

“Wednesday’s high is looking increasingly as a significant top, if not the top of this entire move,” she noted in a memo Friday. Indicators already were in place, then panic selling in China took hold.

“The macro picture has also turned bearish with China’s efforts to control inflation, pushing all of their individual commodity markets down, which spilled over into ours,” she wrote.

Friday was a “another brutal day with cotton as U.S. futures followed China’s lead by closing down substantially, if not at limit down.”

Adding to the probability, she said, was the fact that she was interviewed by a CBS Evening News crew Friday afternoon for a broader piece about soaring cotton prices and what it means for consumers..

“Although cotton’s advance has been well documented in print media and on the internet, along with business cable networks such as CNBC and Bloomberg, it has not hit national mainstream network TV, such as CBS, until now,” she said. “As we all know, by the time the public is made aware, the specific market being discussed has already topped.”

The segment, she was told, should air Sunday night (11/14)

Mule Races In Rosedale, Mississippi: The Thunder Of Distant Hooves.

Our friend and former mentor Leroy Morganti writes a column that's syndicated in a couple of Delta newspapers, and he recently recalled the Fourth of July mule races at the country club in Rosedale, Mississippi, where he and I grew up.

Nobody thinks much about mules anymore, much less racing them. But in our small city on the riverside of Bolivar County, the Fourth of July mule races were a social occasion and a tradition, even into my lifetime. They officially dated back to the late 1930s, although I suspect that a few races were scattered about for as long as people had been growing cotton in the Delta, and the event simply made a transition in Rosedale to the fancier setting of the club's 9-hole golf course.

Mechanized farming was taking hold, even before World War II, but mules were still a part of the countryside when the second half of the century started, although their numbers were steadily dwindling.

Leroy -- a former university administrator who worked in the news business and even had a stint as a gubernatorial press secretary -- admitted at the start of the piece that he was a bit fuzzy on the details. But he seems to have pretty much captured the essence of the annual event, based on everything I've ever been told by people older than Leroy or me. I was still in diapers at the time. Leroy, though, was just old enough to actually remember being there, smelling the mules, watching people place bets and seeing the dust fly. His grandmother's farm was just south of the golf course.

Leroy recollects that the races ended in 1950, but the last one probably was in 1951 or maybe later.

I say that because my father, Herbert Taylor, played a small role in the races on at least one occasion. He was the pilot who flew Richard Henry over the country club where he dove out of a Stearman biplane and parachuted onto the golf course. It was a big show. For most people in the crowd,  that was the first and maybe the only time they saw anybody do that live. World War II was still fresh in people's minds, and the sight of a former paratrooper landing on the golf course would have captured everyone's imagination.

Since my family didn't appear in Rosedale until the spring of 1951 -- a few months before my birth -- I'm figuring that 1951 was likely the last year.

The races couldn't have gone much past that because hardly any mules would have been left on the area farms and plantations by then. The days of animal traction were about over as that new decade started.

I don't think the mule races ended due to lack of interest. More than likely, it was the lack of mules.

Here's a link to Leroy's column, posted on our high school's alumni web site.

- Owen Taylor

As Cotton Goes Up, So Does The Value Of John Faulkner's Novel, "Dollar Cotton"

High cotton prices appear to be having a spin-off effect on the value of John Faulkner’s 1942 novel, Dollar Cotton.

How much? In the previous decade, you could buy the last reprinting of Dollar Cotton all day long for less than $3 dollars a copy. I know that because I bought a stack of them.

Today, that same book -- and keep in mind, this is a reprinting, not a first edition -- is being offered on Amazon for more than 20 times that amount. And that's for a used copy. One book marketer is offering a never-sold copy for well over $200, also through Amazon.

Unfamiliar with the book? It was largely set in that period around World War I when British mills ran up the fiber’s price over fears that hostilities would block supplies coming from Egypt.

Cotton reached a dollar a pound, which made for heady times in America’s cotton country until the bubble burst and prices fell to almost nothing..

Vast wealth flowed into the Delta, where the story was set. It accelerated the clearing and draining of land in the Midsouth as more acreage shifted into production.

Now, cotton prices are above $1 again, something that’s only happened only a handful of times in the last century.

And as the price of cotton moved above a dollar this year, the value of Faulkner’s book began hitting new highs, too.

I know this because we collect first edition works by John Faulkner, the lesser-known brother of William Faulkner, Mississippi’s literary lion.

We own 3 first-edition copies of Dollar Cotton.

By “we,” I mean my business partner and wife, Debra Ferguson, and myself. I think Debra bought the first John Faulkner first edition, although it wasn’t Dollar Cotton. Like people who collect books or anything else, it becomes a quiet obsession. For me, the quest has been to find more pristine first-edition copies of Dollar Cotton, the only book John Faulkner wrote about the Delta.

Our 3 copies are in various conditions, depending on whether they came from a private collection or a public library. It’s hard to say right now what a first edition would fetch because it’s difficult to find any that are even on the market. A year ago, you could still run across them on a fairly regular basis through various internet sources.

But as the price of cotton started rising earlier this year, I began to sense two things.

• First, demand was increasing. When somebody offered a first-edition Dollar Cotton, it didn’t stay on the market long. There seemed to be a quick turnover on eBay and Amazon.
  
  
• Second, the price was edging upward. At one time, we could buy a first edition for as little as $75. The last one I bought cost $150, and that was without a dust jacket.

Supply and demand affects the used and rare book market just as it does the price of cotton. Book merchants sensed somehow that more people wanted to buy Dollar Cotton. As the supply dwindled, prices moved higher.

And if the market for paperback copies is any indication, the price for a hardback first edition would be considerably more than what we've paid for them in the past.

Several reprints of Dollar Cotton have been done over the years. The last reprinting was about a decade ago by Hill Street Press in Athens, Georgia. The image to the right shows the front of that particular edition.

The jacket price was $14.95 for what would be considered a “trade paperback” edition, meaning a book size somewhat larger than the traditional paperback.

As interest in that printing cycled out and merchants dumped leftover copies onto closeout tables, the price dropped drastically. I’ve seen it through the years for as little as $1.98 on Amazon, eBay and other on-line sites where people sell out-of-print books. At least until this year, plenty of paperback copies always were a couple of clicks away. If Amazon didn’t have it in its own inventory, plenty of after-market vendors were selling copies through the on-line book retailer.

When the last paperback edition went into a closeout section at Square Books in Oxford several years ago, our daughter Sarah – then a Southern Studies major at Ole Miss – told me that Dollar Cotton had been marked down to $2.99. I told her to buy every copy they had, which turned out to be 30.

Since then, Debra and I have given away all but 8 of those to friends who had an interest in cotton or Southern literature.

We were overly generous, as things look now. I wish our stock portfolio had done as well in terms of appreciation as this rather obscure book published at the beginning of World War II.

On Amazon this morning, the lowest price on that same edition was $64.50, and that was for a used copy. From there, used prices ran up to $153.56, depending on which Amazon affiliate offered the book.

Only one new copy of the reprint was being offered.

The price: $263.22.

No kidding.

I've got 8 copies just like it in my office storage room.

Granted, there’s no guarantee that that particular seller – or me – will find anyone willing to pay that much. But, then, you never can tell. How many people 2 years ago would have predicted dollar-a-pound cotton any time soon? Corn spread across the countryside, gins closed or were moth-balled.

The book, itself, is well worth reading if you can find a copy (and don’t ask me to loan you one of mine).

It has all the elements you’d expect in a work of Southern fiction – lust, violence, greed, racial conflict, forgiveness and grace.

The plot, itself, hinges on a simple principle that Faulkner, as a farmer, understood. That is:

• What goes up must come down.

• Or, to put that another way, don’t bet the farm on prices staying high forever.

The protagonist of the book, Otis Town, clungs to the belief that if his cotton was worth a dollar a pound last year, it should be worth a dollar a pound this year. Town didn’t know enough about how the world really worked to feel any reservations about holding on for a better price.

He thought he deserved a dollar.

I'd like to think that Faulkner intentionally wrote a tale about economics, the opposing forces of fear and greed that guide the market and the people who make decisions. Do you buy, sell or hold? Anyone majoring in ag economics should be required to read Dollar Cotton.

For that matter, so should anyone who hasn't yet priced the 2011 cotton crop.

And if you want to buy a copy, I'll make you a deal.

- Owen Taylor