Betty Jo Gigot, Editor and Publisher

Well, we lived through another election. Tracy Rehberg has some interesting comments on the campaign in her Range of Reason column in this issue, as does Steve Dittmer in Ruminatin’. I certainly can sympathize with North Carolina-based Rehberg because we moved our base of operation to a southern locale for the month of October. (The southern location is our motor coach, the Gypsy Wagon, sitting on the banks of Table Rock Lake in Arkansas where we can do business as usual with a different view.) Our access to “local news,” came via satellite from New York and Los Angeles. This certainly gave us a chance to see everything twice, four hours apart, but it subjected us to the political ads from both states. Between that and reading the local Arkansas Democrat newspaper, we were more than a bit jaded when we arrived back in Kansas to go to the polling booth. (Surely all the candidates weren’t crooks!?) It certainly was an experience I don’t look forward to again, but 2008 is just around the corner so hold onto your hats.

I was very uncomfortable listening to pollster John Zogby at the TCFA convention in Amarillo, reporting about the high percentage of Americans who had decided that they were very comfortable just being comfortable. My mom and dad raised me to believe that every generation wants more for their children when it comes to education and a higher standard of living, and the way you do that is to work as hard as you can to see that happen. It took me a while to realize that my folks’ generation understood what it was like to work three jobs for that college degree and that they started their family with no money and a bicycle for transportation. One of the old family stories was about Mom wanting to buy a turkey for Thanksgiving and Dad said he couldn’t see why we would have to buy a turkey when we had plenty of venison. According to Dad, she cried for a week.

I have been calling on Jim Anderson, featured in Walt Barnhart’s story, for 15 years, and Jim and I always knew that the time would come when they could no longer operate their farm along Colorado’s I-25 corridor. We have talked about it often through the years.

That area is the perfect example of fertile ground being eaten up by housing developments and urban sprawl. One would wish they would go build a house on a rock somewhere and leave the land to raise food, but that is not the case. Sadly, developers want the same thing the farmers did when they came to the area, namely water. Home buyers also want a view, but that quickly goes away when areas are blanketed with houses that all look the same, interspersed with million dollar homes with a few horses. In Jim’s family’s case, I am sure the amazing amount of money they received would be gladly forfeited for a chance to live the way they started, with rolling hills, open spaces and a way of life they loved.

The point is, Zogby’s complacent groups started out with washers and dryers and three television sets. They have cars and can afford to buy turkeys. They have never been cold or very hungry and, if they want, will send their kids to college. Zogby was right. The world has changed for a large number of consumers in this country, but I doubt that his polls included very many folks in the cattle industry. We have bigger fish to fry.

Finally, while working on this issue’s cover story, I spent weeks talking to industry people about ethanol and its implications to the cattle industry. The more people I talked to, the more confused I became. I finally realized that it is one of the most complicated and far reaching issues we have encountered in a long while and everyone looks at it from their own perspective. How it will all shake out is anybody’s guess, but one thing is for sure – it will take a while to see what works best for each of the players. Right now there are more questions than answers, but the fact of the matter is that ethanol is here to stay.