Farmers, CTAs and other affected parties can probably be forgiven for thinking that Mother Nature has declared war on them over the past couple of months–after cool and damp weather delayed planting of many crops this spring, heavy rains over the past couple weeks have left many growing areas in the Midwest waterlogged or submerged altogether, with the upshot that corn prices won’t be coming down for a long, long time, and things aren’t looking too good for soybean yields, either.

In today’s edition of The Gartman Letter, North Dakotan farmer and ag stock commentator Roger Neshem weighed in on the situation with some astute points about fertilizer leaching, yield expectations and whether or not farmers might cut their losses for the remainder of the year rather than spend more money on a risky crop. But after noting that the current conditions bode well for wheat yields, Mr. Neshem closes with a comment that possibly reveals a little bitterness toward that most fickle of mistresses, Mother Nature:

I often find it funny that idiots like Al Gore yell mad in the streets about warm temps as being bad and never stop to think that the real enemy to the farmer and mankind alike is the cold. Our biggest crop failure in the last 20 years here was 2004 when a frost on august 20th decimated much of the states corn, soybean and sunflower crops. The great extinctions in history have occurred when the earth is cooling and the great population explosions occur when the temps are warming. I pray for global warming so as our species can survive!!!

So bear this in mind, carbon-neutral advocates. As a matter of fact, Mr. Neshem’s screed brings to mind a similar view expressed by famed industrialist and nuclear power magnate Mongomery Burns, on the topic of recycling:

“Oh, so Mother Nature needs a favor? Well, maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys. Nature started the fight for survival and now she wants to quit because she’s losing? Well, I say hard cheese!”

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Commodities, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.