Where Have You Been, Todd?

I've been looking for Todd, the custom cutter guy, who comes up to our Golden Triangle every harvest season, & I'm happy to report this morning that "Tall-Todd" is down in Vernon, Texas, where the winter wheat is from 1 inch up to 12 inches HIGH! The price earlier this month was $4.03 for new crop winter wheat & $3.67 for the 2015 winter wheat. Surprisingly, there's quite a lot of winter wheat still in the hands of the Texas farmers, much the same as up here in Big Sky Country. The only difference is that our Montana wheat is stored on-farm in the producers granaries, while the Texas stuff is stored in the elevator with a 4 cent per bushel storage charge that's been going on since late May of last year, which erodes the cash price significantly. The more mature winter wheat has significant rust problems; thought to be stem rust instead of stripe rust, but no one knows for sure. About the only thing I know about rust is that "Rust never sleeps" according to Neil Young, & I assume musician Young knows something about crops because he came up with the Harvest Moon album some years back. I'll have more on wheat RUST coming up soon on my Puffman Blog.