National Ag Day was the twentieth of March. Tenders of flocks and toilers of seeds and row crops may have missed the day trying to make their operation last through the rest of the month. For the ones of us really out of touch, there was also a bigger window, "Ag Week", beginning on the 18th and ending on the 24th of March.
A news release by Texas Agriculture Commissioner Susan Combs brought my attention to the celebration. Ms. Combs continues to air the case of agriculture on all fronts. Instead of Texas herders and planters having a day, we should be honoring her for making more sense and more friends than all 10 previous commissioners combined.
Listed to one side of the article were our state’s ratings nationwide in farm production. The ones I liked were the facts that we ran 14 million head of cattle and calves and raised enough peanuts to make nine billion peanut butter sandwiches. Commissioner Combs’ numbers looked grander until the new census report was released. The 14 million head of cattle meant each citizen of the 21,800,000 of us living in Texas had access to two-thirds of a cow brute and an annual allotment of 413 peanut butter sandwiches.
Such huge figures put me in a tight spot. Goat Whiskers the Younger succeeded his father Goat Whiskers the Elder as the keeper of all mathematics solutions for the family. Old man Whiskers carried a slide rule holstered in a leather case symbolic of a professional engineer. His successor, Young Whiskers, a math major, to this day covers graph paper with long columns of proofed numbers marked off in four decimal figures. But Young Whiskers wasn’t around to do the long division on the cattle and the peanut butter inventory. So if the figures are wrong, contact Commissioner Combs in Austin on the principal amounts and a Mertzon tax fixer and arranger named Richie Cravens on the quotients.
I’d already read that Texas ranked number six in agriculture exports. Beef consumption was rising nationwide. I suspect Texans were eating more beef, too, but not two-thirds of a beef a year. Analyzing the surplus in peanut butter sandwiches proved difficult as no tariff or export information on peanut butter sandwiches exists.
My son in Austin was vague about the amount of peanut butter sandwiches his two teenagers ate in a day. He asked, "When do you mean, Dad, before school in the morning, at meals, in between meals, or from bedtime to daylight? Think of it this way: I’d buy a Central Texas peanut farm if I wasn’t afraid the country air might increase their appetites."
In my time, I made sandwiches in the kitchen of the rock house for my eight kids to take to school, slapping all sorts of concoctions of cheese spreads and water-packed tuna on thin sliced bread, but not much peanut butter filling except for in-house consumption. (The case for feeding kids peanut butter without jelly is that straight peanut butter makes them thirsty, leading to water fill.) A stack would rise up to, say, eight sandwiches, maybe nine. The telephone would ring. By the time I returned I’d have to start over.
Once one of the many room mothers rang and left a terse message that we were going to owe 12 bucks if John Noelke failed to bring a dozen sandwiches to the class picnic the next day. When his case came to trial (and the docket stayed loaded with seven boys and one girl in the house), testimony showed the defendant had been holding a private picnic down in the city park every time his class ordered sandwiches.
One item in the news release puzzled me. The report praised Texas agriculture for providing 39,000 jobs. More than Whiskers or Mr. Cravens' talents were needed to figure that one. Did it mean there were 39,000 openings or 39,000 jobs filled and 39,000 more needed this spring to round up and plant the crops? After the mesquites leaf in the spring, just the herders in the cow jungle alone need 3900 of that 39,000 head to go hunt for the novices lost in the thickets and prickly pear cactus patches. Nobody knows how many hands it’d take to gather the cow jungle, as it’s been too long since there were enough men to work a pasture or know the count.
The success of National Ag Day hasn’t been tabulated. All I know is we didn’t exchange gifts in Mertzon. I was relieved the banks stayed open. Jugkeepers are nervous enough about agriculture loans without taking time off to think about our plight. Sounds like we are going to have plenty of peanut butter sandwiches to export. And if our luck holds this spring, we’ll have calves to ship, too ...
April 5, 2001