The fall corn harvest is in full swing in the Flint Hills and in eastern Kansas. From early accounts, the harvest is pretty good and the current price of corn in the range of $5/bushel is above recent years.
But, regardless of the cash price of a bushel of corn, farmers don’t ever come close to realizing the full value of their corn. Just think, how much actual corn is in a box of high-priced corn flakes? Google says about 8 percent of the weight in a box of corn flakes is actual corn. Less than 5 percent of the purchase price of a box of corn flake cereal reflects the expense of the actual corn inside.
My point is that it’s all the middleman — the cereal makers, the cereal box makers, the transportation folks hauling the corn flakes to the grocery store, and the grocery store owners — who gain more profit from a bushel of corn the farmer receives. And, it’s the farmer who shoulders all the expense and risk from planting to harvesting through post-harvest storage.
Well, I put my innovative and inventive brain to work on turning the economics of raising corn around to benefit the farmer first and foremost. It lets the farmer sell ready-made corn flakes directly from the field to the major cereal companies like Kellogg, General Mills, and Post.
My new invention is the Model CFH CORN FLAKER HARVESTER. This column includes a drawing showing how the CFH works in the field.
You can see as the farmer drives the CFH through his corn field, the machine snaps the ears from the stalks and lines them up to feed directly between two massive, heated crusher-rollers. Voila! Instant toasty, crispy-brown corn flakes.
An add-on option is a sugar-coating sprayer so the farmer, if he or she chooses, can merchandise premium-priced frosted flakes so kids and adults can get their daily sugar high from their early-morning bowl of cereal.
Plus, there’s a really big bonus feature that makes the CFH super efficient. The high-value corn oil that is squeezed from the corn kernels in the flaking process is stored in a stainless steel tank at the rear of the CFH. The farmer can now merchandise his corn oil to the whole gamut of commercial corn-oil users. It amounts to an entirely new profitable, income stream from his corn crop.
If the farmer is really smart, he or she will merchandise the in-the-field-corn-flakes in a bidding process on an internet website. The big cereal companies will be forced into becoming competitive bidders for the ready-made corn flakes.
You can easily see how profits to the farmer grow exponentially from the wise use of the Corn Flaker Harvester, coupled with the merchandising power of the internet.
The CFH investment can easily be recouped from just one good corn crop.
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My free-range chickens are temporarily no longer free range. The chicken-killing varmint has killed a total of six chickens so far. So, it’s forced me to keep the flock penned up. Now, if I keep losing chickens, I’ll know for sure that the chicken-killer has feathers and claws and not paws and jaws.
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Ol’ Nevah and I are getting stocked up for winter. This week we bought a half of beef from ol’ Selem Prime, at Gridley, Kan., a known producer of high-quality beef. That’ll keep us in beef for a couple of years. A generous neighbor, ol’ Ezra “E.Z.” Pickens, let us forage for sweet corn in his late-planted garden. We shucked, cut from the cob and froze enuf for us to get through the winter.
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My question for the week is: “Are there any countries around the globe that tax their citizens and send some of it to the U.S.A. as foreign aid?”
My words of wisdom for the week are: “Imagine a world where every tweet, but not every ballot, must be fact-checked for accuracy.”
Have a good ‘un.
