Provider: Ryan & Hope Pjesky
Profession: Farmers/Ranchers
Hometown: Goltry, Oklahoma

February 2008 Diary Entry

February is usually when we get most of our winter weather, but this year it has been mild.  We have gotten several cold rains and one period of snow.  We applied our spring fertilizer this month.  This is done to replace the nutrients used while the plants have been grazed by cattle during the winter.  We as farmers have really felt the pinch of higher energy prices.  Not only are we faced with the high price of gas and diesel fuel, but fertilizer, which is produced using natural gas, has increased nearly five times over the last five years.

You may have heard that wheat is trading at record prices but those prices have barely risen enough to cover the huge increase in expenses.  Not to mention that severe weather conditions this past year caused us not to harvest hardly any wheat, so we don’t have any to sell at these high prices.  Enough bad news, the good news is that our current crop has great potential if everything goes well from here on to harvest.

This month Hope traveled with a group of other producers and agribusiness people from Oklahoma to China and South Korea.  They visited Beijing, Xian, Shanghai and Seoul.  During their travels, they met with government officials and looked at several different agricultural operations.  While she was gone, I used our semi truck to haul some more hay home that we had bought.  We got ready to begin moving cattle off the wheat that we will harvest in June.  I also got our lambing barn ready for our ewes to lamb, which happens during March.

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