October 2015

FSA News

By Owen Anderson, FSA County Executive Director, Sanborn and Jerauld counties

Oct. 30 Deadline… ARCPLC Annual Enrollment.   You must complete your annual enrollment to be eligible for an ARCPLC payment.   If FSA has contacted you to complete your enrollment you need to do that now.
Nov. 15 Deadline… Fall Acreage Reporting.  Fall reporting is required for established perennial crops and for small grains and new perennial crops planted after July 15.   This is required to be eligible for a variety of programs.
Late Fees for Late Acreage Reports.  If you file late you will be charged a late fee ($46) for each farm and are subject to additional verification requirements prior to acceptance.  If we can’t verify it, we can’t approve it.  This has been the rule since 2012.   Spring planted crops and CRP have the same requirements, but with a reporting date of July 15.
NEW Grassland CRP.   Initial signup ends Nov. 20.   This new CRP is designed to protect expiring CRP and existing and re-established grasslands.  Offers will be graded for environmental benefits with the best offers selected.  Sanborn will pay $32/acre/year.  Jerauld will pay $30/acre/year.   Approved contracts will run 14-15 years while allowing restricted rights to hay or graze the CRP every year.   Cost shares are available for approved fencing and water projects.   Cost shares are NOT available for planting grass.  Visit www.fsa.usda.gov/crp.
    “USDA is an equal opportunity employer and provider.”

On Nov. 1, open enrollment for government healthcare begins, and Americans are once again free (ha, ha) to pick their health insurance.
It has become difficult for me to talk about America’s health insurance disaster without getting upset. It gets even harder every year when I open up the “premium change notice” from my insurance company, like I did this week. There has been a standard rate increase anywhere from 20 percent to upwards of 50 percent per year over the past few years since Obamacare was enacted.
I wrote an editorial in this paper back when it was first put into place, warning of the “bait and switch” we’d see as Obamacare progressed. Now that this has come to fruition, guess who’s feeling the biggest squeeze? Yep, middle class working Americans — particularly the self-insured. Many of my friends, along with myself are paying well over $10,000 per year for health insurance premiums. These people are typically healthy, young, working class families on the highest deductible plans allowed.  It’s no longer a car payment, it’s a mortgage payment. Something’s got to give.
I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of subsidizing our dysfunctional government. So what do we do about it? The change for Obamacare is not found anywhere close to the 2016 Democratic ticket. I’m not sure that true reform can be found in the Republican ticket either, but it’s most likely the best chance we’ve got for changing the current healthcare insurance situation in America.

The Way We Were – 1942-45 & 1967-70

Part Twenty-Nine - By Warren Thomas

Can or should a 15-year-old high school boy be psychoanalyzed in retrospect for weird behavior? A lot of water has gone under the bridge, details lost, and reasons not remembered. So a reader will have to consider whether the passage of 70 years might exonerate a mischief-maker of a past decade.
The setting was Forestburg High School in 1944 or 1945. The exact location was the boys’ restroom located on the ground floor between the first, second and third grade room to the east and the fourth, fifth and sixth grade room to the west. The girls’ restroom was located directly above on the second floor.
Perhaps 5-8 years prior to the deed of interest, I had discovered in my deceased grandfather’s shop a small, ancient glass jar containing black, greasy material. How I identified the unusual stuff, I don’t recall, but I learned that it was gunpowder from an older era. It appeared to be Granddad Bonney’s last stash of powder, likely from the days of his muzzle-loading rifle, circa 1885. Experimenting when my father was elsewhere, I discovered that a match would ignite a pinch of the powder into a tremendous cloud of pungent white smoke. What’s more, the explosion occurred with only a soft “poof”, quite unexpected considering the volume of smoke.
How much later it was, I don’t recall, but the bright idea came to me to take the powder to school. And again, I don’t recall when the moment of mischief changed from showing a friend what I’d found to actually having some fun with it.
Again, the setting — study hall on the second floor. With the bottle out of sight in my pocket, I walked to the front blackboard and right beside the pencil sharpener I initialed “WT” to signal that I was leaving for the restroom downstairs. It was important that with my “WT” in plain view, no other high school boy could use that restroom at the same time and upset my scheme.
On the east wall of the restroom stood two tall, flat-topped urinals, ideal for my bright idea. Secrecy was necessary for the project, so I stepped outside the series of two doors to look for intruders. The front entrance and hallway were deserted and quiet. Hurrying back inside, I extracted both bottle and matches from my pocket, removed the lid, shook out a couple teaspoonfuls on the top of one of the urinals and scratched a match. When the flame touched the powder, I was gratified to hear the expected “poof.” As the dense smoke mushroomed to the ceiling and spread toward both the stall on the far end and the door on the north end, I quickly exited the scene, secure in the thought that the two sets of doors would slow the acrid smell sufficiently for me to calmly climb the stairs and just as calmly enter the study hall to erase my initials from the blackboard.
I could imagine that the next male visitor to the restroom, be he high schooler, grade schooler or janitor, would yell “fire!” at the top of his lungs. There would be no way in which the smoke could escape from the small room and it would all be there for the next user to witness. But peace and quiet prevailed. I heard no excited discussion; I didn’t even learn who next opened the doors. It escapes me whether I was elated that my conspiracy succeeded or disappointed that I’d not caused a ruckus. Of course, my juvenile brain hadn’t planned for the horrifying judgment-day event if the superintendent had suddenly walked in! As it turned out, “all’s well that ends well.”
Now, you amateur psychoanalysts, what made a teenage twerp pull such a stunt? You men who were once boys yourselves may have a quicker answer than the generally genteel ladies. However, some 25 years later when Woonsocket sophomore and junior boys attempted to push my Volkswagen over the bridge to the island, I remembered! I got away with my prank; they almost did. Kindred spirits, I suppose.

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