Around here the corn burning stoves went into houses like crazy. Corn seems to burn well, much less work than wood, little mess left for cleaning out. Takes small amount of corn to keep the WHOLE house warm. I was rather surpised at how enthusiastic the new owners are over corn stoves. Transportation may not be the whole cost, but tractors are fueled with gas and oil, to work the soil and bring in the crops. Tractors are not especially efficient in fuel usage, cost a bunch to produce those crops. Costs that farmer has to pass to buyers so farmer can at least pay his bills. Hay is supposed to be costing more, I know the truck to go get it runs on fuel that has more than doubled in cost since last year. Much equipment is diesel powered, even costlier than gas. Diesel has always been cheaper to produce, now they just WON'T produce it, keeping cost high. Bush and his Oil friends are making plenty of money. Keeping cost of doing business for truckers very high. Consumers pay that extra. I don't know if Ethanol is going to be cost effective as a fuel. We have a local plant being built 5 miles away, 60 new jobs in a very hard hit job market area. Everyone is excited, but for corn fuel to be useful, it can't cost more to produce than it costs to sell. At least the farmers can sell their product, so many were just losing money planting corn. Prices just never got where you could turn a profit. I buy our grain, mixed at a local mill. No commercial bagged food for the animals so I am not seeing those costs. We use quite a bit of corn in the horse feed, prices seem to be staying higher than other years. I think the oats come from Canada. Not sure why they are not local, we do have oat production. Dry dog food prices are higher, even on the junky stuff. Again, I would point at mostly fuel prices to raise a crop, then transportation to get products to market.

Thanks for the info. I will have to check my local Home Depot. Some times one forgets to check the obvious. The windows are covered by a 10 year warrantee to the original owner only. By the look of the low E windows I have they have 2 holes drilled through the spacer. This is the part that separates the windows. Put a tube in the lower hole down to the bottom, add the argon, vent oxy. out the other hole. IÂm quite sure the windows have no pressure on them. Just displace the oxy and cap the holes or glue them shut. I also have access of an oxy meter if needed. There are also special insulated spacers. Some of the older double windows have an aluminum spacer and we all know that alum. is a very good conductor of heat. If I can find spacer material and the film I will give it a try. Stephen

Hi Robbins, Sorry to not have responded to this sooner, but I was too depressed...not really, well...sorta! Regardless of my metal state, this was a very disappointing year, but mostly due to our own mistakes. We got in over our heads by attempting to do more markets than we could handle very early in the season (while we were still preparing new beds). Some of those markets were brand new...hence, very low traffic and sales. Also we tried too many new crops, and too much of the labor intensive crops. To top it off we had the wettest spring on record followed by the driest September. So that doesn't really get to the heart of your question, but it feels good to finally admit that we failed and came up very short of our goals this year. I am trying to find the desire to try it again next year. The one established market that we attend had more vendors and more traffic, and therefore most vendors had a little better year than last. We did have a few folks count out change to pay, and we had our first bounced check as well. But overall, people seemed to be willing to pay a premium for high quality locally grown produce. Patty P.S. One of the highlights of our garden this year was Daniels tomatoes! We didn't have many, but after one week we had customers come back asking for them by name...including the market coordinator's wife! (I mention this here because Robbins was the seed source.)

ChristopherH, I don't think the government gets quite 38 percent of the price of gas in taxes. I think you may be thinking 38 cents per gallon. At least that's about what it is here. Many states are considering what NY is oonsidering -- rolling back or temporarily eliminating taxes. While that would definitely be a popular thing to do (and it would allow the politicians to tell the public "we're doing something about this") it could ultimately backfire and just put more money into the oil companies' profit columns. If the price of gas is lowered 30 cents a gallon due to a tax cut or elimination, then that just props up demand and causes people to keep using more, which causes oil prices to keep rising. In a few weeks we're paying the same as we were with the tax in place, except the money has just been diverted from the government to the oil companies. While I know many people may have a hard time choosing from between those two entities for where they'd like their money to go, I'd suggest that at least the tax money does go to accomplish some needed government function, whereas if it goes to the oil companies it just further adds to their already more than adequate profits. As far as durable plastics such as computers and car interiors, they're probably a good use of plastics. Bad uses of plastics would be throwaway items that can't be or aren't being recycled. You look at soft drinks; those used to be in glass bottles that were returned for a deposit. Now most are sold in plastic bottles, probably way under half of which are recycled. The problem with recycling up until now is that in the case of many products, it was questionable as to whether it was even worthwhile to recycle them due to the energy required to recycle being greater than the energy to make new ones. But high oil prices will change that, and hopefully we can start recycling nearly everything made of plastic. I would favor putting a deposit on plastic soft drink bottles and other recyclable items that are frequently simply thrown out to encoourage recycling of these items. These are the kinds of simple things we can do that really don't hurt anybody, cost little, but could make a big difference.