Are the bulls getting ready to stampede again?

Are you looking for a way to grow that pile of cash you're sitting on? How 'bout investing in farmland? People will always have to eat, you know.

Went to the mailbox today and there was the latest copy of Fortune Magazine with the headline, "Why Farmland is Hot." My first reaction was, "Well, it's summer, duh," but they were talking about a different kind of hot. Actually, the big headline, which took up a third of the front page was, "Retire Rich."

Before we get to farmland, here's Fortune's formula for retiring rich - start when you're 25, set aside $400 a month at 7% and when you're 65 you'll have $600,000. I wish I'd have known that when I was 25 and finally crashed the $100-a-week barrier writing about the fantastically ne Haybine in New Holland Machine Co.'s advertising department. Right now, if I'd followed Fortune's advice, I'd be really set.

But I'm curious - is $600,000 "rich?" Especially to the readers of Fortune?

As the financial press becomes more and more irrelevant to my life, I find myself reading it more and more. By "financial press" I mean that group of professional journalists who missed things like Bernie Madoff, grossly negligent mismanagment of financial institutions, credit default swaps and other instruments where we'd have been better off paying guys commissions to play roulette...

Did I mention paying guys tens of millions of dollars to shovel their publicly owned companies into giant SlurryStores? Did I mention that they sacked our retirement accounts of Five Trillion Dollars? That's trillion with a "t?" A capital "T?"

So why do I read the financial press at all? Well, sometimes they're amusing. And sometimes I find things I want to buy. Like on the back cover of this issue they have a ballon bleu de Cartier watch...very nice. Lists for a mere $41,000 or so, but there are places you can get a deal. But then I read the fine print. You have to wind it. Or get your butler to wind it. I don't have  butler and never will. I don't like people going through my things.

Actually, I think I read the financial press for the same reason I used to read comic books. For the entertainment. Gyro Gearloose, Donald Duck's inventor cousin, was my favorite.

Oh, wait...I was going to tell you why you should take all that cash you're got hidden in the corn
crib and buy a million acres of farmland in the southern Sudan, which is what an American named Heilberg did, according to Fortune.

But I'm out of space, I'm afraid. I'll let you know tomorrow.

If we all made one each of the dairy recipes in our June is Dairy month section in the current issue, we might just goose those milk prices up a little bit. Or if not, at least we'll all be eating well. I think I'm going to try the sour cream lemon pie from Thelma Blank in Bird-in-Hand, Pa.

Thia 4-H skit took a first prize in Texas. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oF3bSz12DM